Tag Archives: The Thursday Murder Club

Book review

The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club (4) by Richard Osman, 2023

I confess to being a lazy reader of murder mysteries. What I mean by that is that I am comfortable with learning whodunnit when the author is ready to let me know, and not before. Of course I spot the red herrings, the introduction of what appears to be a peripheral character who is actually a suspect, and so on. But I know that a well-written book – and Richard Osman is an author who takes care with his plot construction – will provide just enough information to make the resolution of the mystery almost impossible to guess in advance, but to appear fairly obvious once it is revealed. I don’t see mysteries as a battle between me and the author to prove who is the cleverest – the contract between us is for the author to entertain the reader, challenge them a little bit, maybe even educate them, while not making them feel inferior or stupid, and never ever cheating (untraceable poisons and the like).

I say this because I worked out ‘whodunnit’ in this, the fourth of Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, fairly early on – avoiding spoilers, it is someone who falls into the category I describe above – and that the mystery we are presented with isn’t the real mystery after all. I explain this a little more in the section marked ‘SPOILERS’ below. But that doesn’t mean the novel wasn’t enjoyable. It is always pleasant to spend time with the club members, who Osman stubbornly refuses to kill off (despite my clear prediction in my review of the original novel in the series that he would do so early on in book two). If anything he has expanded his cast of characters, with other residents of Coopers Chase being introduced into the crime-fighting team, including an older person who knows how to use computers (bit of a patronising portrait I thought – not all old people are clueless when it comes to technology) and another who is the victim of a pretty transparent romance fraud. The relationships of the wider cast, police officers Chris and Donna, builder Bogdan and drug dealer Connie all make little or no progress – there is talk of an engagement, but nothing more. If you haven’t read the previous books in the series, or like me have a poor memory for novels read without the full beam of your attention, then you might struggle a little working out who is who – backstories are very lightly sketched.

I also struggled with the subplot involving former spy Elizabeth and her husband Stephen, as they face his advancing dementia. Again I can’t really write at any length about this thread of the novel without spoilers, so I again refer you to the text below.

As to what happens, well if you have read one Thursday Murder Club you have really read them all. Someone is murdered, other crimes follow, and the four pensioners solve the crime using unorthodox means and a considerable amount of tea and cake. Stereotypes about old age are both challenged and used as a source of comedy, particularly through the well-meaning character of Joyce, who is endlessly curious but a little adrift in the modern world.

It’s not uncommon for authors of long-running series to lose steam – Terry Pratchett being the obvious exception to the rule. I am sure there will be more Thursday Murder Club novels, but in an implicit acknowledgement of the diminishing returns from another outing of the feisty pensioners, Osman is writing about a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective duo, which sounds sufficiently different to be interesting while in the same wheelhouse. Looking forward to it.

SPOILERS ALERT

Don’t read this unless you have already read The Last Devil to Die or have no intention to do so. Early on we are told that the heroin which goes missing is being carried in a box. The box is not described in any detail, but there’s enough to pique a curious reader’s interest – why smuggle heroin in a box? I suspected this was an example of the wheel-barrow theft operation story (A man works on an building site. Every day he walks off the site with a wheelbarrow full of sand. The security guards are suspicious and look through the sand trying to find if he was stealing anything. When he retired a guard asked him “Alright, how did you do it? We knew you were stealing, what did you hide in the sand?” “I wasn’t hiding anything in the sand, I was stealing the wheelbarrows.”) The box is described as ‘a small terracotta box, made to look old, like a tatty piece of garden junk…a boring ornament’. The obvious incongruity of using a terracotta box to smuggle heroin caught my attention at the time, and while the author works hard to downplay its significance, I was reasonably confident that we hadn’t heard the last of that box.

I am not claiming this as an example of my powers of penetration, simply suggesting that the puzzles in this novel weren’t that hard to solve. Actually, worse than that, they were pretty obvious.

