They say that April showers bring May flowers. It’s been raining on and off since last week (yesterday, it sounded like there was a monsoon outside my window), and I’ve come down with a cold since I’m never sure from day to day what to wear. Some days, it's been warm; some days, it's been cold. I spent all day Tuesday from 5 am to past 9 pm working at my local polling site. It was slow, so I tried to come up with new, cozy mystery ideas to entertain myself—ideas like a professor and her goth graduate assistant who solve crimes. The professor would teach something that relates to ghost lore or the paranormal. Or a woman who works at a museum haunted by a hot Revolutionary War hero who somehow manages to come to life.
I love cozy mysteries and would love to write one, but finding what niche I could fill has been challenging. Most cozy mysteries occur in small towns and involve food, crafts, or books. I live in New York City and have no desire to live in a small town, so coming up with a cozy, mystery idea has been challenging, but I finally think I’ve come up with something that might have legs. I admire writers who are juggling two or three series at a time. I have no idea how they do it, especially the writers writing contemporary and historical mysteries. It boggles my mind. I love this idea that I came up with, but I need to put the cozy mystery idea in the vault until I finish the current WIP.
One of the side effects of being sick is that I don’t have the energy to do much of anything. I’ve been dosing myself with Dayquil and Nyquil because I need to finish my most recent chapter of the WIP for my writing class. It’s due next week, but I only want to sit under a warm blanket, sip tea, and do nothing.
Since I’m feeling under the weather, I’ve been indulging in what I like to think of as comfort food for the brain, books, and TV shows that are lighter than my usual fare—nothing too taxing for the old brain. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series fits the bill. I just picked up her latest DIRTY THIRTY from the library yesterday. I have a love/hate relationship with this series. Evanovich is one of the funniest writers around, and her books go down easy, but Stephanie Plum hasn’t grown as a character after thirty books. She’s still terrible at her job as a bounty hunter and torn between Joe Morelli and Ranger. Now, there are worse things in the world than not being able to decide which hot man is right for you, but it’s getting ridiculous at this point. To mix it up, Evanovich occasionally throws in a character named Diesel, who has supernatural abilities.
You know what you'll get when you read a Stephanie Plum novel. Stephanie will wreck at least two cars; Grandma Mazur will somehow get involved; Ranger will say ‘Babe’ a lot, and Bob the dog will eat various objects like a couch, a magazine, or a hat. Like the Canadian Mounties, she will eventually apprehend her man or woman, but not without causing much damage. I think the Stephanie Plum novels are popular because Stephanie is an average woman living paycheck to paycheck, mooching off her parents, and not particularly ambitious.
I’m shocked that no one has snapped up the Stephanie Plum series for either Network or streaming. The movie based on the first book in the series ONE FOR THE MONEY was a flop and miscast. But that was 12 years ago; I’m sure someone out there could do a better job adapting the series for television. There hasn’t been a light, funny mystery series on American television since PSYCH, although the Canadian television series WILD CARDS was filling that niche for me.
My other comfort read is Meg Cabot’s ENCHANTED TO MEET YOU, the first in a new series. I’m a huge Meg Cabot fan. I read the entire Princess Diaries series, and her Heather Wells mystery series is the prototype for my writing. They’re urban cozy mysteries. ENCHANTED TO MEET YOU is more of a paranormal romance set in a small town in Connecticut. Jessica Gold cast a spell that went wrong when she was a teenager. Since then, she’s been under a lifetime ban by the World Council of Witches. Fifteen years later, a mysterious man named Derrick appears in West Harbor. He tells Jessica that saving West Harbor from sinister forces is up to her.
My comfort TV watching this week was the animated series FRIGHT KREWE on Hulu. I stumbled upon season 1 last October when I was on a spooky movie binge because of Halloween, and I fell in love with the show. I was so happy that it was renewed for a second season. Soleil Le Claire accidentally breaks the spell on the Tree of Life and unleashes an ancient evil. The spirit of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans, puts Soleil and four of her friends in charge of saving the city from Belial, an ancient demon who feeds on fear. Luckily, they're not alone; each gets a special gift from the voodoo spirits called Loa. Eventually, they learn NOLA's biggest secret: Vampires, rougarous, ghosts, monsters, and demons are real and have secretly lived among humans for decades. This show has three things that I love: New Orleans, a diverse cast, and the paranormal.
GREY’S ANATOMY is the ultimate comfort watch. The new season started two weeks ago, and the interns are just as messy as ever. Shonda Rhimes insists that Grey’s isn’t a soap, but it totally is. The doctors' personal lives sometimes supersede the medical stories. Besides Miranda and Dr. Webber, every doctor on this show has slept with every other doctor. Owen was married to Amelia and is now married to Teddy; before that, he was married to Christina Yang. Amelia and Linc have a child, and he’s now involved with Jo, who was once married to Alex Karev. This show has jumped the shark more than once, but I can’t quit it for some reason.
Maya Rodale wrote on Threads she wished they would revive the show BEHIND THE MUSIC, which ran on VH-1 from 1997 to 2014. This show was my jam. The episodes were like mini-documentaries; they were only an hour long, but they managed to pack a lot into that one hour. The best episodes were on bands I’d never heard of, like Thin Lizzy, The Band, and the early years of Genesis pre-Phil Collins, or were a little more obscure, such as Jan and Dean. They even did an episode on teen heart-throb Leif Garrett, whose appeal I never understood. The show didn’t just profile bands but also Studio 54, Lilith Fair, and different musical years, such as 1968. It ran the gamut from pop to hard rock, country, rap to R&B.
VH-1 revived the show for two seasons in 2021, but the original episodes aren’t on the Paramount+ website. I don’t know the hold-up, but I miss that show. I once watched a marathon of episodes one New Year’s Eve. I could barely pull my eyes away from the TV to let my boyfriend, who had flown from Los Angeles to see me, in. The best part of the episode was the 1/2 hour mark when the announcer would say something like, “And then tragedy struck.” If you Google BEHIND THE MUSIC, you can find some episodes online.
You should definitely write a cozy mystery series set in New York City. Your post reminded me of the John Gunther quote about how New York "becomes a small town when it rains."