The Cozy: a Purely American Art Form
In 1962, a woman named Phyllis James sat down and wrote Cover Her Face, the first Adam Dalgleish mystery. Two years later, in 1964, Ruth Rendell wrote her first Reg Wexford mystery, From Doon with Death. These two women pulled the golden age format created by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers into the present, and as they wrote, they deepened the form psychologically, writing darker, more intense and longer books as their careers progressed. They were the godmothers of what I think of as the contemporary noir police novel, and writers like Jill McGowan, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Peter Robinson, Elizabeth George and many others have carried it forward.
