We Solve Murders with Richard Osman and the Book Group

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As a boy I read a lot of British crime fiction. When I was 13, I put a brown paper cover on the conveniently-sized novel I had to read for school (Booran by M. J. Unwin – trigger warning for 1950s colonialist attitudes), then transferred the cover to book after book by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh over the course of the year. My parents were impressed that I appeared to read Booran so many times. For my father’s birthday in April, I gave him a pile of ten pre-read paperbacks, and for Christmas another twenty. It didn’t occur to me that my pretence might be transparent.

This means that on the cusp of teenagehood I read enough ‘cosy mysteries’ to last a lifetime. I can still enjoy the odd Agatha Christie on TV or at the movies, but I have no desire to reread the books. Not even The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Reading We Solve Murders felt like an enforced return to that territory. It’s a cosy mystery mixed with a comedy action thriller, written with amiable wit in elegant prose, with a plot that features many exotic locales, influencers being murdered and a villain who uses generative AI to disguise their identity. (Incidentally, it’s a bold move in a genre novel written in the style of a friendly English gentleman to have the villain’s chapters preceded by a Chat GPT prompt to render text ‘in the style of a friendly English gentleman’. I can’t be the only one to think Richard Osman is having a little joke at his own expense.)

This is explicitly intended to be the first book in a series, like Osman’s first series The Thursday Murder Club, and we can probably expect a TV movie, hopefully less mediocre than the recent TMC movie. There are moments where I would laugh if I saw them on screen. Just one example, from page 244. Amy, the hard-boiled heroine is talking to Nelson, who may be about to kill her:

‘It’s just you don’t seem like an assassin?’ says Amy. ‘And I know a lot of assassins.’
‘I am not an assassin,’ says Nelson, his tone very reasonable. ‘I’m just, you know, a regular criminal and politician.’

Boom tish!

The story rattles along at a good pace. The characters are an amusingly diverse bunch of types. There are twists and turns and plenty of travel. It is what it is and it’s terrific at it. I was entertained, but it took many more hours than a movie would.

After the meeting: It was a small group, not for lack of interest in the book but because of family birthdays, travel commitments, viruses – and our current policy of sticking to our designated dates no matter what. Not for us the practice of that group who don’t decide on a date until everyone has read the book. Still, the four of us enjoyed each other’s company until well after my watch announced it was my bedtime. Among many things, including the colourful career of one us, we did talk about the book.

One chap put it nicely: Richard Osman works in popular entertainment, having devised and presented a number of successful game shows. He knows what works with audiences and has brought that knowledge to the new (to him) field of novel writing. I’m pretty sure someone said that there’s a big overlap between his target readership and people who go on cruises. (We had an interesting digression into the sociology of cruise ships.)

When it was observed that when Australian comics try to replicate those British game shows they don’t always come up with a winner, we realised that their Englishness is at the heart of their charm. And that is also true of this book. Our one English-born and bred group member spoke eloquently on this point. There’s a character who can be relied on to give details of which roads he takes to get from one village to another: this, our group member assured us, has the ring of authenticity. The book is firmly rooted in a particular place – a village in the New Forest. Another chap who lived for some time in an English village testified that, just as in the book, in a two-pub village most pub-goers were loyal to one establishment and wouldn’t dream of visiting the other. What I read as cosiness is also a celebration of something distinctively English. And they did say ‘English’, not ‘British’.

Someone asked, ‘Did you laugh?’ No one said yes. On the page, the book is often funny but not laugh-out-loud. We shared stories of books that did make us laugh out loud – a Georgette Heyer regency romance and the The Traveller’s Tool by Sir Les Patterson were mentioned. (There was another interesting digression about Barrie Humphries.) But we had a sense that a movie, or preferably a TV series, might be on the way.

One of the non-attendees summed it up well in a WhatsApp post: ‘No thinking, just chorkling. The goodies win / the baddies get their come-uppence. Very English.’

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The Book Group met, and I wrote this blog post, on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation as the days are growing suddenly warmer. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.