The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Thursday Murder Club, #1) * * *
I really wanted to love this book. It is incredibly popular, the premise sounded exactly like the sort of thing I should enjoy, and I generally like mysteries with unusual amateur detectives. Sadly, I ended up giving it three stars. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, and I wouldn’t call it a bad book at all. It was perfectly serviceable. I just didn’t find it particularly compelling, and for a murder mystery, I found it far too slow.
The story takes place at Cooper’s Chase, a retirement village where four residents, Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, meet every Thursday to investigate old unsolved murders. They are a nicely varied group with very distinct personalities, and I never had trouble remembering who was who. When an actual murder happens practically on their doorstep, they suddenly have the opportunity to investigate a live case rather than going through old police files.
On paper, I should have loved this.
The problem is that the murder mystery frequently feels like it is taking a backseat to everything else. There is a lot of the characters simply living their lives, talking to people, thinking about their pasts, dealing with their families and contemplating old age and death. They are solving a murder, yes, but it often feels as though they are living their lives and, by the way, there happens to be a murder somewhere in there too. If you love these characters and enjoy spending time with them, I can absolutely see why that would be part of the appeal. Unfortunately, while I thought they were perfectly well written, I didn’t particularly like any of them. I didn’t dislike them either. I just never became attached enough to them for all that everyday material to hold my attention.
I think that is where my expectations and the book fundamentally parted ways. I went into
The Thursday Murder Club expecting a murder mystery about elderly amateur detectives. What I got felt much more like a character driven novel about ageing, mortality, regret and the choices people make toward the end of their lives, with a murder mystery woven through it. Death is everywhere in this book, and not simply because people are being murdered. There is a lot of reflection on approaching the end of life, on mistakes people made decades earlier, on things that can no longer be changed, and on deciding when and how your own life should end.
And, somewhat unexpectedly, there is a lot of suicide. I can think of three separate suicides in the story, which is enough that I would genuinely give a content warning for it. If suicide is something you prefer not to read about, this probably isn’t the cosy little murder mystery its premise might make you expect. Some of those deaths made more sense to me than others, and one in particular frustrated me because I understood what the character was trying to accomplish, but the decision itself still seemed spectacularly unnecessary. Overall, the amount of suicide contributed to the feeling that this is really a book about death and approaching death rather than primarily a book about solving one particular murder.
The mystery itself also became more convoluted than I thought it needed to be. There are a lot of people, old secrets and different threads feeding into the eventual explanation. At one point I thought I had figured out where the story was going, and technically I was both wrong and sort of right, which is actually quite clever. There are interesting ideas and reveals here. My problem was never that nothing interesting happened. My problem was that those interesting things were surrounded by so much material that moved at a pace I simply couldn’t stay engaged with.
I listened to the audiobook, which runs for more than twelve hours in the edition I had, and I found myself zoning out repeatedly. I’ve recently started noticing a pattern in my own reading: when a straightforward murder mystery gets much beyond about nine hours in audio, there is a good chance I’m going to find it bloated. Obviously that isn’t an objective rule for how long mysteries are allowed to be. It is becoming a fairly reliable rule for me, though. Once a mystery gets that long, it often means more red herrings, more secondary characters, more subplots and more time spent on what everyone is doing when they aren’t actually investigating the mystery. Sometimes that works because I love the characters enough that I want to spend all that extra time with them. Here, I didn’t.
And I don’t think the age of the protagonists itself is the problem. Murder, She Wrote is one of my favourite television shows, and Jessica Fletcher is hardly a twenty year old action hero. Those stories can be slow and cosy too, but the mystery remains the engine pulling everything else along. With The Thursday Murder Club, I felt as though the mystery was sitting in the passenger seat while the characters’ lives were driving.
That may also explain why the movie didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I had already seen the adaptation, but I remembered surprisingly little of it by the time I read the book. Now I suspect I probably had the same problem with the film that I had with the novel. There are plenty of things happening, but the particular rhythm of the story just doesn’t hold my attention.
So The Thursday Murder Club gets three stars from me. Three stars is not a bad rating. This is a perfectly competent book with distinctive characters, some clever reveals and a lot more thematic weight than the cute premise might initially suggest. I can also understand why people who fall in love with Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron would want to keep returning to Cooper’s Chase and spending time with them. I simply didn’t.
If you want a character driven story about older people dealing with mortality, regrets, friendship and the end of life, with a mystery running through it, I can see The Thursday Murder Club working extremely well. If you are primarily looking for a tightly plotted murder mystery that keeps you guessing and keeps the investigation moving, I think there are much stronger choices.
For me, the Thursday Murder Club can carry on meeting every Thursday without me. I’m glad I met them once, but I don’t need to join them again.
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