This quirky novel (published in 2020) comes from the pen of Richard Osman, the genial co-host of Pointless, which is currently Nigel's favourite UK quiz show.

Featuring a quartet of amateur sleuths, who reside at Cooper's Chase (an upmarket Kentish retirement village), and meet every Thursday to solve outstanding cases that have come to their attention, it very much slots into the category of "cosy crime". This is a genre that I'm not totally a fan of, and about a quarter of the way in, I still wasn't sure if I was liking it... Was it just too silly...? Was the old folks' banter occasionally just too long-winded? Was it verging on the twee?

But the book definitely grew on me, and I'd definitely read the sequel.

Excellently narrated in my audio-version by Lesley Manville, it is nothing if not an easy listen. And there's no denying that it's stunningly well observed. Quintessentially English. From Twixes to the relative price of bottles of wine; from building regulations to Waitrose deliveries; from Brexit to the predisposition of stars to appear in so many rounds of Masterchef, Strictly, and other celebrity trot-outs that they start to forget what they're actually celebrated for -- it's all there, fondly, amusingly, and non-judgementally noted.

In places the writing is quite lyrical, and you think: This man could be a much more serious author if he chose to be. I'm thinking, for example, of the description of the community of nuns on whose site the retirement village has been built:

"[They were] the Sisters of the Holy Church, an army which would never give you up, which would feed you and clothe you and continue to need and value you. All it required in return was a lifetime of devotion... And then one day you would take the short trip up the hill, through the tunnel of trees, to the Garden of Eternal Rest -- the iron gates and low stone walls of the Garden looking over the convent and the endless beauty of the Kentish High Weald beyond, your body in another single bed, under a simple stone, alongside the Sister Margarets and Sister Marys of the generations before you. If you had once had dreams they could now play over the green hills, and if you had secrets then they were kept safe inside the four walls of the convent for ever... [The chapel] is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle and where the whispers have sunk into the stone. It is a place to make you feel part of something slower and something gentler."


Dorset, not Kent, but still very English

Then, after a couple of hours of suspended judgement, it dawned on me that this story is not so much a detective novel as a meditation on aging... Viewing it as such totally transforms it.

We watch Ron and Ibrahim, two of our sleuths, prolonging one of their evening conversations. They are "two old men, fighting against the night". Joyce, the most recently recruited member, is widowed, and remembers her husband fondly, but still retains a healthy interest in the elderly men around her. She and her little gang of girlfriends used to go up to town to the theatre, and drink ready-mixed gin-and-tonics on the train home. But two cancers and a stroke have taken the others, and left her on her own. As she says, you always know when you're doing something for the first time, but you never know when it's going to be your last time... So when widower Bernard (at whom she has delicately set her cap) commits suicide, Joyce remembers not only him, but all her other dead.

There are a LOT of deaths in this book, it has to be said...



But it's not only death that you have to deal with in your advancing years. It's not always easy, for example, to handle changing relationships with your children, as Joyce discovers.

And then there's memory loss, the shadowy ogre that stalks the retirement village... The mysterious Elizabeth, the Thursday Murder Club's leading light and master-networker, is still managing to keep under wraps the increasing mental feebleness of her husband, Stephen. But how much longer can that last? And Penny, Elizabeth's friend and club co-founder, lies prone in the nursing-home part of the retirement complex, having apparently reached her current unresponsive state via a bout of dementia. She is loyally attended by her husband, John.

Advancing age also means you have had more time to accrue burdensome secrets... Secret shames, secret griefs, and secret crimes that you just don't know what to do with, but that somehow will out... As Dr Mackie puts it: "Whatever they say about time healing, some things in life just break, and can never be fixed."

But I don't want to give the impression that this is a gloomy book. For a start, it's very funny. And also, these characters are people who make the most of what they still have. They enjoy their cake; they enjoy their wine; they enjoy the little ruses they employ to wheedle information out of various sources. They're not giving in, or going under. Joyce is right: You have to learn to count the good days, and tuck them in your pocket, and carry them around with you...



I guess the underlying moral issue that Osman deals with -- though ever so approachably and entertainingly -- is the idea of getting away with things. In one of the first-person stretches penned by Joyce, she says: "Penny and Elizabeth had solved all sorts of cases to their own satisfaction, but that was as far as they could go. So Penny and Elizabeth never really got their wish. All those murderers remained unpunished, all still out there, listening to the BBC Shipping Forecast somewhere. They had got away with it, as some people do, I’m afraid. The older you get, the more you have to come to terms with that."

Except... they don't get away with it in this book, do they? They may not conventionally come up against the strictures of the law, but there are definitely consequences to be faced... Penny, in her time as a police officer, once took the law into her own hands, and didn't let that young man get away with his crime. She will not get away with the action she took (although I suppose what happens to her could be seen as a blessed release, given her totally incapacitated condition), and John, her husband, who turns killer to protect her secret, won't let himself get away with that either. Tony Curran didn't get away with what he did all those years ago. Bernard doesn't allow himself get away with what seems to us to be just the loving subterfuge of a grieving widower. By the end of the book, Bogdan is still getting away with his bit of taking the law into his own hands, but for how much longer?



Not everyone is a fan of the book's undeniable complexity. One reviewer complains: "The one real quibble I have is that there isn't just one killer. We have multiple deaths and multiple killers and multiple motives -- though I suppose that you could say that most of the killers were acting out of an urge to protect or avenge someone. But I prefer my mysteries a little tidier and that all the deaths are linked in a very real way." And one reader's comment goes like this: "Hi there. I’ve just finished this book and I’m sooo confused! Why did John kill Ian Ventham because Penny killed Peter Mercer?"

Personally, I don't mind things being a little convoluted. My own reservations eventually boiled down to feeling that my credulity was being stretched just a little too far with regard to the Thursday Murder Club's relations with the police, and remaining somewhat unconvinced by the utility of the first-person interludes of Joyce, delightful and perspicacious though she is.

But I'm interested in finding out what the fearsome foursome gets up to next, and how poor Stephen gets on with his memory loss, and what happens to the likeable but culpable Bogdan, and whether DCI Chris Hudson, whose struggles with food and fitness seem to mirror Osman's own, starts to feel better about life...

Such curiosity is clearly an accolade.