I was having a lousy day and wanted something charming and comforting, so I picked up Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is a bestselling mystery novel set in a swanky British retirement community. I’d heard that it was funny and refreshing, and I was very willing to be pleased. I mostly was … until I thought a little more about the ending, at which point I found it genuinely distressing.
There were definitely points before the end where I raised my eyebrows, mind. I noticed very early that we were in the kind of book where the third-person narrator refuses to acknowledge a character’s race, even where the character would unquestionably notice it. This was, as I expected, a sign of a book in which nonwhite characters exist but no thought has been given to how those characters’ lives would be affected by their race.
There’s also this unlovely musing from one of the—sympathetically portrayed!—police characters:
She had arrested a shoplifter in Fairhaven last week, and when he had struggled, she had brought him down with a baton behind the knees. She was aware she had hit him much harder than she should. Sometimes you just had to hit things.
No! You really don’t!
My initial notes to myself said that the book had a core of sadness but resilience, and I do stand by that: it’s a retirement community, so a lot of people are facing mortality, especially that of their loved ones, but are still changing and learning and enjoying their lives. And I liked the mosaic effect created by the short chapters from lots of points of view, though I can see that it could easily be frustrating to other readers.
But the ending. There are two parts that really stick in my craw. The first is that it seems like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to morality. The second, and much worse, is that there’s a death that is absolutely a murder but that is not treated as such by either the characters or the narrative, which I can only interpret as horrific unthinking ableism.
So, unfortunately, I don’t trust the author enough to keep reading the series.