Richard Osman
The Bullet that Missed
As you know, I don’t like to judge an author on one book – especially perhaps one that has catapulted into the bestselling lists. So, I bought two of Richard Osman‘s novels and have just finished reading the second one.
The Bullet that Missed (clever title, by the way) features The Thursday Murder Club (TTMC) again. Once a week this gang of four pensioners in a retirement village, meet to look over old police files and try to solve murders, although their remit is decidedly elastic. This time they’re together investigating the unsolved Bethany Waites case: a brilliant young reporter who vanished while investigating a massive VAT fraud relating to the import and export of mobile phones. What is already known?
She was murdered almost ten years ago
She had got too close to the secrets of the fraudsters.
Her car plunged off of Shakespeare’s Cliff near Dover, late at night.
Someone had been in the car with her just beforehand.
There were ambiguous messages on her phone.
She left a note for a fellow reporter: I don’t say this often enough, but thank you.
Well … the police may deem it murder, but Elizabeth Best of THMC knows you should never trust a murder without a corpse. And she should know: she has faked a few deaths of her own over the years as an MI5 agent. And Bethany’s body has never been found.
Fast forward ten years and Elizabeth is suddenly being bombarded with threatening texts in her present real life. She’s wary, but then, uncharacteristically, makes a big mistake: she goes for a walk with her husband at the same time along the same route every day, giving her enemy an open invitation to strike her down and abduct her. And that someone wants her to go on a deadly mission: to kill a man she knew years ago, or her best friend Joyce Meadowcroft’s life will be forfeit. Elizabeth’s husband Stephen, abducted with her, is suffering from dementia, and at the stage of being aware something isn’t right but not sure what it is. He has flashes of perceptiveness however, and now, rare and expensive books in the library where his abductor took them, jog his memory and help him to identify Elizabeth’s tormentor. She links up with an old ally, a former KGB colonel, Viktor, the very man she was instructed to kill, and they combine skills to attempt to outwit their common foe, a money-laundering Swede nicknamed The Viking. He is closing in but hasn’t bargained on their disarming friendliness or cunning.
Joyce Meadowcroft meanwhile, unaware that her life is in Elizabeth’s hands, is beavering away at the cold case and involves her lawyer daughter to dig deeper into the facts relating to the murder of Bethany Waites. A gathering collection of anomalies move thinking on. Then one of the the key players in the case is murdered in prison. A fellow inmate, a notorious drug baron, manipulates the elderly sleuths and plots to kill one of them (Ron) and his associate once she is released. The past and present become inextricably tangled.
The introduction of new characters such as the KGB colonel is definitely a brilliant move in the machinations of TTMC. Convoluted layers of intrigue unravel, revealing different facets of the truth or lies according to the differing perspectives. Master-crooks get involved, enemies become allies, confessions become red herrings, bodies keep turning up, big money creates temptations, cryptocurrency offers new opportunities, careers are made and broken in an instant. Osman is setting things up to weave ever more complex stories. And therein lies the test for a writer – keeping all the threads perfectly woven and unbroken, maintaining the tension without unduly repeating the detail or pattern. Methinks this mighty mind will be well up to the challenge.
Overall assessment after two books? Much more depth and complexity than I first thought. Rather like the deceptively simple four main elderly characters in TTMC. Still not books I would just have to hang on to, and I’m not racing to get the others in the series, but I’m looking for a good outlet for these two – someone looking for light-hearted easy-read diversion from life’s stresses.
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.
A matter of personal preference
With hundreds of books on my shelves awaiting their turn I’ve been resisting purchasing new ones but I keep hearing about Richard Osman‘s novels being big-time bestsellers, so when I saw The Man Who Died Twice advertised as even better than its debut predecessor, I bought it hoping it would give me a flavour of his style.
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely septuagenarians investigate a case of stolen diamonds, drug heists, and a ruthless murderer. Hmmm. OK, Osman has a nice line in gentle humour. His elderly sleuths remind me of Alexander McCall’s No 1 Detective Agency: you can’t help warming to them. Their improbable success is reminiscent of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown: irritatingly poking their noses in where the police fail to tread, and making sense of a crime scene which has baffled the responsible adults.
As the critics say, offbeat, warm, full of heart, with a not too shabby body count. An undemanding diversion. Gave me a welcome break from some serious contemplation of weighty ethical issues. And maybe even a different angle on just how people with widely disparate opinions can, in spite of the odds, manage to work together. Better get back to the study …