Another Successful Case for Thursday’s Crime-Fighting Pensioners
The Last Devil to Die
By Richard Osman
(Pamela Dorman Books, 362 pages, $29)
If I had known that Richard Osman was a producer of television quiz shows and a TV entertainment show presenter before I read The Thursday Murder Club, I never would have read The Thursday Murder Club, or the three vastly entertaining and intelligently wrought mysteries that followed. My experience with novels written by folks with television backgrounds has been less than rewarding. I can always tell where the commercials go. And the characters tend to be as shallow as pie plates and even less interesting.
Luckily, I did not know of Osman’s dubious day job, so I took the recommendation of a good friend and tucked into Thursday Murder and then read the following three unlikely but amusing adventures of four English retirees living at Coopers Chase, an upscale retirement village in Kent. The recurring characters include the group’s de facto leader, Elizabeth, a retired spy; Joyce, a flirtatious retired nurse who likes to bake; Ron, a bolshie former union activist; and Ibrahim, a semi-retired, overly intellectual psychiatrist. The books also feature finely drawn and recurring secondary characters, including a Polish maintenance man, Bogdan, who provides muscle and some dodgy but useful skills; Chris and Donna, two police officers who help the unofficial sleuths unofficially; and young Bob the computer geek, the amateurs’ IT division. Then there’s Elizabeth’s many helpful colleagues and contacts made during her years as a spook. (I can’t recall from the books if the exact Secret Squirrel agency Elizabeth worked for is revealed.)
The septuagenarians began amusing themselves by gathering every Thursday in the Jigsaw Room at Coopers Chase to discuss cold murder cases, thus the name. When a real murder takes place on their patch, idle speculation morphs into direct action. The four lively geriatrics, at a time of life when most just look forward to peaceful days, become amateur sleuths, dealing successfully, and at some risk to themselves, with various bad actors the police can’t quite corral. If you don’t die young, you have to grow old. But you don’t have to grow old gracefully.
This set-up may make the series sound like cozies — mystery novels out of the Miss Marple tradition, featuring rural crime with muted violence, the corpses sanitized, with amateur detectives, usually older, sometimes even a cat, solving the crimes. These appeal almost exclusively to your aunt Eunice and other spinsters of this parish. But don’t be misled. Osman’s stories are much more high protein. They can and do reward savvy, adult readers with experience of the world.
To start with, while Osman’s central characters are old, he doesn’t make them cutesy. He doesn’t patronize them. This bunch is anything but twee. They’re endearing without being saccharin. They’re smart, lively, mischievous, witty, and resourceful as they put their varied experiences from long lives to work outmaneuvering bad guys as well as the police, who would just as soon they stick to their bingo and shuffleboard.
Comic crime stories, adventures not meant to be believed but that also manage to say something useful about the way we live and what being human is all about, are not easy to pull off. Few writers have been able to do it. Hats off to Osman for packing so much humanity into these otherwise fantastic romps. Readers would have to be daft as a brush to believe that these oldies, who should be concerning themselves with varicose veins, memory lapses, and arthritis, could really outwit, outmaneuver, and corner drug dealers, Mafiosi, hit men, forgers, and various species of fraudsters of varying degrees of lethality. But Osman has his creations do so cleverly enough and with sufficient humor and insights into modern society that we willingly suspend disbelief and go along for the bumpy and improbable ride.
While these oldsters continue to punch well above their weight and demonstrate that it’s far better to wear out than to rust out, Osman does not exclude the manifold losses, mental and physical, of the golden years. Infirmities abound. Joyce is a widow and misses her late husband terribly. And Elizabeth is staring down the barrel of widowhood. Her beloved husband, Stephan, has dementia and is slipping away. There’s a major development in this sub-plot in Last Devil, which is sensitively handled and moving. Old age is not for sissies, and Osman doesn’t try to pretend otherwise.
The stories themselves are tightly plotted with multiple suspects, red herrings, twists and turns, and people and things who turn out not who and what readers first imagine them to be. All out of the long and respected tradition of British mystery writing.
The Last Devil begins on Boxing Day with Joyce drinking a toast to “no more murders next year.” But readers know this is not to be. And even Joyce sees the charm of the group’s second career, saying, “The lovely thing about investigating a murder is that you can be nosy and call it work.” Not long after Joyce’s ineffective toast, the game is afoot again. News reaches Coopers Chase that an elderly antiques dealer, Kuldesh Sharma, an old friend of the group, has been murdered, execution style, in his car at the end of a rural road. So it’s action stations again for the club, which is not about to let this murder go unsolved and avenged. This latest adventure involves more moving parts, more different kinds of villains, and a higher body count than the previous ones, though the ending is just as satisfying.
The Thursday tales, from 2020’s The Thursday Murder Club to the last installment, The Last Devil to Die, just out in September, were popular from the very start, with each number selling more than 1 million copies. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still more copies in Santa’s bag for mystery readers on his list. Steven Spielberg was impressed enough to buy the film rights to The Thursday Murder Club and plan to direct it. Soon to be major motion picture, as we say in the trade. (Has any movie ever been marketed as a minor motion picture?)
Some may object to my whooping up what is clearly escapist fare at a time when the world is more tense and dangerous on many fronts than it has been for many years. But perhaps this is exactly why we need to step away from a troubled nation and world for a few hours from time to time. It would be hard to find a more enjoyable escape than with The Thursday Murder Club.
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