Cosy Crime

In​ the mid-1980s, before they moved to London and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:

Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been brought up in a similarly boxy little house in a similarly depressing part of Haywards Heath by his single teacher mother. Although his family was much better educated than mine, it was still trapped in the same sort of grim lower echelons of the British class system: baked beans for tea and the stale fug of paraffin heaters. Richard was a bit younger and, although now always faultlessly charming, I remember him as being comically grumpy. One afternoon we were sitting in Mat’s room listening to Forever Changes when Richard suddenly barged in and shouted: ‘The 1960s were rubbish and Love are rubbish!’ and then stormed out again in a cloud of stroppy, teenage righteousness.

When Anderson’s book was published, in 2018, Richard Osman was one of the faultlessly charming presenters of the achingly dull BBC teatime quiz show Pointless. He had done the rounds of comedy game shows, appearing on or presenting Have I Got News for You, QI, Taskmaster and Richard Osman’s House of Games, among others. He quit Pointless a couple of years ago, following the astounding success of his Thursday Murder Club series of novels, each volume in which, released at annual intervals since September 2020, has sold millions of copies worldwide, outselling Suede’s first album – which was owned by everyone I knew when I was fifteen – by an order of magnitude.

The Thursday Murder Club is an unofficial gathering of four residents at a luxury retirement village in the Kent countryside. Every Thursday they meet to solve cold cases. Elizabeth (who will be played by Helen Mirren in the forthcoming movie) is a retired MI6 agent, Joyce (Celia Imrie) a former nurse, Ron (Pierce Brosnan) a one-time union organiser and Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) an ex-psychiatrist. Their former careers give them a mixed bag of complementary skills to bring to the group detecting sessions. Most useful of all, for both the Thursday Murder Club and its creator, Elizabeth’s background allows her to ‘work her magic’ and call on a past acquaintance with, say, ‘access to the email correspondence of the Kent Police Forensic Service’, no questions asked – a neat way of stitching holes in the plot for a writer in a hurry.

Joyce appears in the first book as the gang’s newest recruit: Elizabeth has conscripted her to replace the club’s founder, Penny, a retired police detective, now in the late stages of dementia, whose old files provide the material for the club’s investigations. But then, as luck would have it, since cold cases are all very well but an active murder is far more juicy, ‘the builder who put this place up’, Tony Curran, is found bludgeoned to death in his kitchen, and the club sets to work solving the crime with a little help from a couple of the local plod, PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson.

Coopers Chase is a private, closed community where everyone has a secret – almost somewhere that J.G. Ballard might have dreamed up – but any reader hoping for a late capitalist dystopia seething with class resentment and sexual perversion has come to the wrong place. To get to the village you have to take the A21 out of the fictional town of Fairhaven until you ‘pass an old phone box, still working’, an unassuming yet miraculous relic from a bygone age. Narratologically, at least, it functions a bit like the Tardis or the Phantom Tollbooth, as readers are transported to a fantasy world in the heart of the Garden of England, a world without food banks or fuel poverty, without a bedroom tax or two-child benefit cap, Boris Johnson or Brexit, Donald Trump or Tommy Robinson; without a public sector staffing crisis, crumbling hospitals, collapsing schools or overcrowded prisons. Most important of all, for readers looking for an alternative reality in September 2020, it’s also a world without Covid, where old people in care homes aren’t dying alone, but are up and about, cheerfully solving crimes. Who wouldn’t want to escape to such a utopia for four hundred pages? As Joyce confides to her diary, ‘people love a murder, whatever they might say in public.’

It helps that the man who’s been murdered is a nasty piece of work: not just a builder but an ex-gangster who got into the building trade as a way to launder his drug profits. The only character nastier than Tony Curran is the owner of Coopers Chase, Ian Ventham, a prime suspect in Curran’s murder until he winds up dead himself (this isn’t really a spoiler: you can see it coming a mile off). The killings seem to be connected to plans to expand Coopers Chase, which would involve digging up a graveyard known as the Garden of Eternal Rest to make way for the new development. Almost everyone seems to have a reason to want to leave the graveyard undisturbed, which means that almost everyone has a motive for the murders. And almost everyone – not excluding members of the Thursday Murder Club – also has means and opportunity. So almost everyone’s a suspect, and almost everyone has a secret, which our heroes gradually wheedle out of them. In most cases, the not so dark secret turns out to be that the character simply loves or loved their husband or wife too much; after a while, these small revelations become predictable – refrains in a hymn to monogamy – but the big reveal at the end is both sufficiently surprising and sufficiently obvious with hindsight to satisfy readerly expectations.

