I watched The Thursday Murder
Club movie before reading the book. Had I read the book first, I might not
have watched the movie. Therein lies the difference… I won’t rehash the plot
too much – a quartet of senior citizens at luxury retirement home Cooper’s
Chase amuse themselves by ‘solving’ cold case murders. Imagine their shock when
two real murders happen that relate directly to the fate of their beloved
Cooper’s Chase and could signal them losing their home. They take on the role
of real-life detectives and maybe they need to because the police don’t seem to
have a clue where to begin.
I love any kind of cosy murder mystery
and am a big Agatha Christie fan. The sleuth team idea works well, and their
backstories draw the reader into the lives of the four senior citizens. However,
the movie is the only reason I continued reading. Let’s do the pluses first:
the movie characters totally do justice to the book characters, thanks to inspired
casting and brilliant acting. The scriptwriters ingeniously teased out the main
characteristics and idiosyncrasies of each person so that when I read about
Ibrahim, I could see Ben Kingsley in my mind’s eye, giving a masterly
performance. The same can be said for the rest, save for Ron in the movie.
Alas, I felt Ron was miscast in the movie but on the page, I could imagine him perfectly.
The movie actually made the book come to life as I read. Without those visuals
already in my mind, I would not have finished the book.
The main issues are writing in
the present tense; the constant shifting of POV from first to third person;
the huge number of chapters, some of which are only one page, to change POV;
and the unbelievable and turgid backstories for just about every character,
important or not. It was like being on a roller coaster, but not a pleasant
ride. Who still writes in the present tense? This is for YA novels and not for
the average reader who likes to settle into the story as events unfold. It is
also technically very hard to do this and then refer to past events without
getting the tenses muddled. I was surprised Richard Osman chose this path.
However, perhaps he did this thinking that present tense coupled with first person
POV (Joyce’s) would give more immediacy. Sadly, Osman included Joyce’s propensity
to write in a stream-of-consciousness fashion in her diary. Unless one is James
Joyce, not TTMC Joyce, this can fall flat and it did. The reader is subjected
to her ‘wittering on’ (no other way to describe it) and it ends up being the
demented chatter of a slightly senile old biddy who keeps repeating herself.
The change in POV was also very jarring as we go from Joyce’s vague mental meanderings
to Elizabeth’s third-person POV as she strides about, picking up clues and putting
it all together. She was with MI5, you know, or was it MI6? No matter, she is a
force to be reckoned with.
The backstories dragged the main
plot down and it’s a pity because all the to-ing and fro-ing and things that
happened twenty years ago were immaterial. I know some Big-Name authors say
they have detailed backstories for everyone, from the gardener to the supermarket
checkout girl, but it is not necessary to burden the reader with that. It is
enough for the author to know this for themselves, and their writing can reflect
in a line or two here and there enough information to flesh out a minor character.
Osman chose to give the baddies wildly complex backstories of crime and perhaps
murder, since all the people involved seemed to have disappeared rather oddly
without a trace. Thank heavens, the scriptwriters were skilled enough to give
the movie viewers just enough information and not drown the main story. Osman has
made a poor choice here and his editors should have picked up on it.
Bottom line: see the movie and
skip the book. My glowing review of the movie is here. Make popcorn.
