Hazel Holt and Mrs Malory

I just saw with sadness that Hazel Holt has written her last “Sheila Malory” cosy mystery and I rushed to buy it on Kindle. I’ve read most of her books and I enjoy them very much.  They are about a middle aged widow, in a small town in rural Devon, who gets involved in mysteries and murder cases.  Sheila Malory is in her early 50s when the series starts and as I’m getting around that age now, I tend to enjoy the stories about a heroine who isn’t young and “hot”.  Titles include Mrs Malory and the Festival Murder”, “The Cruellest Month” and many more.

Sheila is a writer, who writes literary criticism and occasionally takes temporary posts in teaching and lecturing which enables her to go to other locations, such as Oxford, America and a prestigious girls school, so as to get away from the rural town location for a book. 

Her mysteries are “cozies” in the American phrase which means that they are not usually about the criminal classes, but murders in “private life” among the comfortable middle class.  And there is no real violence or gore. 

In fact in many of her books the murder victim is a very unsympathetic figure, - such as a busybody or a nasty bully, or even a potential murder.  If they are male, they are often bullying and domineering over their wife and children… and the murderer is often someone who has been wronged by the victim, who has snapped and killed him or her.

I like the characters in her books, they are older people usually and more pleasant and well-mannered than many characters in modern fiction.  More “Inspector Morse “types than characters from “The Bill”.  
One of the small problems with the books is that because the victim is usually a nasty type, (this often emerges only after his death when family problems are outed), it is hard to wish for the mystery to be solved, because you sympathise with the murderer to an extent.  Sheila does sometimes feel that she has an ethical dilemma of not wanting the murderer to be caught…  Even when she does find the murderer she often accepts their request to “put their affairs in order” before going to the police, and allows them the gentlemanly option of committing suicide. In one of her earlier ones, she and her son, Michael (who becomes a lawyer which gives Sheila access to inside knowledge about law and property deals etc.) trap the murderer into a confession and it is one of the few cases where the killer (presumably since the novel ends with his being caught) is tried and found guilty.  But again this is a case where the victim (a woman) was a bullying selfish creature who used blackmail and spite to get her way, much of her life.   I’m not quite sure why this was one of the few cases where the murderer (who was not an unsympathetic person) was caught in the normal processes of the law.
Hazel Holt’s world is pleasant and cosy, albeit she does touch on modern problems such as secret affairs, child abuse, homosexuality etc. and she shows a tolerant and intelligent viewpoint.   I’m very sorry that she’s stopping writing the novels, and hope that maybe she’ll change her mind.