ORCID

Abstract

My project is comprised of two elements. The first is practice led research taking the form of a novel titled A Murder Of Sleuths. This investigates how the Cosy Crime subgenre might be modified and impacted by the digital nature of the contemporary world. I explore this by taking the key traditional features of the Cosy Crime structure, in particular the manor house setting, the small isolated village, and the amateur sleuth and detective relationship and merging it with the character of Dora Grant, a Websleuth who uses technology and the internet as tools to solve crime. Dora's investment in technology comes into collision with the traditional, Golden Age Detective traits of Henry Ellis, a Police Detective who is sent to the village when its dominant patriarch and tech entrepreneur is found dead. My novel is accompanied by a 15,000 word critical commentary examining how Websleuthing and the digital world more broadly entails themes of isolation and 'digilantism' justice, and engage a long generic tradition of the Police versus the amateur sleuth. These readings allow me to question whether, by including these elements with the cosy novel structure, it can remain cosy. I answer this question by setting out precisely the framework and conventions of a contemporary cosy crime novel, and exploring how elements normally excluded from it might be incorporated so as to expand its boundaries, without leaving the original genre behind entirely. The project findings include an analysis of how and why the current works of cosy crime largely ignore technology. It also includes two case studies, the first being an analysis of This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen (2025), which expands the genre to include themes of technology. I use this as a comparison to the second case study, an analysis of The Thursday Murder Club (2020) by Richard Osman. In which I examine how the traditional Cosy Crime style he uses can incorporate the modern digital world and whether in doing so, it could remain cosy This PhD project interrogates how, and how far, Cosy Crime might remain 'cosy' while also engaging with a contemporary world rife with technology and its darker potential consequences.

Awarding Institution(s)

University of Plymouth

Supervisor

David Sergeant, Anthony Caleshu

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2026

Embargo Period

2026-08-27

Deposit Date

August 2026

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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