I found the Elizabeth and Stephen subplot difficult, if not even a little distressing. Stephen’s dementia is accelerating and Elizabeth is slowly realising she is unable to cope with him. She is unable to leave him alone for any length of time without him putting himself in danger. He is aware at moments of his decline – at others he barely recognises her. So to cut a long story short, he kills himself with her assistance. This is presented to us as a brave choice, but it felt like patient-assisted suicide to me (because it was) which is illegal. Elizabeth is not one to care about being on the right side of the law, but anyone making a case for euthanasia simply because someone’s memory is failing (Stephen is in no physical pain or discomfort, and while obviously upset at his increasing dementia does not spend his days in acute distress) will find little support from me. It left a bad taste. Osman has given old people some dignity in these novels, revealing their strength and resourcefulness and celebrating the positive aspects of old age, but here, for me, he drops the ball badly. Old people lose their memories, but don’t deserve to die for it. He takes care to tell us that Stephen takes his own life, and is fully aware of the choice he is making, but glosses over the illegality and subterfuge required to achieve this end without prosecution.

Osman also uses Stephen’s dementia as a key point in the main plot – Stephen is the only person alive who knows where the missing heroin that everyone is being killed for is hidden, and somehow through the fog of his dementia manages to tell Elizabeth, albeit in a confused way. Because that’s what people suffering from dementia do, isn’t it – they solve crimes and locate hidden contraband. This was clumsy and a bit distasteful if I’m honest.

The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club (4) by Richard Osman, 2023

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Book review

(NB I’ve tried to avoid spoilers in this review but I am not sure I have succeeded, so if you are planning to read The Bullet that Missed and want to have a spoiler-free experience, best not to read on.)

Any author setting out to construct a crime novel will need to decide fairly early on in the process the amount of peril they want to include. Are the characters going to be at serious risk of harm or death, or will they be able to slip away from danger effortlessly? Authors writing for children will usually avoid anything where their characters come to ‘real’ harm, and any deaths are usually ‘off-screen’ or reversed very quickly – I know I have said this before, but I have a theory that you can work out the age group a film is targeted out by the number of seconds between the moment a character ‘dies’ and then suddenly coming back to life. When J K Rowling kills one of her characters in front of us – Cedric Diggory of course – and he doesn’t come back to life, we know she is now writing for a new, more mature audience, even if it is the same one that initially read Philosopher’s Stone three years earlier.

Richard Osman seems to have made a different choice and gone in the opposite direction, ratcheting up the ‘cosy’ element of the Thursday Murder Club series and removing all sense of peril whatsoever. At no point are his senior citizen investigators under any more threat than the Jigsaw Club. Highly skilled assassins can be persuaded not to go through with their threats over a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and a nice little chat with someone telling them they really didn’t want to kill anyone, did they? A hardened gang-leader in prison for murder can be persuaded to help the gang investigate the current crime simply through being asked nicely. Another lonely gangland crime boss trades secrets for another game of snooker.

Which makes it hard to take the novel at all seriously. Osman introduces several new characters in this latest incarnation of the Thursday Murder Club, which it goes without saying will sell in its millions. There’s a Swedish crypto-billionaire money launderer who tries to do his own easily-foiled assassinations (even though he has a crew to conduct kidnappings for him). He shows Elizabeth, retired spy, around his baronial lair in Staffordshire (why Staffordshire – is it home to many Swedish crypto-currency billionaires?) and the only thing missing is a white cat being slowly stroked for the Bond villain caricature to be complete. Victor is the ubiquitous retired Russian KGB colonel who always turns up in this kind of novel and would be played by Brian Cox (the actor, not the astronomer) in the inevitable film adaptation. He is also a complete sweetie and wants to join the gang, moving into the retirement community from his lonely luxury apartment in a tower block with it’s own suspended swimming pool.

