Now, now, I know it says a “pint” of murder but the pint is a pint of canned green beans not a pint of beer, alas.
Gentle Janet Wadman has temporarily moved back onto the family farm with her brother’s family following an illness. Unable to sleep one night, she sees lights and the doctor’s car pulling into the driveway at her elderly neighbor’s home. When she drops by to see if she could help her old friend, she finds the town doctor and Mrs. Treadwell’s avaricious niece cleaning up – it appears Mrs. Treadwell has died from food poisoning from a jar of bad canned string beans.
Janet is immediately suspicious: she knows her old friend was a bit of crank about food, since her husband’s untimely demise 40 years back from food poisoning. Since then, she has eschewed processed foods, buying her eggs and dairy from the Wadman farm, and canning her own produce, following strict standards for safety and cleanliness, and insisting that the old ways are best, snapping her beans, not cutting them, for example. The skeptical doctor takes samples and dismisses the idea of murder – why would anyone want to murder Mrs. Treadwell?
Roped into helping the niece take an inventory of the house for probate, Janet discovers that, of the 13 remaining jars of string beans in the pantry, all but one have been snapped – and that one has been cut. This kindles her suspicions which, unfortunately, she voices aloud in the presence of the town gossip. By the time she gets to the doctor’s house with the mysterious pint of beans, the doctor has accidentally fallen, smashed his head against the corner of his desk, and is dead himself. When Janet calls the town marshal – part-time marshal, mostly auto-repairman, sometimes blacksmith – he is reluctant to label it murder, despite the convenient timing and a wound that feels strangely rounded, not angled like the desk-corner. Janet doesn’t blame him – the doctor’s widow (another of Mrs. Treadwell’s nieces) could make things uncomfortable for him if he creates a scandal unnecessarily. Fred is too old to relocate.
But when the doctor’s daughter’s house goes up in flames, Fred calls in the mounties and Madoc Rhys responds. Just shy of the minimum height for a mounty at the time, skinny as a “plumber’s helper” with a moustache that doesn’t match his hair, and unusually soft-spoken, Madoc goes undercover to discover the murderer. But do not underestimate Officer Rhys: his unassuming ways mask the true force of the RCMP, and he has an amazing track record, not least of which apprehending Mad Dog Magee.
This is the first of many Madoc Rhys and Janet Waldman Rhys mysteries, although she becomes less involved in the actual mysteries after the first two. Despite the involvement of a professional – Rhys – they fall squarely into the category of “cozy” mysteries.
Cozy mysteries generally take place in an intimate setting, with an amateur sleuth, and they don’t usually show the murder itself, with dead bodies being discovered, as opposed to seeing the murderer commit the crime. In my opinion, they often rely more on character than plotline – with quirky locals adding to the confusion – and the solution is often found within the community where the mystery takes place; for example, not involving international spy rings or criminal conspiracies. I also think the cozy mystery doesn’t go for the creepiness factor – the amateur sleuth may be worried, as Janet often is in this book, and dismayed that someone they know will be the murderer, but cozy mysteries don’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, as a Sir Henry Merivale mystery would.
Cozy murders tend to take place in small towns, as this one does. But could you have a cozy murder in a big city? I think you could. Although I wouldn’t classify Jane Haddam’s Gregor Demarkian books as cozy murders – the crimes take place on the page and are gruesomely described, and there are too many plotlines, each suspect having their own plotline that extends outside the book, and explains why they are going to die soon or aren’t sharing witness testimony or might be mistaken for the criminal – but the Armenian-American neighborhood that Haddam builds and Gregor resides in would be a perfect setting for a cozy mystery: intimate and full of quirky characters.
Charlotte MacLeod was particularly adept at writing cozy mysteries. I think she had four series going, all cozy. The Madoc and Janet Rhys mysteries, The Grub and Stakers (which I will write about tomorrow), Peter and Helen Shandy, and Max and Sarah (Kelling) Bittersohn.1 Three of the series start with a young woman alone, facing an unexpected murder and getting drawn into the detection. (The fourth is Peter Shandy.) Pretty quickly, the amateur detectives find themselves married to their partner in detection. And then the women tend to get pushed to the background, providing insights into local culture or history, while the man is the one actually detecting. The exception being the Grub and Stakers in which Dittany Henbit continues to lead the charge.
I like Charlotte MacLeod’s writing and, in particular, the Madoc and Janet Rhys mysteries. They take place in rural New Brunswick, Canada, along the coast, with people galivanting off to the big cities of Boston, Fredericton or even St. John. A beautiful area of Canada, with rugged coastlines and long sweeping river valleys, with one of the best used bookstores that I have found on my travels, an old barn with shelves around the edges and projecting into the main aisle and – outside – long tables with hinged boxes that opened to reveal paperbacks. I didn’t get enough time to enjoy browsing: the first time, I needed to meet a ferry I had a reservation for; the second, I was scurrying home ahead of a hurricane.2
It seems a little odd to call a mystery “cozy” – if you heard a podcast about this crime or series of crimes, or if you saw it on IDTV, it wouldn’t feel so cozy. Think about that family that got killed a few years ago, one at a time, because the neighbor was poisoning the soda pop that they kept on a back porch. It had all the ingredients of a cozy, but no one would call it “cozy.” I think the other thing that makes these mysteries “cozy” is that you could picture yourself curled up in a cushy armchair with a throw blanket, a mug of hot tea, and a small plate of finger cookies.
Sometimes, when the world is scary or complex, a cozy mystery is just what you need.
- The Bittersohn books also start in a big city – Boston – before moving to the more intimate setting of Cape Cod. ↩︎
- I think it was Grace, but maybe Claudette. I remember the year only because I had been off-the-grid for a week, depriving myself of outside stimulus without books, TV, or radio, to try to focus on my writing (I gave in and made a run to a nearby town where I picked up some books). When I got in the car to come home and turned on the radio, the first thing I heard was a news report announcing that the Soviet Union was falling and the second report was that a hurricane was headed straight at me. I’m thinking it must have been Grace. I spent the night sleeping on wrestling mats in a Red Cross shelter in Maine. I did write a good short story on that trip inspired by the place where I was staying – and I have a great dinner story about looking for shelter in a hurricane. ↩︎
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