Richard Osman again. Published in 2023. The fourth in his series about geriatric sleuths Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim.

Unusually for me (I tend to leave ages between parts of series, for better or for worse), this comes hot on the heels of The Bullet That Missed, the third instalment of the saga. Why? Because they're both Real Books, and Together Books, and we both want to get through them (so we can donate them) before we set off on our travels...

The third in the series, you may recall, I was a little ho-hum about. This one I thought was memorably good.



No spoilers, but there are two things that work very well.

The first is the main crime plot. It's very twisty, as Osman likes to be (and no, I didn't guess...). But whereas the action in The Bullet That Missed went haring off in so many directions that you felt not all of them were totally under control, this was somehow much more streamlined. There's also a subplot involving internet scams, which might serve a useful educational purpose (although the scammee in this case still doesn't seem to have learnt his lesson).

The second very successful element is Osman's treatment of dementia. This theme has been building over the course of the series. Elizabeth's husband, Stephen, has been struggling to keep himself together, and Elizabeth has worked to hide his plight from everyone except the retirement complex's all-round-useful Bogdan, who plays chess with him. When, in the last book, Stephen suddenly can't remember how to play chess, or even that he had played chess, you know that a few more chunks of the riverbank have washed downstream.

In this book, Stephen worsens. I won't say any more, but I will tell you I shed tears. My mother suffered from dementia. I have several friends who have dealt, or are dealing, with relatives stricken by dementia. I know with bitter clarity what a tragedy it is for all concerned.

Osman conjures up a moving description of Stephen's fuzzy world, as he roams around his home, not knowing quite how everything fits together: "He knows the sofa, and there is safety in that..."

Stephen is lucky in that he has conserved a fundamental belief that he is loved: "Whatever else is going on, and something most definitely is, Stephen is loved and Stephen is safe." Sadly, not everyone is privileged to share this experience. Many dementia patients go through long periods of thinking those nearest to them are the enemy, to be warded off, definitely not to be trusted. Whether realistically or not, Stephen retains his trust in Elizabeth, and in the others around him. There aren't many silver linings in this accursed disease, but surely that must be one of them, for those lucky enough to seize it.

Stephen had the wisdom, before he became too lost to make any decisions, to document his insistence that Elizabeth should not be the one to care for him. A wise move.

Osman does all this very well. And it forms a genuinely gut-wrenching background to the crime stories playing out on centre stage.


Yogyakarta, 2013/14. Life in a different sort of community

Of course, there's still plenty of humour. And as always, a lot of it is built on incongruity. Examples:

-- "[Heroin dealer] Mitch [who has just attacked Ron] looks at his watch. 'My son's got street dance before school, but you've got me till then.'"
-- Joyce describing how the crew tells the drug kingpins that the police have their heroin: "You could tell that Mitch was devastated (I'm not sure how much he enjoys his job)."
-- Donna arrests someone on Christmas Day for "soliciting a sexual act" (as the legal terminology puts it). "'At Christmas,' says Joyce, shaking her head. 'You'd think people would be too full.'"

In another exchange between the drug dealers, we get this:

"'Nice place, Luca,' he says. 'Where are we?'
"'Under an IKEA,' says Luca. 'If you can believe that?'
"Well, that certainly explains why all the guns are on wooden shelving units."

But there's also plenty of more serious life wisdom strewn throughout the pages. Examples:

-- "What is it about Christmas? Everything that's wrong seems worse, and everything that's right seems better."
-- Elizabeth observing students: "How beautiful they are, though how ugly some of them will feel."
-- And that challenge of galloping years: "The urgency of old age. There's nothing that makes you feel more alive than the certainty of death."

Yes, I guess it's corny. But there's a gentleness and a compassion about the observation that you can't help but warm to.

The book, like all the others, is quintessentially British. It opens at Christmas, so M&S vouchers abound. We have references to Kate Atkinson and Wolf Hall (I'm obviously reading the right things). And when there's a gathering: "The nibbles were mainly Aldi, but with a sprinkling of Waitrose for effect."



Born in 1970, he's a youngster, Richard Osman (there's a bit of a bio here). But he experienced his grandparents' dementia; his mother lives in a retirement village; and he has a genuine zeal for seeing the over-70s better represented (quantitively and qualitatively) in mainstream media.

Reading two elder-focused novels back to back certainly gave me pause for thought. Our sleuths are in their late 70s. I'm not there yet, and I still can't truly manage to see myself as old. And yet it's only 14 years till I'm 80. (If I live that long, of course, which I increasingly think is unlikely.) Looking back 14 years takes me to the period just before I handed in a first draft of my PhD to my supervisors, and we headed off to Sri Lanka while they were reading it. That feels like minutes ago. Those 14 years have gone in a flash... So the next 14, if I have them...? I'm already 10 per cent older than I was when I retired... Time is moving inexorably onwards. There's no room for complacency...