The Villains in a Cozy Mystery Series (Guest Post by Mathiya Adams)

Cozy mysteries are not intended to be thrillers, nor are they filled with excessive violence. Still, they are mystery stories, and what is more violent than murder?

So it is not surprising that The Hot Dog Detective series is filled with dead bodies. As one cop in Eager Evangelist describes what he calls “weird MacFarland cases,” they are crimes “with nothing the police can get their hands on! No evidence. No proof. But it turns out you always end up with scores of bodies.”

The causes of these scores of bodies are the villains of MacFarland’s universe.

There are two types of villains in Mac’s world: the rich, powerful people who use their positions of privilege to cover up their crimes; and the lucky, less-fortunate people who get caught up in their own crazy schemes but manage to outwit the organized resources of law enforcement.

Let us first examine the rich and powerful villains.

The most prominent of these is Norris Peterson, the one-time boss and lover of MacFarland’s wife Nicole. Peterson uses his wealth and influence to thwart MacFarland by buying juries, bribing officials, controlling the instruments that should be serving the public good. How does MacFarland fight such an opponent? Certainly not by playing on the same field. It’s not a level playing field. So MacFarland uses his network of friends and associates, the “invisible people” who exist in society and go unnoticed, mainly because much of society does not want to acknowledge their existence. One of the appeals of The Hot Dog Detective series is how the little man, with virtually no power, can defeat the rich and powerful.

MacFarland confronts Peterson in the first three books of the series, until he is finally able to bring his powerful enemy to justice.

Another such villain is Reverend Bryce, in the Eager Evangelist. Bryce is a powerful and influential man. He has charisma, charm, is extremely intelligent, and can control hundreds and thousands of people with his words and ideas. He is the kind of villain who can destroy his enemies by isolating them and stripping them of all their friends and allies.

MacFarland is in a quandary when it comes to fighting such an opponent. His usual allies have been stripped away, alienated from him. This is a time when MacFarland has to use his own natural abilities to defeat his adversary. In this case, it is perseverance and commitment that helps him defeat his villain.

Not all of MacFarland’s opponents are rich and powerful. Many of them are simply lucky. They succeed, not because they are powerful, but because they are lucky. They are hidden from detection by their own anonymity.

In the Crying Camper, he goes up against a gang of vicious thugs who think nothing of killing someone: “Three dead bodies, four dead bodies, who tha fuck cares?” These gang-bangers don’t care if they get caught, and that audacity makes them difficult to catch. Their crimes don’t stop when one of them gets caught because their crimes are communal. All of them share in responsibility for the crime because they all support each other.

How do you counter audacity? With tenacity. MacFarland never looses sight of what is important, and that is protecting the helpless. He pursues his opponents until he has managed to dispatch every one of them.

Many of the crimes in a cozy mystery are committed for very down-to-earth reasons: love and jealousy. In The Freaky Fan, the killer is trying to eliminate a rival lover for an up-and-coming Denver Bronco quarterback. This kind of villain is often hard to bring to justice since much of the background of the murder are hidden beneath lies and deception as various individuals try to cover up their infidelities and mistakes. MacFarland does have one advantage over the traditional police who investigate such a case. He is not under the same political and social pressures to “solve” the case as the police often are. And while good cops resist those pressures, there are times when it becomes impossible. In a good mystery, the hero has to do the impossible.

Another case where the motives of the individuals involved in the crime muddy the waters is The Groping Gardener. In this case, MacFarland has to untangle interweaving lies of a teenage girl who is trying to cover up her own misbehavior with a couple who are also engaged in inappropriate behavior. When one of them is killed, the challenge becomes one of digging through the lies until the truth can be found.

As in most cozy mysteries, the motives for committing the crime most often are greed, jealousy, keeping something secret, covering up other crimes, or revenge. Only once in a while is MacFarland confronted with a serial killer or a political conspiracy. And while the crimes may be violent, the emphasis will not be on the act of murder, but the motive for murder. MacFarland will go up against people who, for one reason or another, always seem to outsmart the system. But MacFarland works outside of the system, and that gives him his secret advantage.

Start reading the first book in the Hot Dog Detective series, The Avid Angler by Mathiya Adams.