Paula Hawkins might be breaking records this summer with The Girl on the Train, her disturbing look at murder and alcoholism, but not all lovers of crime fiction are looking for tales of blood and violence, with golden-age and “cosy” mystery writing currently undergoing a major renaissance.

Not only are reissues of golden-age crime writing taking off – last Christmas, Waterstones sold more than 50,000 copies of J Jefferson Farjeon’s 1937 country house murder story Mystery in White – but books by modern-day authors setting out to recreate the gentler side of mystery writing, as epitomised by Agatha Christie, are also flying out of bookstores. Publishers are rushing to bring “lost” golden-age authors such as Annie Haynes back into print, and to repackage the likes of Margery Allingham and Francis Durbridge.

“It’s massive for us,” said Joseph Knobbs, crime buyer at Waterstones. “The crime novel originally was a fun puzzle to solve ... Today, crime writing can be a very dark thing, and sometimes it’s quite nice to have something a little simpler, lighter, more fun, even.”

According to Maxim Jakubowski, crime expert and founder of the Murder One bookshop, so-called “cosy” crime, set in “an idealistic world where nothing really bad happens and everyone can gather in the living room to discuss the culprit”, has been around since Christie, with series today hooked on topics from quilting (Knot in My Backyard; Gone But Knot Forgotten) to cookery.

A popular subgenre, particularly in America, focuses on pet detectives; not Ace Ventura-style, but the likes of feline mystery-solver Sneaky Pie Brown (“it takes a cat to write the purrfect mystery”), star of Rita Mae Brown’s long-running, bestselling series, or Lilian Jackson Braun’s stories about James Qwilleran, who solves crimes with his Siamese cats.

Authors tend to be American, although Knobbs also cited the British Mandy Morton, who recently released The No 2 Feline Detective Agency. (“You’ve got to have a punny title,” he adds.) And there’s Issy Brooke, who self-publishes her Lincolnshire-set Some Very English Murders series, featuring Penny May and her rescue dog. Brooke says she is selling as well in the UK as the US.

“I fell into cosy mysteries because it’s something I enjoy,” she says. “I decided to write in UK English and trade off my Englishness. I think there is a subculture [in the US] allied to the whole hipster thing that likes Brit stuff; people who want to watch BBC America and drink tea and all that.”

She chose to focus on pets, she says, because Amazon has three sub-categories of “cozy mystery”: animals, crafts and hobbies, and culinary. “You only have to look at Facebook to see how many times a photo of a cat will get shared,” says Brooke.

“Readers love them,” says Jakubowski. “The sort of people who buy them are the sort who don’t touch anything with a stamp of realism – they like the murder to be a bit like in Agatha Christie, where it doesn’t really feel real, where there’s not much blood or pain. The murder is like a MacGuffin.”