Book 63 - The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Reading date - February 2021

You know sometimes you hear something being hyped up by everyone and think that everyone cannot be wrong and that it must be something great?  And then you think, I like this person, I've seen them on the tv so it must be as great as everyone is saying it is?

This is how I felt about this book.  Everyone has been raving about it and everyone loves Richard Osman cos he's all tall and intelligent and funny.

Well, let me tell you what a disappointment this book was.  I feel like he has dumbed it right down so it gets onto a daytime tv show list.  He has gone for the lowest common denominator and come up with a shitey holiday read which would fit perfectly on Richard and Judy's booklist.  I thought this would be a delight to read but it most definitely was not.  I know I sound like a literary snob when I say this and I don't care because I don't like it when books dumb things down and don't think the reader can read and understand something complex.  Treat me the way Donna Tartt does, not the way Jodi Picoult does.

The story is lazy and pointless, the actual murder turns out to be something which runs off on a tangent but the worst part about this book is the casual xenophobia.  I never ever expected this from Richard Osman and I am really disappointed with him.  The xenophobia adds absolutely nothing to this book or the story so it could have been left out.  Also, the fact that a lot of it comes from a red man who lead the marches when the mines closed is something I could never imagine a red man saying.  I felt so strongly about this that I even unfollowed Osman on the Twitters.

I feel that by writing a book to appeal to the old Daily Mail readers, he has alienated a lot of the people who would have loved to have read a proper book written by him.  Unless, this is the real Richard Osman and the person he is on TV is a total fake?  I met him once (in the flesh) when he was off the clock and he was really nice..and very, very tall.  This leaves me a bit confused.  The book would have been the same without the xenophobia.  It's so bad that every time a character who is not white British is introduced, you're immediately told about all the shady things he could have done and is currently doing.  In the end, the murderer turns out to be a blue blood Britisher, so again, pointless.  His xenophobia goes way beyond red herrings, too.  I am not being sensitive about it, nobody has the right to tell an ethnic person they're being sensitive when they haven't lived the same lives we have lived, until you've had your beautiful name Anglicised because it's too hard to pronounce (but they can manage to learn Klingon...a totally made up language and have no issue saying the word Khaleesi), you can't tell me nothing.

It is such a shame because this book is lazy, doesn't develop into anything of any substance, body shames men and it really isn't the witty book I expected Richard Osman to come out with.  I did have the odd chuckle here and there but I expected so, so much more from him.

I just hope his brother is a better author than him, I absolutely love his band so I hope Matt Osman doesn't let me down like his brother did.  There is another TMC in the works and you can drop me out of that right now.