When Richard Osman published his inaugural Thursday Murder Club novel in the autumn of 2020, it proved the perfect pick-me-up for a nation mired in the pandemic blues. Five years and millions of book sales on, the latest instalment – the fifth in the series – has an equally vital function: to cheer up those of us who have just sat through the clodhopping Netflix adaptation of the first book.
Although the film boasts a blue-chip quartet of geriatric thespians as Osman’s crime-busting pensioners Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, it doesn’t have half the charm and liveliness of the novels – nor the emotional impact. On the page, the superannuated sleuths defy the elements of caricature to possess a vibrancy that makes you invested in their triumphs and tribulations, large or small.
The result is that their adventures linger in the memory – more so than We Solve Murders, the globe-trotting crime caper Osman published last year while taking a break from the Club: though a highly entertaining read, it seems disposable in retrospect. So far, at least, Osman and the Thursday Murder Club are both better in combination than apart.
Celia Imrie, Sir Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan star in Netflix’s adaptation – Giles Keyte/Netflix
The Impossible Fortune begins with an explanation of what the Murder Clubbers have been doing with their year off: not much, it transpires, as Elizabeth has been poleaxed by grief following a tragic loss – and, as Ron observes, “the force of Elizabeth’s personality is the glue that binds [the] gang together”.
But her little grey cells splutter back into life when, attending the wedding of Joyce’s daughter Joanna, she’s approached by one of the guests, who has been advised of her prodigious ratiocinative skills and wants her to find out who placed a bomb under his car that morning. This proves to be one of Osman’s more cleverly plotted whodunnits, with bonus brainteasers in the form of cunning codes to crack: it’s all the pleasure of Dan Brown, but without prose that zaps your will to live.
A sub-plot involves Ron’s daughter giving her violent gangster husband Danny the elbow, with the result that he vows to take murderous revenge against her family. It’s part of Osman’s charm that his portrayal of Danny, rendered in sub-Martina Cole clichés, is entirely unconvincing. He has said before that his books should not be described as “cosy crime” because they contain such violent characters and storylines: but in fact what he does, so enjoyably, is to render that macho gangster world ridiculous by infusing it with his cosy sensibility.
Netflix
That’s not to say that the novels can’t get you in the gut at times: the storyline about the deterioration of Elizabeth’s dementia-addled husband Stephen has progressed over the series from poignant to harrowing. That thread was brought to a definitive end in the last book, however, and The Impossible Fortune is touching in a quieter way.
Osman has chosen to place Joyce’s difficult relationship with her daughter Joanna, previously touched on in brief snippets, at the heart of this book, resulting in a funny-sad depiction of a dysfunctional dynamic that is one of the best things he has done. In fact, it is becoming ever clearer that the slightly scatty but emotionally intelligent Joyce is Osman’s finest creation: her name at the top of one of those chapters comprising her first-person ramblings is a sure guarantee of a couple of pages of pure pleasure.
Elsewhere Osman provides such reader-pleasing elements as jokes about Flog It! and vigilante attacks on people who play videos loudly in public places. But what makes his books supremely irresistible is his vision of old age – often difficult, yes, but also an opportunity to find your tribe and do something worthwhile with them: as Elizabeth notes, though she is no longer as agile and razor-witted as she once was, “she doesn’t need to be. Because she is now part of a team.”
As we turn the pages and realise we are five years closer to inhabiting our own equivalent of Coopers Chase retirement village than when we started reading the series, we all hope one day to be part of such a team. In the meantime, such is Osman’s skill that as we read, we feel as if we already are.
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman is published by Viking at £22. To order your copy for £18.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books
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