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Ladies In Lavender

© James C. Hess

Noctivagous.

While doing research for a mystery I am attempting to write and complete before summer's end I became privy to an interesting editorial and publishing opinion, regarding mysteries, specifically those known as 'cozies': They are nothing less than soft-core pornography, I was told, given so many of them characteristically involve insidious, salacious, immoral, unethical, depraved, demented, disturbed, deranged, self-serving, egocentric, treacherous, devious, sleazy, manipulative, Machiavellian types who are anything but good people at their most basic. The sort who have so many skeletons in their closets they need several such closets to keep them at bay.

To which I replied: Well, isn't that why cozies are so appealing? Because such wretched examples of humanity get what they have coming?

That's incidential, I was told. The thing that is important here is that people don't understand what it is they are reading, and because they don't they accept such realities far too easy and quickly.

In other words: Mysteries of this stripe are a lot like comic books once were, apparently: Regular readings of them can lend to skin blotches and inflammations, rotted teeth and bad breath, insomnia and impotency of some degree.

Such condemnations are understandably concerning, especially to those who create these otherwise memorable works of literature, and measures must be taken, then, to keep from being relegated to the popular culture slag heap.

Measures which include but are not limited to the introduction of superficial trappings, chattel, elements, and features which provide distractions, sufficient enough to allow an audience to appreciate the work at hand and not be influenced otherwise prejudice and bias.

These measures, then, are great talents whose mere presence can eclipse said prejudice and bias. Consider as example the film "Ladies In Lavender", featuring two great, undeniable acting talents, Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith, who play two sisters sharing a cozy little cottage located on the Cornwall coast.

Why are they there? That is something of a mystery, wrapped in a cozy design: They spend their days gardening and having tea, their evenings and nights knitting, and listening to the wireless.

Until one particularly dark and stormy night, when a strange young man washes up on their shore.

His name, it is learned, is Andrea Marowski (Daniel Bruhl). He is a sweet, handsome, kind, young man, who barely speaks a word of English. After a time Janet Widdington (Smith) learns he knows some German and she sets to communicating with him by way of an antique school textbook. Soon she and her sister, Ursula (Dench) learn that Andrea is actually Polish, and that he is an accomplished violinist--a very gifted one, at that.