Richard Osman’s meteoric rise
OK. I give in. I’ve resisted buying his books for long enough. But Richard Osman is hitting all sorts of award lists and records these days so I might as well see what all the fuss is about. It was this kind of resigned approach I took to JK Rowling back in the pre-Harry-Potter-worldwide-crazy days … and look what happened there!
From what I’ve read and seen about Osman’s debut series, it has shades of Alexander McCall Smith‘s gentle humour. Poking fun at life’s idiosyncrasies without malice, but revealing a keen understanding of the human psyche and behaviour. It follows a group of elderly amateur sleuths in a sleepy retirement village in rural Kent who form a club to investigate unsolved murders.
In his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, a rich but unscrupulous local builder cum property developer, Tony Curran, is actually bludgeoned to death in his own vast kitchen in real time on their doorstep. A photograph of three men is left on the work surface nearby. The intrepid TTMC gang use every wile known to them, and a few new ones too, to infiltrate the police squad dealing with this crime. And then someone else is killed with an injection of fentanyl in full view of many people – including TTMC – during a sit-down protest against the digging up of graves in which nuns are buried in The Garden of Eternal Rest. This time the victim is someone no one likes – Ian Ventham – a unscrupulous avaricious man bent on owning the land on which the graves are situated.
Much as he rather begrudgingly likes them, the elderly sleuths stretch the patience of Inspector Chris Hudson when they keep quiet about the discovery of a skeleton buried illegally in the nuns’ cemetery; and again when they send bones away for forensic analysis. They take risks, interview people they suspect, gain information by nefarious means. All under the guise of naive innocence and old age.
Though the intrepid quartet have an air of elderly eccentricity, even scattiness, in reality they represent a combined force to be reckoned with and seem to find an answer to everything. Somehow they manage to get information often before the professionals are asking the questions. But they are essentially engaging and friendly and beautifully hospitable and friendly. One can’t help but root for them.
One example from the brightest spark in the gang, Elizabeth, a former MI5 agent, gives a flavour:
‘You don’t know who dug up the body and you won’t hear the answer from any of us,’ continues Elizabeth. ‘You don’t know who took the bones away for analysis and you won’t hear that from us either. At the end of the evening you might try and explain to the CPS that four people in their seventies and eighties have failed to report digging up a body. For what reason? With what evidence, other than the inadmissible confession you’ve taken from us this evening? And with four suspects, all of whom are quite happy to go to court, smile happily and pretend to mistake the judge for their granddaughter and ask why she doesn’t visit often enough. The whole process is difficult, costly and time-consuming, and achieves nothing. No one is going to prison, no one is getting a fine, no one’s even going to be picking litter by the roadside.’
The prose is witty, charming, quirky. Pure escapism and just what I needed. And the plot unravels satisfactorily through many a twist and perfectly civilised shenanigan.
Richard Osman’s background as a comedian as well as TV presenter, is not far from the surface, and I could well imagine him chortling as he conjured up these crazy scenes and endearing characters. What I didn’t know is that he has such poor eyesight that he has to learn his scripts off by heart because it’s too difficult to read the autocue. But his stellar career belies his diagnosis and I so admire his determination and spirit launching into yet another successful career change.
No Second Chance The Bullet that Missed