The Thursday Murder Club

I deliberately avoided this because A) it was written by a celebrity and I’m fed up with them jumping to head of the publishing queue; B) it’s about OAPs investigating a murder; and C) because of that, I thought it was a genre I’ve never been able to take to.

Cosy crime.

Cosy crime is all about people doing dreadful things to each other but it’s all right really because nobody ever actually really gets hurt – except that poor victim at the beginning – and it all winds up nicely with a nice cup of tea, or a pint in the pub, and a cuddly joke to wrap everything up. OAPs feature in them a lot!

Big mistake!

Richard Osman is a terrific writer, with a wicked sense of humour and an eye for genuinely original characters.* What’s more, his four main ones, the members of the club, are NOT defined by their age. They just happen to be old, which doesn’t mean that they can’t bring the skills they acquired in their working lives to bear on solving the mystery at hand. And it’s this that lifts the books, as funny as they are, right up out of the Cosy Crime bin. 

I’m kicking myself for avoiding such a good read for so long.

*My favourite is Elizabeth, ex-MI5 (?) agent, with a wealth of contacts in the shadow world of spies and an absolute inability to be stopped from doing anything she decides to do. Closely followed by Bogdan, implacable Pole, excellent builder, and completely unfazed by whatever corpse happens to pop up from time to time, or anything outside the law Elizabeth asks him to do.