★★★★☆ Well, that was fun!

The Thursday Murder Club

Richard Osman

Strangely, considering that I don't think myself a fan of mystery novels, I've been reading a lot of them lately. Right now, aside from Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, which I have just finished, I am listening to Agatha Rasin and the Quiche of Death and reading The Tea Master and the Detective

The reason is that mysteries are allowed to be pure fun. They are what, in my youth, people with literary pretensions condemned Science Fiction as being: escapism. I haven't heard that line much recently, because since the 1970s "escapist" has transitioned from being a bad thing to a neutral description. Apparently over the course of the last five decades reading for fun has become a thing no one needs to be ashamed of. Who says that there is no such thing as progress!

The Thursday Murder Club is that kind of mystery. It doesn't pretend to be Great Literature, or even marginally plausible. The Thursday Murder Club consists of four octogenarians in a retirement community who meet weekly to discuss unsolved murders. They are Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim. Joyce is a former nurse, Ron a labor leader, and Ibrahim a psychologist. Elizabeth, who is the closest thing to a leader the Club has, is cagy about her past, but we are obviously meant to deduce that she was some sort of international spy.

They start out investigating the murder of a contractor/handyman who worked for their community. In the manner of murder mysteries, a few more murders get added to the investigation. They don't really solve the murder (more on that in a spoiler below). The fun of the novel is in their interactions with each other and with the two police officers involved, Donna and Chris. The characters aren't really believable -- Elizabeth and Ron in particular are caricatures exaggerated for fun.

Now, about the ending. Neither the Thursday Murder Club nor the police figure out the murders. We, the readers, find out whodunnit, because Osman puts us in the head of the murderer while he introspects on what he did. He gets away with it completely -- the cops don't catch him. It is implied that the Thursday Murder Club figures out that he's the one who did it, or at least Joyce does. Joyce keeps a diary, and in her final entry she says (without a shred of evidence) that she thinks he was the killer.

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