Emma Teitel: Dahmer is dominating television TV these days, but Angela Lansbury is the queen of the cosy mystery. Why the resurging genre is having a moment

“Murder, She Wrote,” the popular TV mystery that ran from 1984 to1996, was more than a television show. It was, for many fans of Jessica Fletcher (the senior citizen sleuth at its centre), a substitute for anxiety medication.

It doesn’t matter that wherever Fletcher went in the series, whether it was around the corner or abroad to visit one of her nieces (of which she seemed to have an infinite supply), someone turned up dead.

What matters is that there were, and are, few TV spectacles more calming than Fletcher riding a bicycle through the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove with a smile on her face and a cardigan tied loosely about her shoulders. That’s the point, or at least the effect of a cosy mystery, a genre in which the violence mostly takes place out of view, and whose quaint atmosphere and quirky characters shield those watching or reading from the brutality of violent crime.

When Angela Lansbury, the legendary actor who played Fletcher, died earlier this month, I was distraught, because I was one of those fans who put on “Murder, She Wrote” as I would a warm sweater. But I was distraught for another reason too: against this news, I couldn’t stop thinking about Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who was the incarnation of the brutality of violent crime.

This is because Lansbury died at precisely the moment when Dahmer, the late American serial killer who murdered at least 17 men and boys, was crowned the king of television.

One doesn’t have to be a fan of horror — real or imagined — to notice that when you pull up a streaming service in October 2022 you’re not likely to be met not with the friendly face of a detective in gingham but rather with the mug shot of a serial killer. It could be Ted Bundy’s, John Wayne Gacy’s or Aileen Wuornos’s. All are the subjects of fictionalized and documentary content currently available on streaming services.

Lately though, it’s probably Jeffrey Dahmer’s mug you’ll see. Ryan Murphy’s new series “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is not only one of several recent productions about the American serial killer who dismembered and cannibalized his victims; it’s also a smashing success.

According to Variety, Murphy’s “Dahmer,” which premiered on Sept. 21, ranks as “Netflix’s second most popular English-language series of all time in its initial release.” The data company Parrot Analytics reports that the show “has higher demand than 99.9 per cent of all drama titles in Canada.”

If cosy TV reigned in the ’80s and ’90s, terror reigns today — and not without controversy. For years critics of the genre have made the case that “true crime” exploits victims and their families. This charge seemed to reach a boiling point with the release of “Dahmer — Monster,” a series that aims to show how police repeatedly failed to apprehend Dahmer but that critics argue glorifies him in the process.

For starters, there is the series’ hyper focus on the killer’s physique. Many have wondered why the creators chose to depict Dahmer, played by horror heartthrob Evan Peters, dancing seductively in a nightclub and lifting weights with sweat glistening on his chiselled torso.

The series’ fixation with Peters’ boyish good looks is the likely cause of the recent surge in lusty social media posts with titles like this one from TikTok: “He’s so fine #JeffreyDahmer”

But what is arguably the most egregious thing about the series is that friends and family members of the late killer’s victims were allegedly blindsided by it. Some say the show’s producers didn’t consult them at all. Shirley Hughes, the 85-year-old mother of Tony Hughes, one of Dahmer’s victims, told the Guardian recently, “I don’t see how they can use our names and put stuff out like that out there.” (Since the backlash, Murphy has spoken out insisting the show did reach out to victims’ families but received no response.)

Regardless, it’s clear the families have not found comfort in the show.

“The whole point of the most recent iteration of the true crime boom has been about flipping the script and centring the voices of those who have been harmed,” Sarah Weinman, a crime writer and author of the true crime book “Scoundrel,” told me. Murphy’s series appears to do the opposite. “To see a show that puts a killer at the forefront doesn’t really do much in terms of illuminating the lives of the men of colour” whom Dahmer brutalized, said Weinman.

A murder genre that does illuminate the lives of historically overlooked people is the far less fashionable genre Lansbury helped shape and the one she leaves behind: the cosy mystery. Serial-killer true crime may be dominating the streaming space, but cosies are having a quiet moment of their own in print and onscreen, and the revamped version of the genre casts a net that goes far beyond the seaside towns of England and New England.

This is in part because, in recent years, Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House, began publishing cosy mysteries with a fresh voice, geared toward a millennial audience. In Lansbury’s day the unlikely heroes of popular cosy mysteries were often older white women (Jessica Fletcher, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple). Today many of them are young women of colour and queer people solving crimes in big cities as well as in small towns.

“We have had an unprecedented amount of these cosies hitting our desks,” Olivia Rutigliano, the associate editor of LitHub’s CrimeReads vertical, told me, referring to cosy mystery novels. “We’re encountering more of them than we ever have before.”

In “Arsenic and Adobo” by Mia P. Manansala, (published by Berkley), protagonist Lila Macapagal moves back home after a disastrous breakup to help her “Tita Rosie” revive a struggling Filipino family restaurant, when her food critic ex-boyfriend mysteriously drops dead. In the so-called “quosy” (a queer cosy mystery) “Renovated to Death,” by Frank Anthony Polito (published by Kensington), a gay couple solves crimes while they renovate houses in suburban Detroit.

Today’s cosy mysteries are in a sense the perfect antidote to exploitative true crime. Not only is their success in no way dependent on the pain of real people, the genre gives “opportunity for characters who are not normally given protagonist status to have that status,” said Rutigliano.

As evidence of the genre’s recent resurgence, she also points to the fact that American streaming services have followed in the footsteps of BritBox by offering their own cosies: “Only Murders in the Building” on Hulu (Disney Plus in Canada) and “The Afterparty” on Apple TV Plus.

Of course, the modest success of a modest genre pales in comparison to the massive success of “Dahmer — Monster” and serial killer sagas like it. But fans of the latter genre might discover that what they seek in a show about Jeffrey Dahmer they are more likely to find on a show like “Murder, She Wrote.”

Many of us relish serial killer stories because we believe there is something cunning, mysterious and brilliant about their protagonists. But compulsive murdering aside, serial killers, said criminologist Scott Bonn, “tend to be pretty much average.”

Bonn, author of the book “Why We Love Serial Killers,” said that because Dahmer was apprehended in the summer of 1991, months after the release of the film “The Silence of the Lambs,” he “became blurred with Hannibal Lecter.”

But in real life, though they may share some predilections with their fictional counterparts and though Dahmer himself was said to be intelligent, serial killers are not typically shrewd, urbane geniuses; they are mostly banal men with average to lower-than-average IQs.

The same cannot be said about Jessica Fletcher and her modern day-progeny: these are amateur sleuths who can hold down a day job while using their colossal intellect to solve seemingly unsolvable crimes. Or perhaps in Fletcher’s case (the possibility must be entertained), commit murder wherever she goes and avoid detection indefinitely.

If you want to peer into the soul of a criminal mastermind don’t honour Jeffrey Dahmer’s legacy this Halloween. Honour Angela Lansbury’s. Get cosy.

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