The novel’s whodunnit puzzle – the gang are investigating a mysterious death of a reporter ten years earlier – is not that interesting. The red herrings are capitalised, in bold, and underlined to remove the risk of them being missed, and the resolution is, unusually for this series, a bit messily handled. The clues include some clunky anagrams which are hard to avoid – because arch-criminals obviously disguise their bank accounts anagrammatically, don’t they?

The element of pathos in the novel, the recognition that these are the last years of the characters’ lives and that death and infirmity come for us all, remains a theme, but is kept firmly in the background. Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband, is suffering from rapidly deteriorating dementia, but remains lucid enough most of the time to be able to assist with the investigation. Overall old-age is presented as rather pleasant golden years rather than those of infirmity, poverty and loneliness.

That’s the negative aspects of the novel – the cosiness is dialled past 11 and any sense of peril is entirely absent. Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim (and Victor?) are going to all live to 100 and run out of cases before they run out of time. But the 400+ pages pass by pleasantly enough nonetheless. Joyce remains the star of the show, navigating her way through the complexities of the modern world including Instagram and losing her savings by investing them in BitCoin and Etherium. Her murder mystery story, submitted to the local paper as a competition entry and included in full as a bonus item in the Waterstones edition of the novel (but I am sure available online) is hilarious and shows just how hard it is for crime-writers to avoid cliché. The humour in the novel is cleverly done. I particularly enjoyed the observation that “he eats salmon and broccoli now. He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up” given how hard it usually is to get this one right. Jokes about technology also land well – one character admits “I got so desperate I even used Bing, but the results were the same, if a bit slower.” There are plenty of quotable nuggets of wisdom scattered through the text – Victor in particular is wise in the manner of most Russian spies in this genre:

“It’s the people, in the end, isn’t it?” says Viktor. “It’s always the people. You can move halfway around the world to find your perfect life, move to Australia if you like, but it always comes down to the people you meet.”

There are enough points of entertainment to keep the pages turning and one’s interest engaged. The extra-large font the novel is printed in tells you everything you could want to know about Osman’s target readership, if that was ever in any doubt! I just wonder if perhaps Osman is losing focus and interest, and whether diminishing returns are beginning to set in? Eventually all long-running series run the risk of self-parody (a risk Osman explicitly acknowledges in the short story Joyce writes). He will need to find a new element or character in the inevitable Thursday Murder Club 4 due out this autumn this series becoming oppressively comfortable and we all doze off. This is a book to listen to while doing an uncomplicated jigsaw. There is a place in the world for that kind of book and I am sure I will read TMC4 when it comes out – but I can’t avoid thinking that Osman could do better than this.

The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman, 2022

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Book review

The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman, 2021

Turn off Antiques Roadshow, put the kettle on and open a pack of hobnobs; the Thursday Murder Club is back!

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

Richard Osman’s cosy mystery novel is currently smashing book sales records across the country. He seems to have found a winning formula and can’t be blamed for milking it for all it is worth. The question is: has he sustained the quality and originality of the first novel, or is this sequel already showing signs of repetition?

Not much time has passed since the events of first novel in the series. The four core members of the club – you will remember Elizabeth, the former spy, Joyce, a retired nurse, Ron, trade union leader and West Ham fan, and Ibrahim, a psychiatrist – are keen to get started on their next mystery to while away the hours that drag in their retirement community. The ‘not dead yet’ trope familiar from movies such as RED (retired and extremely dangerous) where elderly people draw on their years of experience to prove more than a match for their much younger enemies is quite well-worn by now, but Osman brings it to life by creating some very likeable and believable characters. Joyce in particular stands out – she is quite oblivious to some things going on around her (there is a long running joke about the personal messages she receives to her ambiguously named Instagram account) but her emotional intelligence gives her insights the others miss. It helps of course that she is one of the novel’s principal narrators. She enjoys the adventures even when at personal risk, managing a quick snooze in the back of a car while being held at gunpoint. For some reason I can’t shake the thought that Joyce is based upon Betty White’s character in – well, pretty much everything she is in.

