Mar. 23, 2011 at 2:19pm
puns
We here at Marc of the Beast have been very distressed recently by the trend in cozy mystery titles away from puns and humor (and toward bland descriptiveness). These things are our bread and butter, and—totally unscientific opinion—the better the pun, the more people are probably going to laugh and pick up the book, maybe check it out … right? It’s in authors’ and publishers’ best interests to come up with good (i.e., funny) titles for the SAKE OF HUMANITY. Cozy mysteries: You had a lock on this. Why have you strayed? WHY? Sure, there will always be horrible—and therefore hilarious—series romance titles for us to mock, but those don’t typically come with “tips” for the reader. PLEASE LET THEM NOT COME WITH TIPS. Imagine a series romance novel with tips on how to have a secret baby. Or tips on how bosses can most successfully seduce their secretaries and nannies. On second thought, imagining that might be the subject of a whole other post. However, there are some books that are doing their best to take up the mantle seemingly abandoned by the cozy mystery; I recently found a good example in mainstream romance. Kieran Kramer’s Impossible Bachelors series has been gamely punning for several volumes now: First When Harry Met Molly, then Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right, and now Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage and the forthcoming If You Give a Girl a Viscount. Sure, none of these are earth-shatteringly funny titles, but they’re part of a growing trend that we desperately hope to see (another example: I Kissed an Earl) toward puns instead of away from them. If cozies aren’t going to step up to the standard that they played an integral role in creating, then some other genre will fill that void. And Marc of the Beast will be there to mock them.

We here at Marc of the Beast have been very distressed recently by the trend in cozy mystery titles away from puns and humor (and toward bland descriptiveness). These things are our bread and butter, and—totally unscientific opinion—the better the pun, the more people are probably going to laugh and pick up the book, maybe check it out … right? It’s in authors’ and publishers’ best interests to come up with good (i.e., funny) titles for the SAKE OF HUMANITY. Cozy mysteries: You had a lock on this. Why have you strayed? WHY?

Sure, there will always be horrible—and therefore hilarious—series romance titles for us to mock, but those don’t typically come with “tips” for the reader. PLEASE LET THEM NOT COME WITH TIPS. Imagine a series romance novel with tips on how to have a secret baby. Or tips on how bosses can most successfully seduce their secretaries and nannies. On second thought, imagining that might be the subject of a whole other post.

However, there are some books that are doing their best to take up the mantle seemingly abandoned by the cozy mystery; I recently found a good example in mainstream romance. Kieran Kramer’s Impossible Bachelors series has been gamely punning for several volumes now: First When Harry Met Molly, then Dukes to the Left of Me, Princes to the Right, and now Cloudy with a Chance of Marriage and the forthcoming If You Give a Girl a Viscount. Sure, none of these are earth-shatteringly funny titles, but they’re part of a growing trend that we desperately hope to see (another example: I Kissed an Earl) toward puns instead of away from them.

If cozies aren’t going to step up to the standard that they played an integral role in creating, then some other genre will fill that void. And Marc of the Beast will be there to mock them.