Original crime

Detective fiction is not dead. Two recent crime novels have been bestsellers. And both deserve to be

In a week or two, God willing, about 500 books will arrive on my doorstep. They’re mine; I last saw them in New York over a year ago. They arrived in England last August but I have had nowhere to put them, so they’ve been sitting in a Pickfords facility somewhere in Suffolk. I shall soon summon them to my new home. That’s if the vendors and I complete as planned in a few days’ time.

Still, I’ve had books to hand. I have read, among other things, two very enjoyable vintage crime stories; I posted about these some weeks ago (Crime on the Side, May 19). Now I’ve read two more recent bestsellers. Both have been highly praised and I was afraid I’d be disappointed. I wasn’t.

First, The Thursday Murder Club.

So who’s the sleuth?
In any good crime story, there is a detective or amateur sleuth the reader can accompany on the journey of detection. The stronger their identity, the stranger their quirks, the more likely it is we’ll be back to keep them company in the next story as well. Agatha Christie of course had Poirot; Dorothy Sayers had the sometimes-annoying Lord Peter Wimsey. C. Day Lewis had his eccentric amateur, Nigel Strangeways. A writer can buck that convention. But they’d better know what they are doing.

Richard Osman does. Instead of a detective as such, his very successful The Thursday Murder Club (2020) was the first of (so far) three books to feature an ill-assorted group of four friends, all in their 70s and 80s, living in a retirement village and trying to solve cold cases. It’s a hobby. Then a dodgy local builder is dispatched in his kitchen with a heavy blow to the head. Suddenly it isn’t a hobby any more. And although there are two police detectives, they’re there mainly for human interest and as a foil for the sleuthing seniors. Meanwhile, there’s another death – and then a third and a fourth, both long ago, come to light. Are they connected, or are they muddying the waters?

As a detective novel, The Thursday Murder Club does have some flaws. Now and then it’s hard to suspend disbelief; the fearsome four are sometimes just a bit too lucky, and the two “real” detectives a little too complicit in their activities (and a police investigation of a murder like this would be a lot more professional). The plot is quite complicated, and I think most crime fans would want to have more clues that would help them join in with the investigation in their heads, and let them build their own theories. At the end, when we do find out who did dispatch the dodgy builder, it’s a surprise. It should be, of course; but I’d have liked more clues that would have made me kick myself for not spotting them.  

And yet it all sort of works, because – like some of the best crime stories – this book has features that transcend its qualities purely as detective fiction. For a start, it’s also got a strong sense of time and place. There’s the retirement community itself, and its setting. It’s been built around a former convent, with a clinic, and a chapel that has not been deconsecrated; and it’s set on a verdant hillside that seems to be near Robertsbridge in Kent – a beautiful part of the country. (The nearest shopping centre is called Fairhaven but seems to be Hastings in disguise.) The residents are not just nice old dears; some of them did a lot with their lives and are still people to be reckoned with.

There is also a frankness about dementia and ageing. Osman understands that older people actually confront this more than the young realise. They baldly accept the brutal fact that they don’t know how long they’ll be around, or how long they’ll be compos mentis. Amongst Osman’s characters, for instance, there is Elizabeth; every day she opens her diary at a date two weeks hence and writes a question, the answer to which she knows today – but will she then? If she doesn’t, it’ll be a warning that her grasp is weakening.  Her husband Stephen has already crossed the threshold and she does not want to lose him to full-time care, but knows she soon must.

There’s a fair bit of social commentary. A ghastly get-rich-quick builder has a house of almost comic vulgarity, and attitudes (especially to women) to match. A police officer drops by to talk to the residents on crime prevention; she’s a woman (and, we learn much later, black). She says she is happy to be addressed by her first name, but not as “love”. Elderly resident Joyce has a go-getter daughter who works in finance. Joyce herself was once a nurse, and remembers how horrible some consultants were. Moreover Osman’s turn of phrase makes the narrative more vivid. Elizabeth, looking for signs of dementia in herself, thinks with dread of the time when you “become ‘Poor Rosemary’ or ‘Poor Frank’, catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they really were.” The old convent has “a chapel so dark and quiet you would swear you heard God breathing.” The murder victim is clubbed in his kitchen and his “fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.” This book might have limitations if seen solely as detective fiction. But it is much more than that, and is compulsively readable.

Author Richard Osman turned to writing books only recently; The Thursday Murder Club, published in 2020, was his first book (though he’s since written three more – a productive use of lockdown perhaps). But he has been involved in creative ventures of one kind or another (including scriptwriting) for a very long time, and has been producer or presenter of some of the best-known shows on British TV, working or appearing on The One Show, Have I Got News for You, The Dragon’s Den and Whose Line Is It Anyway. He was also for many years presenter of a BBC quiz show, Pointless. He dropped the latter last year to concentrate more on his writing after the huge success of his crime novels. As I was writing this, he tweeted: “This week marks 150 weeks in the bestseller list for The Thursday Murder Club. I couldn't have dreamt of this three years ago, so heartfelt thanks to everyone who has read the books.”