There’s a comforting lack of peril in The Man Who Died Twice, despite the occurrence of several murders and appearances by gangland bosses and the Mafia. I thought it unlikely that Osman would allow plot armour – the phenomenon where the reader/viewer knows a character isn’t going to die however extreme the risk, because of their importance to the novel/film/franchise – to protect all of his characters, particularly given their advanced age, but they all make it through largely unscathed.

Because the novel is set close in time to the events of the first, there has been little progression in the lives of the foursome or their extended crime-fighting team. PC Donna is still feeling homesick for London and looking for love; her boss, Chris, is in the early days of a relationship with her mother, Patrice. Osman mines the agonies Chris goes through to wean himself off takeaways and onto carrot sticks for all the humour it is worth. Polish handyman Bogdan becomes a get out of jail free card for the team, always on hand to get them out of trouble. Women go weak at the knees around Bogdan which becomes very helpful when dealing with Connie Johnson, the local drug dealer. There’s a well-written and particularly comic scene when Bogdan calls on Connie to buy some drugs. The conversation is brief and perfunctory from Bogdan’s point of view, but when the narration switches to Connie’s perspective it is full of meaningful silences and erotic suspense.

Strangely for a murder-mystery, even a light-hearted one such as this, the plot is really not that important. An underworld boss has had some diamonds stolen by a Douglas Middlemiss, Elizabeth’s ex-husband. Douglas works for MI6, but is close to retirement. In one of an increasing series of improbabilities MI6 agree to hide Douglas and his guard Poppy, an inexperienced agent on her first field assignment, in Cooper’s Chase, the old people’s community where the Club members live. As I am sure is common spycraft practice. When this location is compromised they are moved to another ‘safe’ house which proves equally easy to discover. Instead of just giving the diamonds back or running off with them, Douglas leaves an elaborate trail of clues for Elizabeth to track them down and find the probable killer. In the process she also draws together the novel’s other threads, although the denouement requires everyone to behave incredibly improbably – going to a meeting without bodyguards for instance, or arriving in the country with a handgun without the need for any passport or customs checks – and the willing suspension of disbelief can be quite hard to maintain at times.

I am usually rubbish at solving the clues in mystery novels, but even I found the puzzles here very easy. Osman flags the clues without a lot of subtlety. A last message from Middlemiss to Elizabeth is left in a dead letter drop which he had earlier remarked on as an ideal place for a dead letter drop, and contains a simple acrostic puzzle using the first letters of each sentence. This wouldn’t have been that hard to solve anyway (and it is a red herring) but earlier in the paragraph Elizabeth explains how acrostics work and how she and Douglas used to use them to share jokey messages between themselves. The rest of the letter is phrased strangely with unusual repetition, and I am sure I can’t have been the only reader to scan it for clues – but it turns out the one simple clue it does contain is so obscure that only Elizabeth could ‘solve’ it using her shared past with Douglas. It’s all over-elaborate, improbable, and unconvincing, but I don’t think it matters a great deal – we know this isn’t John le Carre after all, more akin to one of the Famous Five or Secret Seven novels sixty years on.

Osman has put lockdown to good purpose, crafting a mystery novel that keeps the reader guessing to the last page, not least as to the identity of the man who died twice as described in the novel’s title. The jokes work well and are probably the best part of the novel. Checking back on the predictions I made for Thursday Murder Club 2 I probably got more wrong than right, and those that I did get right were fairly obvious – the format would remain unchanged for example – so credit to the author for avoiding some of the other more obvious choices. My mistake lay I think in my estimation of the length of the series – Osman is clearly here for the long haul, and we are going to be enjoying Thursday Murder Club novels for much longer than I imagined, if the progression here is anything to go by. And no complaints from me about that.

