Osman owes an obvious debt to Agatha Christie, but also to more recent light-hearted, larky mysteries by the likes of Alexander McCall Smith and Agatha Raisin author MC Beaton. The crimes “aren’t that grizzly, or they’re off stage, so you don’t see the death”, notes Dr Jennifer Young, head of writing and journalism at Falmouth University, who has researched the “cosy” crime phenomenon. And the gang tends to rely on good old-fashioned “social connections” to solve the mystery. The female characters, Young adds, tend to be “better at making those connections and having those conversations [with suspects] than the police are”. Joyce and Elizabeth are able to operate largely undetected, adds Dr Jo Parsons, a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Falmouth, because the “invisibility of women once we hit a certain age” suddenly becomes an “incredible power”.
The Thursday Murder Club sold 45,000 copies in its first three days and, according to Nielsen BookData, it has been the bestselling book in the UK since then, selling more than two million copies across all print editions. Its sequel The Man Who Died Twice followed in 2021, and knocked Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? off the number one spot. Last year, the third instalment, The Bullet That Missed, became the fastest-selling adult fiction hardback by a British author, beating a record previously held by JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
Glance through reviews and you’ll see words like “heartwarming” and “amiable” crop up over and over again, although The Times’ critic Joan Smith was a rare dissenter, describing The Thursday Murder Club as “a novel so flawed that it is hard to believe it would ever have been published without a celebrity’s name on the cover”. The general consensus seems to be that Osman’s books are “amiable if undemanding cosy caper[s]”, as The Guardian’s review put it – and that’s unlikely to bother Osman. “If I’m anything, I’m an entertainer,” he told The Washington Post in a 2022 interview. “I’m here to give people a book that they can’t put down, and if they’re on a plane journey then the plane journey goes quicker.”
British readers, it seems, can’t get enough of the formula. Nielsen reports that Osman has so far sold more than five million books, a number that will only rise further when his fourth novel The Last Devil to Die is released on 14 September. On the book charts, his only real rival is Colleen Hoover, BookTok’s reigning queen of high melodrama (last year, Hoover’s It Starts With Us grabbed the top spot on the annual UK bestseller list, but guess who happily occupied positions two, three and four?).
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The consensus seems to be that Osman’s success is boosting the crime fiction market, rather than cannibalising it. Of course, his TV work gave him a ready-made platform, but Morgan notes that he has “worked really hard with Penguin [his publishers] to attend all the crime festivals and really immerse himself in the writing community … And he’s been supportive of other writers: he’s given quotes for some of the books that I’ve published from debut authors.”
For Morgan, the “escapist” quality of Osman’s books – and of the entire cosy crime genre – goes a long way in accounting for their popularity. “[They] hold your attention in a way that normal crime [novels] would, without the menace or unease that you get from reading a normal one,” she says, “with the opportunity to play detective yourself in a charming, innocent way. There are twists, but they’re very gentle and mild-mannered.”
But for Osman’s fellow cosy crime novelist Hall, the appeal is more specific. “He just presents such a positive picture of growing old,” he says. Normally, he adds, “you read about a retirement home and there’s lots of people with gaping open mouths, wailing from time to time”, but in The Thursday Murder Club, “you’ve got older protagonists who are firing on all cylinders.” Mortality, Hall says, “is there” in the books (not least in one ongoing sub-plot dealing with dementia) “but it doesn’t define these people”. Osman’s portrait of ageing is an affirming one, that just happens to have arrived in the wake of the pandemic, when we were bombarded with alarming headlines about vulnerable older people trapped in infection-ridden care homes.
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