This is a book which sets out to amuse and entertain. And to some extent, it does this well enough, offering a frothy, light read that carefully avoids straying into the frivolous or the trite. It is a whodunnit, but the focus is more on the characters and their unlikely and lively interactions, than necessarily on the danger or suspense of the plot. It helps that right from the start, we are presented with a murder victim, Tony Curran (a builder) who seems to have been an unsavoury character whom no one particularly misses, and so, readers are not unduly harrowed by the death. From the start, we have an obvious villain – Ian Ventham – a greedy, unscrupulous developer, who has been buying up land around Coopers Chase and is intent on buying more, for further development projects.
The Thursday Murder Club is a group of pensioners who live in Coopers Chase, the extremely upmarket care home (or Luxury Retirement Village) developed by Ian Ventham. Coopers Chase is an attractively renovated convent set in twelve acres of beautiful woodlands in the countryside, in a particularly picturesque location. Many of its residents are fairly sprightly even if advanced in age, and many of them used to be people of significance, as Ron Ritchie declaims when barricading the route to the nuns’ cemetery (the Garden of Eternal Rest) from diggers brought by Ventham to dig up the graves for development:
We’ve got soldiers here, one or two. We got teachers, we got doctors, we got people who could take you apart and people who could put you back together again. We got people who crawled through deserts, people who built rockets, people who locked up killers.
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Of these residents, the Thursday Murder Club currently consists of 4 members: Joyce, a former nurse, and one of our protagonists; Elizabeth, the unelected leader by consensus and a redoubtable woman all her life; Ibrahim, who was a psychiatrist and the academic of the group; and Ron Ritchie, the former trade union leader, and also father of Jason Ritchie, a famous boxer. There are other key protagonists apart from the Cooper Chase stars, namely Donna De Frietas and Chris Hudson of the police force who are working on the case. Bogdan, the Polish builder, also gets added to the amateur detectives group when he makes some interesting finds and connects with some of the retirees. The gentle interactions between the characters are quite charming, and Osman attempts to make them distinctive by class, background, gender and so on, each with their own back stories and secrets.
The chapters are short, the characters are many, though it is a mark of skilful writing that the reader is seldom lost amongst the very large cast, and even if the character identification depends on a few quick brushstrokes of easily defining characteristics for each person, it nevertheless is an effective writing strategy. Osman also has the knack of showing rather than telling, and imparting a huge amount of significant information in a seemingly mild, pleasant manner:
Elizabeth walks into the living room. […] Stephen is on the sofa, lost in concentration. This morning, before the trip to London with Joyce, they had been talking about Stephen’s daughter, Emily. Stephen is worried about her and thinks she is getting too thin. Elizabeth disagreed, but, all the same, Stephen wished Emily would visit more often, just so they could keep an eye on her. Elizabeth agreed that was reasonable and said she’d talk to Emily.
However, Emily is not Stephen’s daughter. Stephen has no children. Emily was Stephen’s first wife and had died nearly twenty-five years ago.
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From this short passage, we quickly gather that Elizabeth is Stephen’s second wife, and that Stephen is probably having dementia, but Elizabeth is kind enough to help him pretend that he is not, suggesting the depth of her love and consideration, as well as skilful handling of the situation to make it as comfortable as possible. In a few simple words and usually quite short sentences, Osman paints a very clear portrait of these characters, of their personalities and their relationships.
However, it feels like quite a lengthy book. After the first 100 pages or so, the reader has become accustomed to Osman’s light writing style, and then it gets a bit ‘samey’, and tends to burble on and on in the same vein (it is 390 pages in length, so not a short novel). Yes, there are twists and turns that meander along happily enough, but at another level, it can feel a tad tedious too. The second murder is a welcome development, but the book could have been cut down considerably, even by half, without much of a loss of enjoyment or anything else. Still, taking a charitable view, readers could maybe could think of it as unfolding at the pace comfortable to the elderly protagonists and going along with that.
The ‘reveal’ in the last few chapters is not particularly lucid, mostly because the plot has left itself with too many loose ends and involved an unwieldy, large number of extraneous characters. The many suspects are doubtless intended to be red herrings, but like too many ingredients muddling the flavours of a dish, Osman has so many red herrings that the ‘reveal’ quite loses its momentum and climatic impact. I had to back up and reread a couple of pages here and there, just to confirm in my own mind who actually killed whom, so unclear was the explanation. Osman has already released the sequel to The Thursday Murder Club, entitled The Man Who Died Twice; well, perhaps when I am next on a long-haul flight, a very long-haul flight…..
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