Richard Osman’s Last Devil to Die and the Bullet that Missed

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
and The Bullet That Missed
(both audiobooks from Audible, performed by Fiona Shaw)

These are numbers 3 and 4 of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries, in which a group of friends an English retirement village meet of a Thursday, between the Chess Club and the Yoga Class, to solve murders. It’s like a blend of Miss Marple and the Five Finder-outers, both of which I loved with a passion, one when I was about nine years old and the other three or four years later. Even though these stories involve nastier crimes than Agatha Christie’s ancient sleuth or Enid Blyton’s ingenious children, listening to them on long car rides transported me back to those earlier pleasures.

We listened to them out of order. The Last Devil‘s first murder victim (there are several in each book) is alive and well in The Bullet, and though we understand why the club members want to solve his murder – he was a friend of one of them – it was only on reading the earlier book that we understood the nature of the friendship, and realised that what seems an improbable plot twist is actually completely in character. On the other hand, it was fun to see where Book 3 includes hints and foreshadowings of Book 4’s revelations.

Richard Osman appears regularly on UK panel shows. Pointless, the game show he developed and co-presented, was a pleasure to watch, and – to judge by the irritating quality of its Australian version – its success owed a lot to his self-deprecatory erudition. Those qualities shine through in these stories. We don’t really care about the vast quantities of lost heroin in Book 4 or the massive financial fraud in Book 3 except as MacGuffins. What matters is the way this group of people who couldn’t be more different from one another are thrown together by the accident of old age and become strong friends. There’s a former trade union official, an almost retired psychiatrist, a former spy who was high up in MI6, and Joyce who is endlessly interested in what’s cheap at the supermarket, what’s happening in her regular TV shows, the comings and goings of the village.

There are romances among the septuagenarians and especially in Book 4 some finely judged moments of pathos. Just as the reader thinks the present adventures are enough to sustain the interest, there are poignant excursions into the characters’ back stories – and one realises that the basic reality of being old is that one has a past.

Fiona Shaw’s reading – performance really – of both books is wonderful, and at the end of Book 4 she and Richard Osman have a conversation that sheds light both on his intentions in writing the books and her approach to reading more than 10 hours of text incorporating the voices of something like a dozen characters.