The action rarely strays far from Coopers Chase, though there are a few excursions to Fairhaven and Folkestone, where, in another piece of magical thinking, a shopping street is effortlessly regenerated by the mere opening of an independent flower shop: ‘before you know it, someone down from London has spotted the boarded-up café and bought the lease,’ and one thing leads to another. Who knew urban renewal was so easy? Chris goes on a jaunt to Cyprus to interview the imprisoned father of a gangster Curran was involved with in his youth, but other members of the criminal underworld are closer to home. One of them is a character called Geoff Goff, who ‘had tried to buy Fairhaven Town FC, lost his money in a property crash, made another fortune selling stolen copper and had eventually been shot dead on a jet ski’, and whose name, it would be nice to think, is not only as English as Reggie Kray but a small nod to Osman’s brother’s old band and his own more mildly misspent youth in Haywards Heath.

‘The real function of the murder in the quiet village,’ Fredric Jameson observed in Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, ‘is for order to be felt more strongly.’ Osman takes Jameson’s rule to another level. The murders aren’t merely a temporary disruption that allows order to be restored more firmly at the end: preserving the status quo in Coopers Chase is one of the motives. And not only is the murder solved at the end, but it was not committed in vain. Joyce’s daughter, who runs a hedge fund in London, buys up the whole of Coopers Chase – not for the purposes of asset-stripping or price-gouging but to safeguard the Garden of Eternal Rest. So all’s well that ends well.

Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. It may be the literary equivalent of the ultra-processed snack foods that Chris can’t help gorging himself on, full of ‘empty calories’, but, on their own terms, it’s hard to fault a packet of cheese and onion crisps or a Wispa bar, either. (That said, the novel dishes out a fair amount of guilt, shame and admonishment over unhealthy eating – Osman, like Chris, suffers from a lifelong compulsive eating problem – which occasionally distracts from the escapism.) The sentences flow smoothly, the jokes bob gently along (Chris ‘really took the expression “plain clothes” seriously’) and the arc of the plot rises and falls as predictably and irresistibly as the tide. But ‘there’s nothing wrong with it’ is hardly enough to account for The Thursday Murder Club’s wild success, which must owe as much to external as internal factors (if there were a deducible formula for these things I wouldn’t be writing this: I’d be putting the finishing touches to volume seventeen of Death among the Crumpets). It helps that the author is one of those nice men off the telly (they’re all at it; the first volume in a new series by Jeremy Vine, set at a local radio station in Sidmouth, will hit the shelves next April). It helps that The Thursday Murder Club was published when there were people who needed a distraction from Covid and had the time and money to spend on hardback books. There’s also the question of critical mass: after a certain point, the books that everyone’s reading are the books that everyone else is reading (a rule that holds true across genres, whether it’s Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, Jack Reacher or Sally Rooney). There are layers on layers of familiarity, in other words, in both text and paratext, for readers to sink into that keep them coming back for more.

Each of the later books in the series has another layer of familiarity, of course, since we already know what to expect. But it seems that even Osman’s enthusiasm for the denizens of Coopers Chase may be waning – four Wispas in a row are more than enough to make anyone feel a little queasy. This September, instead of the fifth instalment of the Thursday Murder Club, he released the first volume in an entirely new series, We Solve Murders (Viking, £22). Well, I say ‘entirely new’, but fans hoping for more of the same won’t be disappointed for long.

