Cozy Mystery & Whodunit Reader Hats

Cozy mysteries run on a famously cozy set of conventions: a small insular village, an amateur sleuth, a single useless local cop, a cat, and a crime that stays politely bloodless. Fans have turned that formula into their own in-joke, down to the Murder, She Wrote saying that no matter where she goes, somebody dies, and the endlessly debated body count of Cabot Cove. Readers cheerfully joke about it rather than argue it. The genre is anything but small. Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, and its fifth book, The Impossible Fortune, went straight to the top of the UK charts with nearly 400,000 hardbacks. The people buying those books are the ones who say STAY COZY, READ A MYSTERY, a slogan already printed on mystery-reader merch. These hats speak in that reader's voice. There are two plain badges, COZY MYSTERY and WHODUNIT, then the genre's own jokes: the butler who did it, a small town with a suspiciously high body count, murder made cozy, and the cat, the teapot and the theory. The casserole line is for the sleuth who shows up at every crime scene with a dish in hand, and the bake sale one is for anyone certain the next fundraiser ends badly. Each design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat.