- The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman. Viking. $32.99.
British television producer and presenter Richard Osman has been a lifelong reader of crime fiction. The Thursday Murder Club is his debut contribution to the genre and the first of a series centred around four eclectic characters, all approaching 80, who live in a retirement village. It was reputedly acquired by Penguin/Viking in the biggest debut novel deal of the decade.
The Thursday Murder Club meets, obviously every Thursday, in the Jigsaw Room at Coopers Chase Retirement Village, built on the site of a former convent in the heart of the Kentish Weald. Coopers Chase is "Britain's First Luxury Retirement Village" complete with a "contemporary upscale restaurant". It has 300 residents, all over 65, for whom "the Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and repeat prescriptions every time they pass over the cattle grid".
The formidable Elizabeth, who has a mysterious past in some aspect of intelligence, formed the club with her friend Penny Gray, who was a police inspector. The aim was to solve cold cases, "a few glasses of wine and a mystery. Very social, but also gory . . . good fun." They were joined by psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and Ron Ritchie, an ex-trade union activist.
Penny, after a series of strokes, is now in palliative care and her place has been taken by Joyce, an ex-nurse, "a small white-haired woman in a lavender blouse and mauve cardigan", but described by Elizabeth as an organiser, "the type who 'gets things done'".
The unscrupulous, greedy owner of Coopers Chase, Ian Ventham, intends to extend the retirement village and remove the cemetery of the old convent to do so. When Ventham is murdered in the middle of a rowdy protest by the residents, the four members of the club realise they have an actual murder to investigate.
Film rights for The Thursday Murder Club have already been acquired by Amblin Partners, the film and television production company led by Steven Speilberg. It's not surprising, given the targeted demographic of the novel, that the film will be directed by Ol Parker, the director of the popular Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. It's inevitable that, as you read, you're assembling the cast in your mind.
There is no doubt that this is a cleverly constructed crowd-pleaser of a novel for readers of a certain age and it's not surprising that it is already the fastest selling debut crime novel in Britain ever.
However, I have real reservations about The Thursday Murder Club, because, at this time of Covid-19, it's difficult to recognise a retirement village as a utopian setting full of irrepressible elderly residents, happily confronting authority and convincing the police that their co-operation is essential to solve the crime.