On an island off the coast of South Carolina, a nice long way from the South-East of England, Rosie d’Antonio, a bestselling novelist, is in hiding from a Russian oligarch who’s unhappy about the way she portrayed him in her last book. She’s alone on the island apart from her chef (‘a former Navy SEAL called Kevin’) and her English bodyguard, Amy Wheeler, who’s on the staff of a close protection agency called Maximum Impact Solutions: ‘If someone steals from you, or someone wants to kill you, or if there is discontent among your private army, they are the people to call.’ (It’s almost as if Osman is deliberately trolling the people who thought he went too easy on hedge funds in his first novel.) Amy is the survivor of some unspecified childhood trauma: ‘I haven’t cried since I was twelve,’ she tells Rosie. ‘I learned not to.’ Rosie says ‘that sounds healthy’ and asks if she can put her in a book: ‘Five six, blue eyes, blonde, never cries, kills bad guys?’ Amy says no: ‘I don’t like publicity.’

But she is getting some bad publicity, at least in the small world of close protection agencies, since Maximum Impact Solutions’ clients keep getting killed in her vicinity. The latest victim is an Instagram fitness star who’d gone to South Carolina to promote an energy drink and wound up dead, ‘shot in the head, tied to a rope and thrown from a yacht bobbing about in the Atlantic’. He’s now ‘a corpse in a South Carolina mortuary’, and Osman – just for once – forgoes consistency for the sake of a joke about fame on social media: ‘Yes, just for a day, everybody had wanted a piece of Andrew Fairbanks. Although, after the sharks had finished with him, there weren’t that many pieces left.’

The criminal mastermind behind the murders uses an alias, François Loubet, and communicates mostly by email, taking advantage of every new technological advance to create another layer of camouflage:

Everyone’s language leaves a unique signature. A particular use of words, a rhythm, a personality. Someone could read an email, and then read a postcard you sent in 2009 and know for a fact they were sent by the same person. Science, you see. So often the enemy of the honest criminal.

That’s why ChatGPT has been such a godsend.

After writing an email, a text, anything really, you can simply run the whole thing through ChatGPT and it instantly deletes your personality. It flattens you out, irons your creases, washes you away, quirk by quirk, until you disappear.

‘ChatGPT, rewrite in the style of a friendly English gentleman, please.’ That is always Loubet’s prompt.

Loubet’s emails don’t actually read as though they were generated by AI, and I’m fairly certain the ‘style of a friendly English gentleman’ is all Osman’s own. But getting in a mention of ChatGPT adds a sheen of contemporary relevance – and if a large language model were asked to rewrite a cosy crime novel as a technothriller (or vice versa) the result might not be all that different from We Solve Murders.

It isn’t long before someone makes an attempt on Rosie’s life and she and Amy have to flee the island. They’re soon zipping from one side of the world to another by private jet more often than the residents of Coopers Chase take the minibus into Fairhaven. By which point you might think that devoted fans of the Thursday Murder Club will have given up in despair – America? Guns? Private jets? – and gone off to pre-order Murder on Line One by Jeremy Vine. But you’d be wrong, because Amy has a father-in-law, a former cop turned private detective, who lives in Axley, a ‘perfect English village’ in the New Forest, and ‘once caught an armed robber because of a Twix wrapper in a blast furnace’. His ideal job is looking for someone’s lost dog and he will do almost anything to avoid missing the quiz night at the Brass Monkey (one of Axley’s two pubs) every Wednesday. His regular Friday lunchtime drinking buddies are a former journalist, a mechanic and a widowed medieval historian, and if they remind you of the Thursday Murder Club then buy yourself a pint. Steve grudgingly agrees to help Amy out, and he’s soon as comfortable in a private jet as he is at a corner table in the Brass Monkey.

Their adventures take the trio from South Carolina to St Lucia, a vineyard in County Cork – the occasion for a throwaway joke about climate change – and Dubai, with plenty of misdirection (of all kinds) along the way, before ‘François Loubet’ is eventually caught courtesy of a giveaway tattoo – you can’t run your skin through ChatGPT. This leaves our unlikely group of heroes free to set up their new detective agency, We Solve Murders, setting us up for countless forthcoming volumes. The way the world’s heading at the moment, Osman’s fans are going to need them.