Bodies to Die for: Negotiating the Ideal Female Body in Cozy Mystery Novels

I N THE PAST FEW DECADES, COZY MYSTERIES, A GENRE DOMINATED BY WOMEN AUTHORS AND marketed to a female audience, have taken a big bite out of the market for crime novels. Cozy mysteries developed out of the classic English detective story and, unlike the hard-boiled crime novel, avoid gruesome depictions of violence, gore, and sex. Instead they focus on the puzzle the crime presents and how it can be solved, based on the belief that the world is ruled by causality and can be deciphered through reasoning (Malmgren 13–31). The light-hearted texts commonly feature a female amateur sleuth who lives, works, and loves in a tightly knit, small-town community in which everything is in order save the occasional murder upon which the protagonist happens to stumble. The female sleuth is often depicted as nosy, more interested in good relationships and romance than in her career, and more concerned about her family and friends than about herself. All in all, cozy mysteries would be an unlikely place to find cultural resistance or the renegotiation of gender norms, were it not for the representation of bodies—not the dead ones, but the living ones. Cozies feature sleuths who come in a range of body shapes, sometimes outside dominant beauty norms. Diane Mott Davidson describes her sleuth as “pudgy” (Catering to Nobody 4), Kathryn Lilley calls her character “plus-sized” (back cover), Selma Eichler speaks of hers as “queen-size” (“Books”), Virgina Rich’s Mrs. Potter describes herself as “fat” (53), and G.A. McKevett’s Savannah Reid is “a big, sexy southern sleuth” (Bitter Sweets back cover)—to give only a few examples for this underresearched phenomenon of overweight, voluptuous, and regular-sized pop culture heroines targeting a mass market. Cozy mysteries also discuss beauty and dieting practices in innovative and often critical ways, thus encouraging women to disobey or at least to become aware of the pressure hegemonic beauty ideals place on them. Many of the protagonists despise diets and enjoy good food in hearty quantities, while avoiding workouts and other forms of exercise, generally enjoying their bodies as they are. In this way, cozy mysteries create a utopian space in which fictional women who do not fulfill hegemonic beauty standards can overcome weight-bias, live successful lives, outwit thin and conventionally pretty female villains, and fight back against the cultural dictum of self-surveillance and self-improvement. The cozy mystery therefore serves as an example of how popular culture can provide space for the successful negotiation of beauty norms. Although in the last three decades feminist thought has tentatively embraced popular culture as a site in which users can observe and try out alternative gender performances