- Title: The Thursday Murder Club
- Author: Richard Osman
- # of Pages: 377
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?
It’s practically impossible to walk into a bookstore in London without running into a Thursday Murder Club novel within the first five minutes. The first book in the series has been continuously reserved at my library for over six months. When a friend told me I could borrow her copy over the holidays, I took her up on the offer.
As a beach read, The Thursday Murder Club is fantastic. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are fun. In a world where hitting forty means you’re on the brink of death, the eighty year old main character of the Thursday Murder Club is a woman who’s just getting started. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are intelligent, funny and extremely likeable. Joyce’s comments on Waitrose lamb mixed with Lidl rice because “you honestly don’t notice the difference with the basics” made me laugh out loud. Personally, I enjoyed the flip-flop between Joyce’s diary and the third-person narrative, and the writing reminded me of Jonas Jonasson (The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared): a mix of deadpan humour, sarcasm and wit. and The standard old-people jokes are still there, such as struggling with Skype or learning about “apps”, but instead of being told at their expense, they’re there to remind us that eighty year-olds can still be curious, and brave and adventurous, i.e. exciting protagonists, even without knowing some of that “trivial” stuff, that “even twelve year olds” these days understand. When Joyce learns about Tinder, she writes: “At least I have discovered that online dating is not for me. You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.”
As a murder mystery, The Thursday Murder Club falls short. While the dynamics between the police and the club, which consist of the former reluctantly cooperating with and then eventually affectionately succumbing to, are actually quite wholesome, no one seems to be doing any detective work at all. The Thursday Murder Club’s investigations amount to the secretive Elizabeth – “I’m not supposed to say what Elizabeth used to do for a living, even though she does go on about it herself at times” – knowing a lot of people in the right places who owe her a lot of favours due to casually referenced tales of interrogations in East Germany, a safe house in Poland and the like. In some places she explains these plot twists to the rest of the gang, and thus to us, and in others we’re expected to take a leap of faith. Unfortunately, leaps of faith generally don’t sit well with investigative novels. In the beginning I tried following along, at some point everyone, including the most sidekick of sidekicks, sounded suspicious, and by the end I just wanted it to end because my head hurt and I had no idea what was going on.
When I sat down to write this review, my premise was this: I liked it, I’m happy I read it, and I think it’s enough Thursday Murder Club for me. However, I just checked the Goodreads reviews for the rest of the series, and people seem to think the second book is just as funny but makes a lot more sense. Next Christmas?
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