The Last Devil To Die: The Thursday Murder Club 4

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The 4th edition of the Thursday Murder Club series is filled with crimes, philosophy and a short goodbye. Possibly because of the way he grew up without a financial safety net, he has admitted to being obsessed with the metrics when it comes to his work today. “I don’t want someone at the end of the year looking at their balance sheet and going, ‘Oh God, Richard Osman cost us money’. That’s like a nightmare for me. I like to get what I’m worth, I like to be valued. But at the same time, I never want to be overvalued. I’ve got a proper work ethic, I’m a grafter.” Osman was 38 when Pointless first aired in 2009 (Photo: Matt Frost/BBC/Remarkable Television)

Kuldesh doesn’t have the box with him but he’s sure he can explain that away. He hopes to be “ on his way before the snow turns to ice .” Sadly, that’s not to be. Joyce plays a more major role in The Last Devil to Die and almost becomes more Elizabeth than Elizabeth herself. Ibrahim makes a quiet revelation to Computer Bob and I wonder whether he will ever make this revelation to the other members of the Thursday Murder Club.Have you been feeling that it’s high time someone did a takedown of Richard Osman, a TV star who has also become phenomenally successful in the publishing world? Amid knotty conversations about the rise of the “celebrity novel”, were you hoping that someone would say at last that the emperor has no clothes? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but that’s not going to happen here. In The Last Devil to Die , Elizabeth’s beloved husband Stephen is slipping away from her with fewer and fewer good days. To say more would be to slip into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say, Elizabeth is not herself so Joyce steps up to take the lead in the new investigation. Granted, that means less time for Joyce to spoil male residents with cake and conversation. Retired nurse Joyce always has an eye for a handsome male, like Mervyn, a newcomer to Coopers Chase. Ibrahim isn’t sure about Mervyn although he’s horrified that he’s being scammed by an online professional posing as a lonely-hearted lady.

Osman’s long career in TV has helped him understand the value of giving people what they want and in no way looking down on that. To him, what they so often want is warmth and kindness. “I can’t write about mutilated bodies and serial killers. It’s not in me, it’s not in my heart. I have to write these characters. There was a period where everything had to be very dark and everything had to be very gritty, and everything had to be very sort of ambiguous,” he says. “The cultural conversation in both our countries centers on a very small amount of TV programs or books, which are not really the ones that people actually watch or that people turn to when they’re looking to be entertained. It’s nice to be right in the middle of popular culture with a product which I love and which I’m proud of, which I hope has messages of hope for what the world might be and how we might treat each other. It’s not fashionable, but I’m very glad that it’s popular.”Returning in The Last Devil to Die are DCI Chris Hudson, PC Donna De Freitas and the unflappable, Bogdan Jankowski. As we have come to expect from Osman's writing, there is more than one tightly plotted mystery to unravel. Humor is an integral part of the Thursday Murder Club series. It frequently manifests itself in the dance between the Club and the official police. Naturally, the Club members pride themselves on their devious methods of finding what lies behind the façade of murder and mayhem. The police, understandably, would prefer to investigate without a quartet of old codgers always beating them to the punch. Same old/same old, until police from the outside take over the investigation of Kuldesh Sharma’s death. Actions have consequences: the local constabulary and the Club join forces. Game show host turned bestselling novelist, Richard Osman, is the author behind the mystery club phenomenon known as the Thursday Murder Club. A series of novels which feature Elizabeth (former MI6 spymaster), retired nurse Joyce, Ron, an opinionated ex-union activist, and mild-mannered psychiatrist Ibrahim - a septuagenarian quartet of retirement village dwelling residents who work together to solve murders. The Thursday Murder Club is so busy solving crimes that they don't even have time for their weekly meetings.

In his author's note, Osman indicates that he is working on a new series, so it might be some time before we can visit with our good friends from Coopers Chase again. I'm glad to know that he has not retired them for good, because I'm invested in this friendship now and I look forward to seeing them again some Thursday in the future. Bestselling author Richard Osman’s latest book, The Last Devil to Die, is out September 19, 2023—and despite rumors, won’t be the final installment in his Thursday Murder Club Mystery series. picture alliance // Getty Images This is the fourth book in the series, and while it can be read as a standalone, the emotional aspects of the narrative might not resonate if you are not familiar with the characters or the series. Authors who can reconnect people with the primal emotion of pleasure reading are worth our close attention. Commercial success doesn't just happen in a vacuum, after all—it takes a whole life, sometimes several iterations of that life, to get there, even as it often boils down to a simple idea: if you write what you want to read, and you enjoy doing so, others will want to read and enjoy what you write, too. Richard Osman knows this better than almost anybody.This is not a new phenomenon. Agatha Christie had been publishing mysteries for over two decades when the Second World War made her a household name, and she began her career in 1920, two years removed from the end of the WWI and the influenza pandemic. Osman’s greatest strength is fusing the puzzle-mastery of Christie and her Golden Age peers with emotional earnestness and wry humor. Mortality is a subject simply too great to be avoided entirely, but it can be done without sinking into despair. Perhaps that’s because the study of popular culture and mass entertainment has been Osman's lifelong project, one that began in 1970 as the younger son of a single mother in West Sussex. While Mat, three years older, was perpetually obsessed with “being cool” (he later became the bassist for the Britpop band Suede and recently published his second novel), Richard had no such aspirations. Fall is in the air and I was finally able to pull out all my coziest clothes again, so what better audiobook to match the mood of the season? The Last Devil to Die, book number four in the cozy crime series The Thursday Murder Club. While others celebrated autumn’s return of pumpkin spice in all its disturbingly copious forms … I enjoyed my annual visit to Coopers Chase Retirement Village and its clever septuagenarian sleuths: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibraham, Ron.

Because of course, there is always more than one mystery to solve in these, and the little reveals at the end are usually even more fun than the BIG REVEAL. But then he had a story idea—one he kept secret from almost everyone. It wasn't difficult to pursue; quiz shows are filmed in bursts, which left a lot of down time during the various breaks between seasons of Pointless. He was also filming a new, celebrity-oriented show, Richard Osman's House of Games, which debuted in September 2017. All of that love of information and knowledge, and of crime fiction in particular, had to go somewhere. And his mother, now living at a retirement village, offered an endless supply of stories about the lives of the other residents. They could be anyone, anything—maybe even spies, once upon a time.The justification for the group getting involved in solving crimes is always sketchy, but that’s fair enough. Why waste time explaining it? Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim will be better than the police – even than their chums in the force, Chris and Donna.