But her emails…
So to the second of these two bestsellers; it’s just as good – and just as original. It’s Janice Hallett’s The Appeal.  

Like Osman, Hallett had never published a book before this one – and walked off with an instant bestseller. But she too had been a journalist and screenwriter. (She co-wrote the 2011 film Retreat, a rather bleak and grisly thriller set on a remote island during a pandemic – about which, she now says, the script was very prescient.)

The Appeal is a whodunnit with a daring structure. It does not start with a crime; you don’t learn of it until quite close to the end of the book. Instead it starts with a note from Roderick Tanner QC to two of his juniors. He is clearly vexed by a case and wants them to unravel it from a huge pile of emails sent and received, over many months, by the various characters. We realise that one of them may be in trouble and may be in jail; we also guess that they are mounting an appeal and that Tanner is their brief. But even these facts we are not told; we infer them. And for the moment we learn nothing else. Instead we are given all the emails, in chronological order – which is how Charlotte and Femi, the juniors, are reading them. We don’t get much comment from either of the juniors. Mostly, we just get the emails.

They revolve around a production by an amateur dramatics group, the Fairway Players (it’s Arthur Miller’s All My Sons). The members of the group are jockeying for parts in the play; the auditions begin. The production is led by Martin, a wealthy local businessman and owner of an hotel/conference centre. Then, not far in, he announced that his infant granddaughter Poppy has brain cancer and needs an experimental treatment from the States. He mounts an appeal to pay for it. From then on the stories of the play, the appeal for Poppy, and the crime to come are intertwined.

The emails structure lets us see each character’s personality for ourselves, without description, from the way they relate to each other – a powerful piece of show-don’t-tell that works very well. It’s a large cast, but they include Isabel, the twittery, verbose, rather nervous nurse who seems to irritate everyone. There’s Martin himself, the local middle-class alpha male, and the members of his family. There is Sarah-Jane, professional appeals organiser, curt with Isabel but emollient with others. And there is Samantha, also a nurse, who has recently returned from some very dodgy parts of Africa, where she has been working with Médecins Sans Frontières. There is something unclear about her and we learn of her mainly from the emails of others. Bit by bit, we sense that all is not as it appears with the fundraiser for Poppy, or with the doctor treating her, or with Samantha’s time in Africa. Bit by bit these themes combine until we are finally confronted with the crime itself.

I thought this book a real tour de force – an unusual crime story told in a highly original way. I wrote once that Dorothy Sayers’s Wimsey novels work so well because she puts you inside his head and unscrolls the story much as he sees it, so that you share the process of detection with him. Something even better happens here; you keep Femi and Charlotte company as they wade through a mass of emails through which threads emerge but are seen through a glass, darkly. The emails also reveal a great deal about each individual with splendid clarity. In 2021, Guardian interviewer Kate Kellaway asked The Appeal author Janice Hallett how much an email could say about someone’s character. “More than you might think,” she replied. “Even the one-line emails people think give nothing away can be revealing.” She is not joking. All of us will have had friends or colleagues whose emails gush like Isabel’s or are curt like Sarah-Jane’s.

Amateur dramatics, 1930s-style

Moreover, like The Thursday Murder Club, this book is a sly snapshot of modern Britain. There is the too-busy health service, the wary HR departments, and the class structure that is never discussed but is always just below the surface, and is baked into our DNA. Here as in real life it defines so much of people’s behaviour – our acceptance of our place in any process, our deference to people who do not deserve it, and our failure to question their motives. I’d guess that this realistic setting is, indirectly, part of the reason for both books’ success. This is not because people want social commentary in their leisure reading; I’m not sure they do. It’s more because they recognise the settings and characters and identify with them. It’s something the Golden Age crime novel didn’t always do quite so well. Neither Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers appeared socially aware, at least in their books; indeed Sayers was (it’s said) a snob. And at times the standard plot of the day seemed to be death at a country-house weekend, not something most of their middle-class readers would have experienced.

The Appeal did have a flaw: the characters, though well-drawn, were mostly just not very attractive. A few were unpleasant and the rest left me mostly cold. Do you need someone to root for in a book? I do. In this respect, Osman’s characters worked better for me and were part of why I liked the book. I enjoyed The Appeal anyway because it was so original and well-written. But I should have liked to have someone who made me care more about the outcome. Still, I think this matters more to some readers than others.

The good news is that both writers have decided to keep writing. Hallett has produced four more crime novels since; Osman, two. Both manage to entertain while reflecting a fast-changing world. I think they’ll be with us a while.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.