Witty Little Knitter

Recently I had a short discussion with Murder by Death on the annoyingness of the mothers of the amateur-sleuths in so many cozy-mysteries. They lack any respect for their children's privacy, meddle and seem to be stuck on an eternal loop of 'and when will you make babies???'. And by 'they' I do mean just about any mom-character in the cozies I read (and I've read many) so far. They're also never just a bit annoying, usually I want to yell at them after about one paragraph. Or, alternately, tell the child that it's probably better for their mental well-being if they stay away. (However if they ever get around to yelling at the moms it ends with a lot of tears 'BUT I ONLY CARE ABOUT YOU!!1!!! And by the way WHEN WILL YOU MAKE BABIES???' and the kid has to apologize...)

And this isn't just badly written cozies. There are series I love (Carola Dunn's Lady Daisy-mysteries or Lanyon's Adrien English-series) that have mums with the same annoying traits.

For that reasons I'm doubly happy that the Cambridge Fellows series has an awesome and likeable mum...but it also made me wonder:

Where the hell is this 'cozy-mothers have to be terrible' thing coming from?

As said: it really isn't something that happens occasionally. If a mother has screen time in any cozy there's an 98% chance that she is horrible. Why? Is there a secret agreement between cozy writers? Are they all mind-controlled? Often cozies draw a lot of inspiration from the golden-age crime novels but the big names there are Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot ever have to deal with their mothers. Lord Peter does but his is again pretty laid-back and really can't be the template for those horrible caricatures...