Our book today is James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, the 2012 entry in his “Grantchester Mysteries,” his series of stories set in the picturesque 1950s English hamlet of Grantchester and starring thirty-something vicar Sidney Chambers, who’s a kind of mild-mannered amateur clerical sleuth in the tradition of C. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death is composed of six interconnected stories in which Sidney Chambers, his faithful dog, and his friend Inspector Geordie Keating, and the collection opens a funeral:

It was a weekday morning in October 1953 and the pale rays of a low autumn sun were falling over the village of Grantchester. The mourners, who had attended the funeral of Stephen Staunton, shielded their eyes against the light as they made their way to the wake in The Red Lion. They were friends, colleagues and relatives from his childhood home in Northern Ireland, walking in silence. The first autumn leaves flickered as they fell from the elms. The day was too beautiful for a funeral.

It’s a handy opening gambit – it not only brings together all the local characters, but it puts front and center their community, which is the main point of this kind of book. This kind of hamlet mystery is colloquially known in murder-fiction circles as a ‘cozy,’ and I confess, the appeal of this particular kind of murder mystery is largely lost on me. Cozies are immensely popular, but I have no clear idea of why. To me, the whole point of a murder mystery is the murder  – and the whole point of murder is that it’s bad. It’s not a head-cold. It’s not a broken leg. It’s somebody being forced against their will to go from being alive to be dead.

In cozies, the murder – if there is one at all (in some of the stories in Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, for example, there’s no murder at all, and those stories are not one bit less dramatic than the ones that feature a death) – is decidedly beside the point. The point is the close-knit community, the puttering locals, the neat walkways and sculptured lawns. The point is the elevation of trivialities into a quilt of comfort (sometimes literally – don’t get me started on all the quilting cozies out there …). It’s only in a cozy, for instance, that you’ll get an opening paragraph like this one:

It was the seventh of May 1954 and Sidney had, at last, perfected the art of boiling an egg. He filled a saucepan with water, lowered a speckled specimen into position and placed it on the stove. As the water began to heat up, Sidney commenced his morning routine. It was vital to complete his shaving at the exact moment the water reached boiling point. Then he would prepare his toast. The time taken to cook, turn and remove the toast from the grill, butter it and then cut it into soldiers, was the exact time needed to boil his egg. If successfully achieved, the toast would still be hot, the butter melted and the egg in perfect condition. It was extraordinary that he was now able to combine the preparation of breakfast with the act of shaving and, every time he did so, Sidney was filled with quiet satisfaction.

Satisfaction, in fact, suffuses cozies like a warm, breathable atmosphere. Characters know their places, yearn for nothing consequential, experience no passions, and frown on all interruptions in the completely comfortable course of their lives. The whole point of the murder in a cozy mystery is that it’s the worst possible interruption in all these routines, and the whole goal isn’t to find justice but to return the village to its normal routines.

To my mind, it adds a strong insulating layer of irrelevance to cozy mysteries. How relevant can a murder be, after all, if its main impact on its story is that it disrupts afternoon tea at the vicarage? And in James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers books, there’s an added layer of irrelevance: Sidney Chambers a quintessential amateur sleuth. He has no professional stake in any crimes that happen (unless the deceased is directly connected to him – once again, the Cabot Cove Syndrome); he helps to crack cases mainly out of curiosity, or vanity, or both.

Runcie stretches the point a bit in these stories because Sidney Chambers is a vicar (and so, presumably, has a stronger-than-normal … even a “professional”  … interest in right and wrong, if not legal and illegal), but ultimately the murders here are secondary to the sculpted lawns. I can certainly recommend Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, but I’d be recommending it for “Downton Abbey” reasons, not Walt Langmire reasons.