This book is exactly what a cold winter weekend in lockdown needs. The Thursday Murder Club is set in Cooper’s Chase, a retirement village where a group of geriatrics meet once a week to discuss unsolved murder cases. When a murder takes place right on their doorstep they get the opportunity to put both their powers of deduction and their senior bus passes to good use.
Osman’s writing is exactly how you would imagine of an omniscient TV quiz host’s to be— it is observant, witty, engaging and exceptionally well researched. There are occasions where his attempts at humour are a little laboured, like a dorky uncle trying to be ‘down with the kids’ or more accurately ‘down with the middle aged, retiree empty nesters who have read the entire back catalogue of Agatha Christie and seen every episode of A Touch of Frost’.
Overall, however, his one-liners are well-pitched and gently massage the reader’s ego, making them feel intelligent for having understood the references, whether these be to crime fiction tropes or 21st century life. Imagine if Miss Marple had moved from St Mary Mead to a retirement village, switched her customary tea for a bottle of Chardonnay (the pensioners in The Thursday Murder Club seem to drink a surprising and quite frankly, pretty impressive amount)and bought a mobile phone. If this image is a pleasing one, this is the book for you.
One downside to the book is the length of the chapters. With some as short as a page, Osman has carefully crafted the book so that every chapter is a cliff-hanger. In theory this sounds clever but in practice it’s just incredibly irritating and results in enough jumping around to make you feel motion sick. As a society we have got used to life running on maximum efficiency and speed. Mobiles allow us to communicate instantaneously, parcels arrive within minutes of being ordered, Google provides limitless information at the touch of a button.
As age slows us down the internet speeds life up and we develop a tendency to get frustrated at the pace of the elderly, the speed at which they walk and their meandering approach to storytelling. Osman captures this well but the length of the chapters truncates this, making the book feeling disjointed rather than suspenseful, rather like watching a program with too many advert breaks. Not every scene needs the element of suspense and sometimes, if characters are heading into the town for a cup of coffee you would prefer that this happened in one fell swoop.
To return to my original point, this is part of what makes the book brilliant for a lockdown weekend. You don’t need to keep flicking between the bedside clock and the number of pages in the next chapter, calculating whether you can risk one more without being exhausted in the morning. You don’t have to stop reading with a cliff-hanger — you can devour the book in one go.
The real joy in this book doesn’t lie in the murder itself but in the characters. As the world focusses increasingly on the young, Osman shows that despite slowing down physically, the elderly should not be overlooked. They may be slow but they are not stupid and their speed works in their favour. Their rigour and observance allows them a different viewpoint, a chance to catch details that in their haste, the police have missed. The book is a gentle reminder that not only should we respect our elders, maybe we shouldn’t underrate them either…
