Satirical novelist Jonathan Coe skewers many peculiarities of modern Britain in his latest book, The Proof Of My Innocence. “I don’t think there’s another country in the world that would take the subject of violent homicide and rebrand it as ‘cosy’,” says one character. “It’s very British, in some indefinable way.”

While Coe’s stiletto is aimed at publishing - the novel contains a book-within-a-book parody of the genre and its current brand leaders, Richard Osman, Richard Coles and Janice Hallett - it might equally draw blood in British television. Death as light entertainment is inherently telegenic because a beautiful location is almost obligatory to such stories.

In the case of Bergerac - a BBC hit from 1981-91, and now revived by UKTV’s U and U&Drama this month - the selling point is that the murders occur in the tourist resort of Jersey. Bergerac creator Robert Banks Stewart decided to set a new series there when his hit show Shoestring (BBC1, 1979-80), an influential proto-cosy with Trevor Eve as a radio host investigator, came to an end. Subsequently, the blood- stained picture-postcard setting has been a regular in the schedules. Its epicentre is the idyllic village of St Mary Mead, home to Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth in Miss Marple (BBC, 1984-92) and Marple (ITV, 2004-13). Close by in Middle England lies the Berkshire-like setting of ITV’s Midsomer Murders, a cosy crime capital since 1997.

Another killing is the easiest way to hold attention over an ad break

Indeed, you could draw a pleasant route through England - at the risk of the driver being slain by a homicidal local - that also took in the Oxford of Inspector Morse, Lewis and Endeavour (ITV, 1987-2023), the quasi-Cambridge of Grantchester (ITV 2014-24) and various beautiful home counties gardens where two horticultural sleuths solve slayings in Rosemary & Thyme (ITV, 2003-07).

Having survived those sublime crime scenes, you might go north to  the Northumberland of Vera (ITV, 2011- 25) or the island setting of Shetland (BBC One, since 2013), both adapted from novels by Ann Cleeves.

The trick of cosy crime is to take somewhere audiences might imagine themselves living and turn it into a place where luck is required to survive until the end of an episode. Midsomer Murders is approaching 150 episodes. Since there are generally a number of corpses in each of these (a screen-writer once told me that another killing is the easiest way to hold attention across a commercial break), living in the bailiwick of either DCI Barnaby senior or junior may be as dangerous as being a player in Squid Game.

The fact that both versions of Bergerac were supported by the Jersey Tourist Board suggests that viewers take the scenery as real but the death rate as imagined. At the peak of Inspector Morse’s popularity, it is said that American tourists refused to board their tour bus to Oxford, believing it to be as dangerous as downtown Detroit or LA.

This bizarre combination of panorama and bloodbath is what Coe objects to in his novel. The great crime writer PD James - whose Adam Dalgliesh stories have been adapted for TV three times (by ITV, the BBC and now Channel 5) - addressed this in her 2009 book, Talking About Detective Fiction. In it, she surveys the fantasies of rural English brutality that began in the so-called “golden age” of Christie and Dorothy L Sayers (Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories have been dramatised several times for TV).

“These novels,” James wrote, “are, of course, paradoxical. They deal with violent deaths and violent emotions, but they are novels of escape... All the mysteries will be explained, all the problems solved and peace and order will return to that mythical village which, despite its above-average homicide rate, never really loses its tranquillity or its innocence. 

My view is that both Coe and James are too harsh on cosy crime. He sees it as “very British”, yet Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels - televised multiple times, with the latest version impending from PBS - fit the format perfectly: one of the most beautiful cities in the world (Paris, emblematic of love) is repeatedly scarred by death. As for James, though her invocation of an English hamlet that has the body count of Hamlet implicitly suggests Marple’s patch, I think that Christie – who probably invented the homicidal idyll as we know it – was more psychologically astute than she is given credit for.

In real life, the property market in Midsomer would have died decades ago

Although you wouldn’t know it from the TV schedules, premeditated murder remains rare in the UK and is always a shock. “You don’t expect it here,” remains the standard bystander response to reporters. Temperamentally, most of us live in a St Mary Mead, Midsomer or Jersey rather than an inner-city gun zone – and so murder profoundly disturbs.

Cosy crime reflects this disconnect, the counter-argument to Coe being that ugly murders in lovely settings are not an attempt to sanitise homicide but to make it more appalling. The drawback is that the more successful a franchise, the less surprising are the multiple homicides. In real life, the property market in Midsomer or Morse’s Oxford would have died decades ago.

Although Vera has just been killed off, the rebirth of Bergerac suggests that the form still has more life than many  of its characters. It may be ominous, though, that, alongside Coe’s prose send-up, there is also a TV spoof of the genre in Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders (Britbox/BBC since 2022), created by Anthony Horowitz, who was the first writer on Midsomer Murders.

The link between literary “cosy crime” and television is two-way. Several of the shows derive from best-selling books, and many of the latest practitioners came from broadcasting: quiz-show magus Osman writes The Thursday Murder Club and We Solve Murders book series, while presenter and reality show contestant Coles started his own series with Murder Before Evensong and its successors.

In April, Jeremy Vine’s Murder on Line One will be published as the first in a projected series in which a sacked late-night radio presenter becomes an amateur sleuth. Perhaps, in the search for unusual death methods, Vine will have someone killed by swingometer.

The scale of Osman’s sales brought screen interest to The Thursday Murder Club: Netflix’s movie adaptation, starring Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and David Tennant, finished filming last autumn and is due for release this year.

Coles’ recent third place on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! may bring similar screen interest, although his ecclesiastical hero already has a rival in Grantchester. But if the schedules can accommodate two detectives near the North Sea - in Vera and Shetland - there might also be space for a pair of C of E amateur sleuths. Vine’s DJ investigator in the West Country seems to follow in the footsteps of Eddie Shoestring, but just as Shoestring led to Bergerac, perhaps the return of the Jersey detective will bring another echo of its predecessor to the screen.