Age is just a number

Famous Five. Secret Seven. Five Findouters and Dog. And my homegrown Pandav Goenda (Shashthipada Chattopadhyay’s take on Famous Five). Also Scooby Do and his friends (cartoons were just as much part of my childhood as Enid Blyton). Young sleuths (and their dogs) outsmarting, and sometimes working with, cops to solve local mysteries. There’s adventure, thrill, unravelling of riddles, and unmasking of crooks.

Richard Osman flips the trope on its head. His Thursday Murder Club, which made its debut in September 2020, comprises four pensioners teaming up to solve crime.

There have been three books in two years. And not one has disappointed.

‘The Thursday Murder Club’ begins with Joyce moving into the retirement community where the other three live. The Thursday Murder Club members meet every week to discuss, and possibly solve, cold cases. One of them has recently become bed-ridden and left the club, and Joyce joins Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim to make up the quartet.

The cases get progressively complex in subsequent books. Where ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ deals with a local murder, the second, ‘The Man Who Died Twice’, goes up a notch with more cunning adversaries, heists and diamonds; the third book, ‘The Bullet That Missed’, with its ‘kill-or-be-killed’ trope, pushes our sleuths further.

It's fun to read about geriatric detectives who never let age define them. And Osman seems like a master in weaving in humour among the comparatively darker themes of murder and general mayhem.

The author delivers on his promise of putting out book after book, and I can’t wait for the Thursday Murder Club’s next adventure.

Osman also posts a lot about his cat on Instagram. I follow him. I follow an unusually high number of crime fiction authors.