Murder, They Wrote

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has recently become famous for spending $2 million a year on a bonkers anti-aging regimen, while the rest of us have to make do with a round of Wordle and a brisk walk. But for the elderly characters in The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp and The Last Devil to Die, nothing keeps the mental gears oiled like solving a tricky murder.

Richard Osman’s justly popular Thursday Murder Club books are the best-known of a spate of variations on this theme, including Robert Thorogood’s Marlow Murder Club series (coming soon to PBS), Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club series, and Tess Gerritsen’s upcoming The Spy Coast. There are tweaks in each iteration, but basically they involve retirees with free time and expertise (many are former spies or police detectives) who band together to solve crimes the police can’t, while charmingly or irascibly embodying the quirks of each book’s particular demographic.

German writer Leonie Swann’s delightfully subversive The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp takes the concept further down the scary road of aging than most. This group consists of tenants in a share house that Agnes Sharp, once a policewoman, has organized for like-minded, unconventional octogenarians. The locals in their small English village are not fans—“a load of senile hippies” is the consensus about the residents of Sunset Hall.

And unlike most murder-club types, they are losing their marbles. Dementia is nibbling away at their minds, but they’re still with-it enough to help each other out of whatever scrapes they may get into. If you put all six of them together, you’d have one fully functioning adult.

So they are understandably panicked by the dead body in the garden shed. There was a gun involved, and though lots of items go astray in their house—Agnes finds her false teeth on the back of the pet tortoise—they really need to find that gun.

The frustration of not quite being able to grasp something crucial is familiar to everyone at Sunset Hall. Agnes and her friends walk a fine line between incipient dementia and eccentricity, which has its uses for fooling the authorities but could also land them in trouble if they’re not careful. The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp may appear to be a cozy about some nutty old crime-solving dears with a pet tortoise, but it has pointy teeth, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.

Unlike most murder-club types, in Leonie Swann’s The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, the characters are losing their marbles.

There’s no big bad wolf in Osman’s new Thursday Murder Club book, though there is a sweet fox that hangs around Cooper’s Chase, the retirement village where the club members live. A new murder has fallen into the collective lap of septuagenarian sleuths Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron, and, sadly, the victim is Kuldesh Sharma, a friend and antiques dealer who helped them with their last case.

As far as they can tell, Kuldesh had agreed to hold onto a box (probably containing heroin) for a threatening drug dealer and got shot in the head for his trouble. The assumption is that he stole the heroin, and the dealer took his revenge. It seems pretty open-and-shut, but was 80-year-old Kuldesh really stupid or greedy enough to rip off a drug dealer? The club has doubts, so finding the killer becomes their post–Christmas holidays project.

This is Osman’s most ambitious Thursday Murder Club book yet. It has all the charm, memorably odd supporting characters, and larky tangents of the three previous books, but this time he’s chosen to address the elephant in the room in what is, after all, a series about old people.

Regular readers will notice that former spy Elizabeth, usually the ringleader, recedes into the background in the novel’s first half. Her adored husband, Stephen, is slipping further into Alzheimer’s, and the time has come to reckon with it, which is serious indeed and maybe not what’s expected.

But Osman deals movingly with this situation without letting it swamp the rest of the novel, which is almost miraculous. He deftly lightens the mood with subplots about an online “romance fraud” perpetrated on a new Cooper’s Chase resident, the emergence of Joyce as a force in Elizabeth’s absence, and the existential dilemmas of drug dealers.

A new murder has fallen into the collective lap of the septuagenarian sleuths in The Last Devil to Die, Richard Osman’s most ambitious Thursday Murder Club book yet.

In an afterword, Osman says he’s taking a break from the Thursday Murder Club to write a different kind of mystery, but will bring these characters back in time. I look forward to his new venture, and to the eventual return of the gang of four.

The ravages of old age play a pivotal role in Sophie Hannah’s latest Hercule Poirot novel, Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night, though in this case they are entirely physical. In Hannah’s fifth book authorized by Agatha Christie’s estate, there is nothing the Belgian sleuth would like less than to spend the lead-up to Christmas of 1931 at the dreary Norfolk mansion of the Lauriers, friends of Edward Catchpool’s mother. But Inspector Catchpool is Poirot’s trusty right-hand man, and his formidable mother, Cynthia, is quite persuasive about enlisting Poirot’s help, so he gives in.

The ravages of old age play a pivotal role in Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night, Sophie Hannah’s fifth novel authorized by Agatha Christie’s estate.

Arnold Laurier is very ill, and determined to spend his remaining days in the private hospital where a local postman was recently murdered. His wife, Vivienne, is certain that her husband will be killed if he stays at that hospital, which seems irrational to everyone else. But if Poirot can solve the postman’s murder first, perhaps Arnold will be spared.

Poirot’s famous “little grey cells” are mightily tested by this exasperating case, as are his gastronomic and aesthetic sensibilities. In order to leave his children a substantial estate, Arnold, who is otherwise the most ebullient dying man ever, has instituted austerity measures. So the food is terrible, the house decrepit, the adult children miserable—c’est insupportable! But Poirot, increasingly concerned that he may have to spend Christmas in this un-festive place, persists.

Over five books, Hannah has honed her Poirot to perfection, with a pleasingly off-kilter mix of clever crime solving and dry wit. Her unsparing eye for the mystifying caprices of the landed English gentry is nicely aligned with Christie’s, as is her exemplary plotting. If your little grey cells have been feeling sluggish lately, Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night is just the thing to get them going.

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If reading is too taxing, you can always watch Poirot, who has been played on stage, radio, TV, and film by more than 40 actors, including Orson Welles and Tony Randall. Skip Kenneth Branagh directing and starring in Death on the Nile and the current A Haunting in Venice. Ditto John Malkovich in BBC One’s mini-series The ABC Murders. Watch, instead, Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, who steals scenes while solving the case, or David Suchet, the quintessential Poirot, in the long-running PBS series. When you read Hannah’s book, it’s Suchet’s voice you’ll hear in your head.

Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City