
Staying in with cosy crime
After a decade of grisly, gritty serialised dramas on streaming platforms, is the traditional murder mystery back in fashion? DQ speaks to the makers of five cosy crime dramas to find out why the genre remains popular with viewers and the secrets to their shows’ success.
For more than 10 years, Death in Paradise has offered viewers a ray of sunshine in the midst of the miserable British winter. Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie, it follows a collection of fish-out-of-water detectives who solve a series of cases – a format that offers audiences the chance to play along with a puzzling investigation in each episode while spending an hour with some familiar characters in a tropical paradise.

It’s that escapism the show offers that has been a huge part of its success, regularly drawing in more than seven million viewers in the UK alone. It has also been sold into more than 240 territories around the world.
Yet for the past decade, amid the streaming boom, a shift to grisly, serialised crime dramas and the global interest in Nordic (and other) noir, Death in Paradise and cosy crime murder mystery series like it may have felt somewhat overshadowed despite their healthy ratings and loyal audiences.
That might be able to change, however, as broadcasters struggling with rising costs fall back on case-of-the week dramas to bring in regular audiences. Even streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video are now getting in on the act with closed-ended procedurals like On Call after library titles such as Criminal Minds, Bones and Law & Order continue to perform well years after they first aired in the US.
“They definitely dip in and out of fashion, don’t they?” says Death in Paradise executive producer Belinda Campbell. “There was a time everything was about creating serialised drama at a very high-end budget that people could completely immerse themselves within, and sometimes audiences don’t want that. They want to have a snack – and really well-made shows with brilliant characters and great stories allow them to do that.”
“Growing up in the 1980s and the 90s, they were on television all the time – classics like Lovejoy, Maigret and all the Agatha Christie stuff,” says Sally Lindsay, the star, co-writer and executive producer of The Madame Blanc Mysteries. “It was a staple and television moved away from it. But when I came up with this idea, it was just based on everything I want to watch on television, which was escapism and just a lovely hour to spend with your friends on telly, characters you know really well.”
“People are still watching the sexy big-budget Netflix shows as well,” Campbell continues. “But they don’t feel like the novelty anymore. And actually, like all things, it’s a mixed economy. It depends on how you’re feeling on the night. Do you want to binge watch something that’s just dropped on Netflix or do you want to dip into something because you’ve got a spare hour.

“The time of year that Death in Paradise goes out is helpful too, because particularly towards the end of January, we’re really stuck into the winter and then you get that blast of sunshine. But also, it’s a blast of joy.”
Debuting in 2011 and returning for its 14th season on January 31, BBC drama Death in Paradise began with the arrival of DI Richard Poole (Ben Miller) on Saint Marie to investigate the murder of a British police officer. He is then ordered to replace the victim and stay on as the island’s detective inspector, much to his dismay.
Over subsequent years, a number of new faces have made Saint Marie – which is actually Guadeloupe – their home, from Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall, seasons 3-6) and Jack Mooney (Ardal O’Hanlon, seasons 6-9) to Neville Parker (Ralf Little, seasons 9-13) and new recruit Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet, pictured top), who made his debut in the recently aired Christmas special.
The success of the series has also led to the launch of the ‘Paraverse,’ with spin-offs including the Marshall-led Beyond Paradise and the Australian version, Return to Paradise. BBC Studios is the distributor.
“What is really important to us with all three shows that they are something that is entertaining, which takes you out of your world for a little bit and it engages your brain because it doesn’t just wash over you,” says Campbell, head of drama at Death in Paradise producer Red Planet Pictures. “You do have to follow what’s going on, and one of the things we try to ensure on all the Paradise shows is that there is an element of interactivity, in as much as the audience are engaged, the clues are there and if they pay attention, there’s a possibility they can play detective.
“That makes it more than just a warm bath. It is something that is actually a really rewarding watch and adds an extra element to it as well as it just being a place that you want to escape to.”

Lindsay began developing Channel 5 and Acorn TV series The Madame Blanc Mysteries during the Covid-19 pandemic after she came to believe viewers wanted the chance to escape into a sun-drenched, imaginary world for an hour a week because “we were all living a horror already.”
The actress plays Jean White, a renowned antiques dealer who discovers her husband has died seeking out treasures in the South of France. But she soon discovers that all their money has gone with him and their shop has been remortgaged. The only thing he hadn’t sold was their cottage in the French village of Saint Victoire, where Jean heads to find the answers she is looking for.
Produced by Clapperboard and Lindsay’s Saffron Cherry Productions, with Acorn Media Enterprises distributing, the show is now heading into its fourth season as Jean has settled in Saint Victoire and regularly helps the local police solve numerous antiques-based mysteries in the Mediterranean sunshine.
“We call it ‘France around the corner,’ because it’s not France. It’s France imagined in my head,” Lindsay says of the series, which is filmed on Gozo in the Maltese archipelago. “It’s like the Carry On films, where England never looked like that. It was a horrible time in the 70s, but they made it shiny and wonderful and something you can be part of. It’s just escapism. But that’s also quite difficult to make.”
Now several seasons into Madame Blanc, Lindsay has found a recipe for the series that informs each script she writes with co-star Sue Vincent, who plays Saint Victoire’s resident mechanic, Gloria. The ingredients, she says, include “slightly camp but three-dimensional” characters viewers want to spend time with, as well as a “really good mystery.”
“You cannot patronise your audience with a rubbish mystery,” she says. “People look down on us a lot, people are a bit snobby, but actually the mysteries are really complex.”

