The fourth instalment of the Thursday Murder Club series is a mixture of action and comedy – with an unexpected comic kick
Richard Osman’s first three Thursday Murder Club mysteries are among the 10 bestselling hardback novels since UK records began; I suspect only nuclear armageddon or an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague can prevent this fourth entry in the series from muscling onto the list. Clearly no other novelist working today can come up with anything to match the pleasure of spending time with Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron as they pore over the details of unsolved murders in the Jigsaw room at Coopers Chase retirement village.
Much of the books’ success stems, I suspect, from the fact that we live at a time in which many enterprises, from banks to radio stations, prefer to lose customers by the shedload rather than acknowledge that the elderly exist and may have different requirements from younger people. Osman has taken the trouble to work out that many of us are old, and that many more of us are reluctantly aware that we will become old in the blink of an eye; his putting the elderly centre-stage is an obvious idea that seems, in today’s climate, revolutionary.
He’s been canny enough, too, to give us a seductively idealised portrayal of old age. Never mind identifying with James Bond or Jack Reacher: what could be more appealing than a vision of senescence in which we might live in as much comfort as the residents of Coopers Chase, be part of an equally close-knit gang of friends, and hare around creating as much trouble in a good cause, in defiance both of a society that undervalues the elderly and of our own deteriorating bodies? It’s to Osman’s credit, however, that now that the world has fallen in love with his septuagenarian sleuths, he’s starting to allow the harsher realities of old age to bite them.
The new book begins with the shooting of Kuldesh Sharma, the genial 80-year-old antiques dealer who gave the Club some valuable assistance in the previous volume, The Bullet That Missed. Kuldesh’s murder kickstarts an Elmore Leonard-esque caper plot in which various interested parties compete to get their hands on a consignment of heroin that had been in his care, resulting in a string of violent deaths alternating with comic set-pieces.