Charlotte MacLeod, 82; Author of 'Cozy' Mysteries, Juvenile Books
Charlotte MacLeod, mistress of the "cozy" mystery who penned more than 30 whimsical whodunits featuring warm, witty and downright wacky amateur sleuths solving murders by quicklime, ancient spear, stinging bees and other innovative means, has died. She was 82.
MacLeod, who also wrote a dozen juvenile books, myriad short stories and a biography, died Friday at a nursing home in Lewiston, Maine. The author spent most of her life in Boston but had lived in Maine since 1985.
Known for her ladylike manner, hat, white gloves and impeccable grammar, MacLeod was a perfect match for the "cozy" genre -- something of the opposite to hard-boiled private eye mysteries. MacLeod's cozy mysteries eschewed gore, graphic violence, sex and vulgar language and reveled in a dizzy pace, outrageous characters, a little romance and a lot of laughs.
"She wrote specifically for people who did not want blood and guts, at least not a whole lot of it anyway," Alexandria Baxter, her sister and business manager who typed and proofread her manuscripts, told the Portland Press Herald in Maine. "Everybody drank tea and ate molasses cookies. It was that kind of thing."
Film critic Kathi Maio, writing in Sojourner magazine, once characterized the author and her work: "If, as I believe, mystery fiction's primary goal is to entertain, then Charlotte MacLeod is one of the most gifted mystery authors writing today."
MacLeod, who sold more than 1 million copies of her books, wrote two series under her own name, the Peter Shandy mysteries and the Sarah Kelling mysteries. She also wrote two series under the pseudonym Alisa Craig, the Madoc Rhys mysteries featuring a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, and the Grub-and-Stakers mysteries about folks in a town she called Lobelia Falls in Canada.
The author's first adult mystery protagonist, Shandy, was a horticulture hotshot professor at Balaclava Agricultural College. He was world-renowned for developing the Balaclava Buster, a rutabaga, and also infamous as Balaclava Junction's "unofficial man-about-the-trouble," solving screwball crimes in his spare time.
Kelling was a young impoverished widow of a prominent Boston family still struggling to remain on Beacon Hill by running a boarding house. She marries art theft investigator Max Bittersohn, and together they investigate crimes, often in disguise, and do good, while managing truly outrageous relatives.
