★★★★☆ A Mystery that feels like Fantasy

We Solve Murders

Richard Osman

If you go into a bookstore, you are likely to find Richard Osman's We Solve Murders on the mystery/thriller shelves. I was surprised, therefore, to find when I read it that it felt more like F&SF to me than a mystery. Of course, mystery and Speculative Fiction are not mutually exclusive -- indeed, two F&SF books I read recently, The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Tainted Cup were mysteries. But those books live on the F&SF shelves of the bookstore. We Solve Murders, in contrast, has none of the defining elements of F&SF -- no Star-Trek style technobabble, no magic wands.

What We Solve Murders shares with F&SF, however, is a cavalier attitude towards consensus reality, and willingness, indeed eagerness, to engage in world-building. Osman just makes up whatever he wants in order to make his story go where he wants it to. And he has fun with it, and I did, too. None of it is magic or advanced future technologies -- his inventions have more to do with the way people behave. I absolutely don't believe that I will ever run into Amy, Steve, and Rosie, any more than I am likely to meet Samwise Gamgee or Wanda Maximoff.

In fact, We Solve Murders felt to me like something Terry Pratchett might have written on a slow day. There was the feeling of never knowing what would happen next, along with the occasional outbursts of startlingly funny prose. Osman outbursts don't match Pratchett's explosions of originality (no one else does), but Osman does, I think, occasionally get up into the 100 milliPratchett range. That's pretty good.

I enjoyed it, and will read the sequels.

We Solve Murders on Amazon

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