The sunshine is also an important part of the show, “but getting that recipe right is really difficult. That’s the thing – it looks easy, but it’s just getting that balance right between the family storylines and the mystery, and all the intricacies in between.”
Morden i Sandhamn (The Sandhamn Murders) producer Filmlance International is currently in development on five more films in the CMore and TV4 detective series, which is based on the novels by Vivica Sten and distributed by Banijay Rights. Alexandra Rapaport stars as Nora Linde, a lawyer and mother who owns a summer house on the titular island in the Stockholm archipelago and comes to assist detectives Thomas Andreasson (Jakob Cedergren) and then Alexander Forsman (Nicolai Cleve Broch) with a series of murders.
Filmlance MD and executive producer Hanne Palmquist credits Nordic noir and the streaming boom with making ‘blue sky crime’ series “unfashionable,” but has seen The Sandhamn Murders go from strength to strength over 10 seasons.
She agrees with Lindsay that there is a recipe behind long-running hit murder mystery series, “but what is really important is that you love and respect the show that you do and you want to do it with the very best writers, actors and directors,” she says.
“This is not a left-hand [easy] job, to do blue-sky crime – and definitely not when you do them returning, because where in the beginning you have the obvious stories that you can pick from the [book] shelf, that’s fine. But then when you progress, you need to dig down deeper and you need to investigate your characters quite a bit more. Sometimes you also need to expand your universe and every now and then maybe take a trip to Stockholm or somewhere else.”
These series also need to have “damn good cases, very many dead people and in our show it’s really important that often they are crimes of passion,” Palmquist adds. “It’s not cynical people who are doing evil things to other people just because they love it, it’s really out of passion, maybe out of a mistake or whatever.”

“You have to understand both the murderer and the victim, and that’s not very easy,” continues Janni Helleskov, a producer at Sequoia Global Alliance, the maker of Danish series The Sommerdahl Murders. “Somehow it’s easier to hunt an evil guy chopping up young women in the forest. You have a purpose; you have a mission. But here you actually have to understand both sides of the story. When it works the best, you will be in the editing room saying, ‘I could have done that myself.’ You have sympathy for them.”
Based on the books by Anna Grue and returning to TV2 for a sixth season this Sunday, The Sommerdahl Murders is set in the picturesque coastal town of Helsingør as each episode revolves around an intriguing, perfidious murder solved by Dan Sommerdahl (Peter Mygind) and his best friend, Detective Superintendent Flemming Torp (André Babikian). Their professional investigations collide with their personal lives, however, when Flemming starts an affair with Dan’s estranged wife Marianne (Laura Drasbæk), a forensics officer who also happens to work with them.
“The challenge of every cosy crime show is the balance between the crime story and the personal plot. It’s always the key to how things work in each specific episode,” Helleskov says. “The Sommerdahl Murders is a blue-sky crime series that is the opposite of the Nordic noir that we’ve been known to produce in Scandinavia. And with blue-sky crime, we invite in the sun, the sand, the sea and the Scandinavian light. It is the first blue-sky crime from Denmark. We knew it from Sweden and Britain, of course, but we didn’t make any in Denmark before The Sommerdahl Murders.”
As such, it might have initially been seen as a risky proposition – but the fact preparations are already underway on a seventh season proves it was a risk worth taking. Dynamic Television has also sold the series into more than 100 territories.

“We have this love triangle (we actually made it into a square a few seasons ago) so you can imagine it’s getting a little intense in the police station while solving the murder cases in the beautiful setting of Helsingør,” Helleskov jokes. “Then we reflect a little on the time we live in by looking at topics like gender equality, global warming and the refugee policy in our country. We do that in a very subtle, light and very hopeful way too.”
In South Africa, producer Quizzical Pictures is known for dark crime drama Reyka (The Cane Field Killings) and thriller White Lies. Now it is stepping into cosy crime for the first time with Murder by the Sea, which is currently being developed with broadcaster M-Net.
“It’s a bit of a relief to go from serial killers to charming murders by the sea,” remarks head of development and executive producer Nimrod Geva. “We are looking for something a bit gentler when the world feels so hard and cosy crime creates this idealised village community in a beautiful place that you almost imagine living in. That’s something that we’ve grappled with in developing our show.”
Reuniting with White Lies writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey, the series follows a Shakespearean actor best known for playing a TV detective who retires to a small town and finds himself reliving his greatest role off-screen by solving real-life crimes.
“It’s gentle, it’s comedic,” Geva says. “We are all enjoying the softer, gentler pace. It’s unusual in that it’s serialised rather than episodic, partly because we don’t have that depth of acting talent. Murdering people and getting rid of suspects every episode, you kind of run out [of actors] quite quickly. So we’re enjoying that serialised thing, and also just trying to imagine what a South African cosy crime looks like.
“There’s something about cosy crime ever since Agatha Christie that is quintessentially British, so as a country in the shadow of colonialism, we are grappling with that as well and finding our own voice, but at the same time honouring the genre and understanding what makes it tick and make it work for a local audience and internationally.”
He believes what makes cosy crime tick might be the “safe danger” is provides viewers, who get to watch a murder investigation from the comfort of their own homes. “Yes, it’s a murder. It’s a death, but tonally there’s none of the gore. There’s none of the emotion trauma that death usually entails,” he notes. “So it’s sometimes a bit more of a pleasurable intellectual exercise rather than this emotional problem that you endure as an audience. It’s a much safer environment.”

