The "Thursday Murder Club" Series

It has been awhile since I have talked about books, so let's discuss the Thursday Murder Club series of novels by Richard Osman.  Osman is a British TV personality, talk show, and game show host, which I suppose makes him the Jimmy Fallon of England.  After visiting an upscale retirement community in England, Osman had the idea to write a mystery novel that would be set in just such a place.  Thus was born the fictional upscale retirement community of Cooper's Chase in the fictional town of Fairhaven in the non-fictional region of Kent in England.

In 2020, "The Thursday Murder Club" was published and became an immediate best seller and critical success in both Great Britain and the United States.  It features four main characters:

• Elizabeth, a retired operative, aka a spy, for MI5 of the British Intelligence Service
• Ron, a retired labor leader and liberal gadfly in British politics.  He was a bit of a rabble rouser back in he day, and he hasn't lost that characteristic his senior retirement years
• Ibrahim, a retired  (sensing a theme here?) psychiatrist with a penchant for being neat and orderly that tends to drive everyone else crazy
• Joyce, a widow recently moved to Cooper's Chase who, throughout the book, records her diary-like first person observations of the goings on in the story.  This keeps the narrative moving along.

Each Thursday morning, they meet in the Cooper's Chase "puzzle room", which they have reserved for their discussions of various murders, usually unsolved ones, that are in the news.  Naturally, they tend to get involved in real murders that often strike very close to home for all of them.  There is a peripheral cast of characters that enter our Club's orbit, including Kent police officers Chris and Donna, who are continually exasperated by the four seniors' interference in their official investigations, but who soon realize that they really need the help of these four old folks.

All of the stories - there have been four of them as you can see in the photo above - offer a true mystery puzzle for the reader, engaging characters, and lots and lots of wry, trenchant, and witty comments on aging, how people view older people, and how just because you get older, it doesn't mean that you have to get old, despite what society may think of you.

Steven Spielberg's production company has acquired the rights to these novels and casting has already been done:  Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, Pierce Brosnan as Ron, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim, Celia Imrie as Joyce, and Jonathan Pryce as Elizabeth's husband, Stephen.  All are excellent choices, and I can't wait to see the movie.

In the most recent novel, "The Last Devil to Die", one of the characters experiences a major life event that casts a darker shadow over the proceedings, but it is a natural turn, I believe, that Osman handles wonderfully.  The four novels have come in rapid succession, and in his acknowledgements in the last one, Osman tells us that while the Thursday Murder Club isn't going away, he is taking a bit of a break before releasing a fifth novel.  The good news is that he will be writing a different story, this one "about a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective duo", and he promises us that we will like them.  I am sure that we will.

The Grandstander bestows Three and One-Half Stars on the Thursday Murder Club series.