Four octogenarians solve crimes on the Kentish Weald

Richard Osman is a funny guy and he’s written a mystery that made me laugh out loud.

The Thursday Mystery Club has four members: Joyce, a former nurse; Ron, a former labor leader; Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist, and Elizabeth, who may not admit it but sound as if she is former MI6 agent. They are all elderly residents of the Coopers Chase Retirement Village, an upscale facility in the Kentish Weald, a scenic area in southeast England that includes parts of Kent and Sussex. 

The Village includes recreation rooms, swimming pool, beside which is “a small ‘arthritis therapy pool,’ which looks like a Jacuzzi, largely for the reason that it is a Jacuzzi. Anyone given the grand tour by the owner, Ian Ventham, would then be shown the sauna. Ian would always open the door a crack and say, ‘Blimey; it’s like a sauna in there. That was Ian.” Ian is the second murder victim.

Elizabeth formed The Thursday Murder Club (they meet on Thursdays) with her friend Penny, a retired Kent Police Inspector. Until she was incapacitated by a stroke, Penny brought files of unsolved murder cases to the facility’s Jigsaw Room, and she and Elizabeth would go over every case file line by line looking for anything the police might have missed. Over time, they called on Ibrahim, Ron, and Joyce for specialized help and then Penny had her stroke. They may have solved cases to their satisfaction, but no one was actually brought to justice. Then a contractor who happens to own 25 percent of Coopers Chase is killed and the club has a real murder to solve.

The Thursday Murder Club is Osman’s first novel. He is the creative director of a production company and is best-known in England as a co-host of Pointless, a game show where contestants aim to score the fewest points possible by guessing the least popular answers given by people in polls on various subjects. He has had  his own BBC quiz show,  House of Games along with Insert Name Here and Child Genius. He is a regular on panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You. 

He told the Guardian he did not want to be seen as someone who just “dashed off a celebrity novel.” 

“I’ve always known how hard it is to write a crime novel and I have such respect for people who do it. I never felt I was in a position where I could do it properly and give it the time it deserved until about 18 months ago. I decided I would start it and once I got going, I found that I couldn’t stop.”

The novel was inspired by a lunch visit to a friend of Osman’s mother's in one such retirement community. “The setting felt familiar because you're in beautiful countryside but I was surprised because it was really busy with people everywhere. Then, when you start talking to them, aged seventy and above, you think, ‘My god, there's some talent, wit, wisdom and sense of mischief in this generation, everything is there.’ I thought this would be a great setting for a murder story. Let's throw the worst at them and see how they deal with it." 

They deal with seven murders by my count, but don’t hold me to that figure. It is stuffed with characters including the club members, two local police officers, Coopers Chase residents, figures from the past (the murdered contractor is a former drug king-pin, or maybe just a minor prince-pin). 

I expected book club members to grouse about the number of characters and the plot’s complex threads, but Osman is able to tag the characters so distinctly, most people I know had no trouble keeping them apart.

(Not everyone though. As one, representative Amazon one-star reviewer wrote, “The Thursday Murder Club is an amateuristic, long, poorly written mystery novel. There are too many characters, plot twists, and deaths. Most of the characters are flat and fail to attract a reader's interest or sympathy. The ending is convoluted and disappointing.”)

Still, The Bookseller reported that Viking acquired the novel and one other, “for a seven-figure sum, after triumphing in a ten-publisher auction in one of the biggest auctions of 2019. It sparked a string of deals across the world including a six-figure auction in the States.” 

The Thursday Murder Club reads a little like a TV mini-series treatment. Short chapters. Quick cuts. Multiple points of view. Snappy dialogue. It makes sense given Osman’s background. I would also go out of my way to watch such a series.

And The New York Times identified Osman’s second book, The Man Who Died Twice as one of the best mysteries of the year.

All of which is to say, The Thursday Murder Club is a hoot. Read and enjoy.