Palmquist says: “It is really a paradox in the way that in this most beautiful place on Earth, where people feel totally safe – and we do as well on our couches – in that specific environment, all these murders are happening. You should be terrified, but it’s like you have a pact with the audience that you can feel safe here and it is entertainment. But we also do talk about serious things in maybe a lighter way.”
The crimes in The Sandhamn Murders are also treated seriously, not just how they happen but also how they are solved. “It shouldn’t just be by a coincidence, or that it was a bit too complex or complicated, so you needed to have this person coming in and explaining to you how everything happens.”
“You can’t rely on coincidence,” echoes Lindsay. “If I see something that’s a hole in the plot, like, ‘That was convenient – you walked past that door at that time and saw that,’ that drives me mad. You can’t do it. You’ve got to twist it again and find out, ‘Well, why was she there and what was it?’ That’s very important.”
Helleskov says: “For us, it works best when the main characters are invested in the crime stories, that they are somehow personally invested in what’s going on and why. We also talk a lot about the urgency in the crime plot because it is cosy and we want to make it cosy, and we want to have a good time and feel good, but we need to solve the case. It needs to be solved.”
The approach taken by Death in Paradise is to keep the show feeling fresh by taking its lead detective – and its audience – into different worlds in each episode, whether it’s a zoo or an art gallery.

“We are mindful of not reheating old ideas,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard feedback about, ‘This feels like a cheat’ or ‘This reminds me of that episode.’ That originality is really important. Everything we do is about putting the audience first, so it is about making sure we give them what they want. And we know what they want will be fresh and surprising and brilliantly clever murders in this amazing environment with these wonderful characters whose dynamics with each other is an entertaining and joyful place to be. That is our driving raison d’etre.”
As he looks to set up Murder by the Sea as a long-running success, Geva admits it’s a difficult feat to pull off, particularly in the wake of several high-profile series – Netflix’s Chaos, HBO’s The Franchise, Disney+’s Shardlake – being cancelled after a single season.
The familiarity with characters that is so important to murder mysteries often doesn’t build until a second or even third run, “so you’ve got to hook them [early on] with some kind of mystery element that is exciting, and a sense of place,” he says. “Certainly, we are fortunate to have a lot of blue sky in South Africa; we don’t have to fix that in the edit. And then having a quirkiness to the characters, so you immediately fall in love with them.
“Over time, you develop the depths of the characters, but immediately you can see who everyone is, how they fit into the small village and how they’re going to provide comedic joy or intrigue and build a sense of wanting to spend time with them.”
By choosing to follow a serialised story, rather than a case-of-the-week structure, the exec hopes that will be enough to intrigue viewers to the end of what will hopefully be the show’s first season.
“But [it’s also about] getting the tone right so people know what to expect from episode to episode. We’re also trying to balance that comedy and the emotional storylines with the mystery and feel like we’re honouring the genre as it’s known and loved, but also giving it a little bit of edge, a little bit of darker comedy here and there, a little bit of South African-ness that is hopefully appealing not just to our local audiences but is interesting to other people.”
With Murder by the Sea, Geva hopes to build on the success of its genre stablemates by “keeping it fresh while honouring what works.” For Lindsay, the secret to a long-running murder mystery series is a combination of “creating a world, characters, warmth and a damn good mystery.”
For Helleskov, sincerity is key. “It’s honest, heartfelt and warm,” she says. “We have a lot of bad things happening in the world, so keeping it really heartfelt is what comes to my mind.”
“And then I would put on top, relevance, believe it or not, just because it’s important that the stories you tell really ring with what you experience as an audience,” notes Palmquist.
“The whole murder mystery, golden age of crime has been around for over a hundred years,” adds Campbell. “People just love this type of detective genre, which are playful puzzles, which aren’t too dark, which have a flourish, which have ingenuity and have a personality. As long as the ideas stay fresh and surprising, the audience will be there.”
This article is based in part on interviews and sessions from Content London 2024.
tagged in: Belinda Campbell, Cosy crime, Death in Paradise, Hanne Palmquist, Janni Helleskov, Nimrod Geva, Sally Lindsay, The Madame Blanc Mysteries, The Sandhamn Murders, The Sommerdahl Murders