I confess to being a lazy reader of murder mysteries. What I mean by that is that I am comfortable with learning whodunnit when the author is ready to let me know, and not before. Of course I spot the red herrings, the introduction of what appears to be a peripheral character who is actually a suspect, and so on. But I know that a well-written book – and Richard Osman is an author who takes care with his plot construction – will provide just enough information to make the resolution of the mystery almost impossible to guess in advance, but to appear fairly obvious once it is revealed. I don’t see mysteries as a battle between me and the author to prove who is the cleverest – the contract between us is for the author to entertain the reader, challenge them a little bit, maybe even educate them, while not making them feel inferior or stupid, and never ever cheating (untraceable poisons and the like).
I say this because I worked out ‘whodunnit’ in this, the fourth of Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, fairly early on – avoiding spoilers, it is someone who falls into the category I describe above – and that the mystery we are presented with isn’t the real mystery after all. I explain this a little more in the section marked ‘SPOILERS’ below. But that doesn’t mean the novel wasn’t enjoyable. It is always pleasant to spend time with the club members, who Osman stubbornly refuses to kill off (despite my clear prediction in my review of the original novel in the series that he would do so early on in book two). If anything he has expanded his cast of characters, with other residents of Coopers Chase being introduced into the crime-fighting team, including an older person who knows how to use computers (bit of a patronising portrait I thought – not all old people are clueless when it comes to technology) and another who is the victim of a pretty transparent romance fraud. The relationships of the wider cast, police officers Chris and Donna, builder Bogdan and drug dealer Connie all make little or no progress – there is talk of an engagement, but nothing more. If you haven’t read the previous books in the series, or like me have a poor memory for novels read without the full beam of your attention, then you might struggle a little working out who is who – backstories are very lightly sketched.
I also struggled with the subplot involving former spy Elizabeth and her husband Stephen, as they face his advancing dementia. Again I can’t really write at any length about this thread of the novel without spoilers, so I again refer you to the text below.
As to what happens, well if you have read one Thursday Murder Club you have really read them all. Someone is murdered, other crimes follow, and the four pensioners solve the crime using unorthodox means and a considerable amount of tea and cake. Stereotypes about old age are both challenged and used as a source of comedy, particularly through the well-meaning character of Joyce, who is endlessly curious but a little adrift in the modern world.
It’s not uncommon for authors of long-running series to lose steam – Terry Pratchett being the obvious exception to the rule. I am sure there will be more Thursday Murder Club novels, but in an implicit acknowledgement of the diminishing returns from another outing of feisty pensioners, Osman is writing about a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective duo, which sounds sufficiently different to be interesting while in the same wheelhouse. Looking forward to it.
SPOILERS ALERT
Don’t read this unless you have already read The Last Devil to Die or have no intention to do so. Early on we are told that the heroin which goes missing is being carried in a box. The box is not described in any detail, but there’s enough to pique a curious reader’s interest – why smuggle heroin in a box? I suspected this was an example of the wheel-barrow theft operation story (A man works on an building site. Every day he walks off the site with a wheelbarrow full of sand. The security guards are suspicious and look through the sand trying to find if he was stealing anything. When he retired a guard asked him “Alright, how did you do it? We knew you were stealing, what did you hide in the sand?” “I wasn’t hiding anything in the sand, I was stealing the wheelbarrows.”) The box is described as ‘a small terracotta box, made to look old, like a tatty piece of garden junk…a boring ornament’. The obvious incongruity of using a terracotta box to smuggle heroin caught my attention at the time, and while the author works hard to downplay its significance, I was reasonably confident that we hadn’t heard the last of that box.
I am not claiming this as an example of my powers of penetration, simply suggesting that the puzzles in this novel weren’t that hard to solve. Actually, worse than that, they were pretty obvious.
I found the Elizabeth and Stephen subplot difficult, if not even a little distressing. Stephen’s dementia is accelerating, and Elizabeth is slowly realising she is unable to cope with him. She is unable to leave him alone for any length of time without him putting himself in danger. He is aware at moments of his decline – at others he barely recognises her. So to cut a long story short, he kills himself with her assistance. This is presented to us as a brave choice, but it felt like patient assisted suicide to me (because it was) which is illegal. Elizabeth is not one to care about being on the right side of the law, but anyone making a case for euthanasia simply because someone’s memory is failing (Stephen is in no physical pain or discomfort, and while obviously upset at his increasing dementia does not spend his days in acute distress) will find little support from me. It left a bad taste. Osman has given old people some dignity in these novels, revealing their strength and resourcefulness and celebrating the positive aspects of old age, but here, for me, he drops the ball badly. Old people lose their memories, but don’t deserve to die for it. He takes care to tell us that Stephen takes his own life, and is fully aware of the choice he is making, but glosses over the illegality and subterfuge required to achieve this end without prosecution.
Osman also uses Stephen’s dementia as a key point in the main plot – Stephen is the only person alive who knows where the missing heroin that everyone is being killed for is hidden, and somehow through the fog of his dementia manages to tell Elizabeth, albeit in a confused way. Because that’s what people suffering from dementia do, isn’t it – they solve crimes and location hidden contraband. This was clumsy and a bit distasteful if I’m honest.
The Reading Bug 