Over the past four years, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club novels, about a group of sleuthing pensioners, have steamrollered sales records and built up a loyal readership. But whom have those readers taken to their hearts: the author, or his characters?
As if to find out, for his fifth novel Osman has put Coopers Chase Retirement Village into storage, and presented us with a wholly new cast. He has promised to return to Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim or Ron in his next book, but in the meantime, a break may be wise. One would hate for Osman to end up feeling as chained to the Thursday Murder Club as Conan Doyle did to Sherlock Holmes, and sending the Coopers Chase gang over the Reichenbach Falls.
In any case, readers shouldn’t be prejudiced against We Solve Murders: it’s well up to Osman’s usual standard of warm wit. When he first announced the project a couple of years ago, he intimated that this was going to be a book in the Dan Brown vein. Happily, this turns out to mean not that the novel is self-important and badly written, but rather that it spans a lot of the globe in a short period, its characters racing from South Carolina to St Lucia and thence to Co Cork and Dubai.
Nevertheless, the book’s soul is an English Eden, a “perfect” village in the New Forest, home to widower and retired policeman Steve Wheeler, these days a one-man detective agency specialising in recovering lost dogs. Steve has a daughter-in-law, Amy, who is a professional bodyguard, currently working for superstar novelist Rosie D’Antonio, the world’s second best-selling crime writer after Lee Child (who, incidentally, has never risked the wrath of his fans by writing a book without Jack Reacher in it). Although Amy is meant to be protecting Rosie – a dame who makes Jackie Collins look dowdy – she soon realises she’s in danger herself, when somebody tries to frame her for a series of murders. She summons the dependable, shrewd Steve to join her as she and Rosie zigzag around the world on the trail of the real killer.
Osman has always bridled at being labelled a purveyor of “cosy crime”, pointing out that his books feature violent deaths and ruthless criminal gangs. But the shoot-outs and car chases in this novel don’t lend it grit; in fact, he makes shoot-outs and car chases seem cosy, thanks to his gently ironic style. His deadpan jokes often undercut the tension. (A taxi picks Amy up at an airport and the back window is shattered by a bullet as they leave: “I’ll not ask if it’s business or pleasure,” says the driver.) But why not? It doesn’t make the book any less compelling.