I spent a pleasant few days ensconced in Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, where a good-natured, if random, group of people (a retired policeman, a bodyguard, and a world-famous writer) traipse around the world trying to figure out who is shooting at them and why. Their travels take them from South Carolina to St Lucia, Ireland, New Forest in the UK, and Dubai. In each place, they stay in magical locales, luxury hotels, a wellness retreat, and are served sushi, perfect poached eggs at 25,000 feet, and glasses of rosé.
At the end of the novel, one of the characters asks another where their next case will be. “Nearby?” “Fairly nearby,” replies the other. “Turkmenistan.” The third member of the group says, breezily, “I’ll prepare the jet,” and off, presumably, they go.
It’s all great fun. The characters are delightful, and there’s an air of no one taking anything too seriously, even when confronting US Customs and Border Protection, running away from assassins and dodging bullets, that is hugely relaxing.
Dizzyingly fun
Nonetheless, I found myself a little dizzied by the quick turns around the world; this vertigo was accentuated by the very short chapters which give the impression of jumping from one place to the other with reckless speed. The plot is also giddy, involving a money laundering kingpin, social media influencers who are flown around the world only to meet their ends in grisly ways that range from being eaten by sharks, crashing over cliffs and being nailed to trees.
It’s a testament to Richard Osman as a writer that he manages to infuse in this wild, world-encompassing tale the same kind of cosy intimacy that he does in his beloved series Thursday Murder Club, which is set in a retirement home in the English countryside. Still, if you miss that homely charm, there is a narrative thread that takes place in a sleepy English village in New Forest; and Osman makes it clear which he values more – the weekly pub quiz is given equal (if not more, for some characters) importance as the aforementioned bullet-dodging and international-money-launderer-foiling.
A delightful read
Wise-cracking side characters are picked up along the way, including a pedantic Dutchman (“it is not a little envelope, it is an A4”), a TV agent who finds herself in the middle of the baffling world of social media influencing (“What is the best way to grow and monetise my social media following?” “Gosh, how long is a piece of string, I suppose?”) and a Hollywood action star that is determined to make some movies the Academy will notice but is on track to making Rampage 8 instead.
For me, the only discordant note was that Osman has a way of regarding the world as an Englishman’s backyard that, to the rest of us, can be a little grating. In the first few pages, a character’s history has spanned “living inside an abandoned oil pipeline in Syria”, “evading rebel forces in Burkina Faso”, and being attacked by swords in Morocco. An Irish bar in Dubai is described mockingly (“Steve has very recently been in a couple of actual Irish pubs, and he doesn’t remember any neon signs.”)
(As an aside, I couldn’t help imagining what it would mean if the book had had an Indian narrator. It would have read very differently, with many pauses as the main characters stopped to apply for visas, gathering application forms, income tax returns, invitation letters and bank statements, their own and from various extended family members. Weeks would have passed as interviews were conducted, passports stamped, mailed, or perhaps returned unstamped and the whole process started again. None of this “I’ll prepare the jet” stuff.)
But these are minor quibbles that are soon washed away in the overall delight of the story. While the characters themselves are different from the characters in his Thursday Murder Club series, they seem to inhabit the same world. (Osman says as much in the Acknowledgements: “If Steve were ever to jump in his Corsa, he could reach [the retirement home] Coopers Chase in just over two hours.”) By the end, you find yourself not really caring who the killer turns out to be. You just want to spend more time in Osman’s world, on private jets, sipping cocktails in swan-shaped swimming pools, and knowing that however many killers are on your trail, you’re always going to get home, to the cosy pub quiz, where everybody knows your name.
Samyukta Bhowmick’s murder mystery novel A Fatal Distraction was published recently.
We Solve Murders, Richard Osman, Penguin Random House.