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Book review

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, 2020

If you enjoy murder mysteries but aren’t a fan of the more gory, bloody thirsty variety of the genre, you will love Richard Osman’s intelligent but ever so slightly sedate ‘The Thursday Murder Club’. Set in a retirement village, four friends gather once a week (“It was Thursday because there was a two-hour slot free in the Jigsaw Room, between Art History and Conversational French”) to discuss unsolved murder cases. One of the club members, Penny, has recently fallen seriously ill and is no longer unable to attend, so the club has decided to recruit a new member. Joyce is the voice of naivete in the narrative, breathlessly excited about her new adventures. (“I’m afraid I don’t know WTF. I only discovered LOL last week”). The other, more experienced members all bring their own particular set of skills to this most unlikely A-team. They are Elizabeth, who was an intelligence agent before never really quite retiring, Ibrahim, a psychiatrist, and Ron, a trade union leader.

The Thursday Murder Club: The Record-Breaking Sunday Times Number One Bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Osman, Richard: 9780241425442: Books

The cynic in me suspects that Osman has had some excellent advice on how to sell books. Rule one must surely be “know your audience”. I haven’t taken the time to look it up, but I am believe the main buyers of murder mystery novels written by television celebrities are senior citizens, and it looks as if Osman has constructed his story with that market in mind. The heroes of his novel are the club members who defy all negative stereotypes about the aged. They are energetic, intelligent, and navigate the modern world with ease. The murder club amateur detectives are always one step ahead of the police and break rules (and laws!) with impunity. Jokes about the challenges of modern technology are kept to a minimum. This adds up to create an immensely likeable story despite some of the more conspicuous evidence of its construction. At 377 pages across 115 chapters the pages slip by quickly, and the contrasting narrative voices and cliff-hanging endings all give the story considerable pace. All these elements make this a very easy novel to read. Is it patronising to suggest that this is all intended to make the book more popular with older readers?

I’m not going to summarise the plot, for the obvious reason of avoiding spoilers, but also because it is quite byzantine. There are lots of red herrings, sub-plots and other diversions which add to the page count but at times felt like padding. The ending won’t come as a massive shock, but I don’t think it is mean to – after a while there are only so many suspects left standing!

Despite some of the media coverage of this novel it is anything but ground breaking in its treatment of the old. Miss Marple is an obvious template for the senior citizen amateur detective, using her age to ensure people under-estimate and overlook her while she doggedly pursues her investigations. Having said that, the setting is original (so far as my limited knowledge of murder mysteries can account for). Osman acknowledges that many people living in a retirement home will either have lost a life-partner, or be in the process of losing them, to dementia or other illnesses. Grief is shown as part of everyday life for this community.

It’s hard to avoid the fact that even the very best murder mysteries are written within a fairly rigid set of conventions. It follows that it is not a criticism of this author to say that his first novel seems to be consciously laying down a template for future novels in the series to follow. Why wouldn’t it? I understand he has already written the sequel to this novel, and I think I can hazard a couple of guesses about what will happen in The Thursday Mystery Club 2. The central structure of a suspicious death being investigated by the club members will of course be retained. I think we will learn a lot more about the back-story of Elizabeth and Ibrahim, two key members of the club who so far we only know little about. There’s a lot more to come there if the history of some of the other residents is anything to go by. I also think one of the club members will die – my money is on retired trade union leader Ron – allowing fresh blood to join the club and new characters to be introduced. I also suspect there will be more explicit romantic complications between the retirement village residents, and that PC Donna De Freitas and her boss, DCI Chris Hudson will return for the next set of murders.

Just as an aside, the attitude to death in this novel is interesting. Of course murder mysteries by their nature need to confront death, and one set in a retirement village probably all the more so. But here two characters take their own lives in quite a casual manner, as if for the old death is less of an issue that it would be for younger characters. That might be the case but it doesn’t really square with the zest for life shown elsewhere in the novel. Some old people might be blasé about death and check out willingly when the time comes, but I suspect many others will fight it to the last – certainly Ron, Elizabeth, Joyce and Ibrahim would.

It’s good to see one of the more thoughtful, intelligent television personalities have success as an author. I await the inevitable television adaptations of his novels with interest.

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