Just a glance at the cast list tells you everything you need to know. Netflix’s adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime sensation The Thursday Murder Club stars Dame Helen Mirren, former James Bond Pierce Brosnan (as well as a former Bond villain Sir Jonathan Pryce), the Oscar-winning Sir Ben Kingsley and the gold-plated national treasure Celia Imrie, alongside a supporting line-up which includes David Tennant and Richard E. Grant. Released today in selected cinemas before landing on the streaming service on Thursday, the film has an awful lot of talent for what appears at first glance to be a mash-up of One Foot in the Grave and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.
What it tells us, of course, is that Netflix is only too happy to pile on the loot because just as Osman’s book sales have doubtlessly caused a dent the size of Monaco in the Amazon rainforest, so the US streaming giant is confident that viewers everywhere (but I expect particularly here and in America) will flock to The Thursday Murder Club until their servers start to melt.
We will know soon enough. But as well as a vote for the popularity of Osman’s books and the starry cast, Netflix is also banking on our continued love affair with ‘cosy crime’ – that genre where, as Jeremy Vine pointed out on Radio 4 Today this week, the murder weapon is more likely to be teapot than a metal bar and the setting more likely to be rural than a big city.
Well, he was right, up to a point. To truly be cosy crime – as well as essential accoutrements such as a cycling vicar, the inevitable brace of spinsters and perhaps a Morris Oxford or Minor – you need above all else to consider the motive.
As George Orwell pointed out in his 1946 essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’, the chief motivations behind the sorts of crimes that transfixed the British public in the preceding decades usually related to the rather English concern of shame – or to put it differently, a desire to avoid the loss of respectability. This could be owing to some past or present sexual misadventure or to imminent financial ruin. But above all, there was that essential almost bourgeois middle-classness behind it all.
‘The murderer,’ wrote Orwell, ‘should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative party branch or a leading Nonconformist… He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery.’
‘The murderer,’ wrote Orwell, ‘should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house’
Poison, of course, was the weapon of choice for Erin Patterson, who murdered three relatives – including her parents-in-law – and attempted to murder another relative (a vicar no less) in the so-called ‘toxic mushroom’ case in Australia, where she served them beef Wellington laced with death cap mushrooms. The details of her crime – the use of colour-coded plates and so on – were lapped up by the public and it drew significant worldwide attention precisely because it ticked so many of the cosy crime boxes. It was highly domestic, more middle-class than a Waitrose tote bag – and utterly merciless.
The Patterson case reinforces the unpleasant point that a good chunk of the appeal of cosy crime is our genuine horror, an abhorrence at the cruelty involved, a catalysing shock which serves to sharpen and shake to the core all the familiar chintz of the format. Here, if you sprinkle it with the spiritual ashes of Joan Hickson – almost certainly the best occupant of St Mary Mead – you find the beating heart of cosy crime.
It’s cosy also because the criminal at the centre of the story is so thoroughly non-criminal in all other aspects of their life. They are amateurs, as often are the so-called detectives themselves – who like Miss Marple or indeed the members of the Thursday Murder Club are neither ‘gentleman detectives’ in the vein of Holmes or Poirot nor paid police officers. They are nothing less than superannuated busybodies – in the ordinary course of things a sub-species that comes in for ill-concealed loathing, but who in this case come good. And the fact that they are genuine ‘everymen’, or more usually ‘everywomen’, means that we as readers can so much more easily recognise elements of ourselves or develop a bond with the protagonist as they embark on their detection. And as a result, it is especially gratifying when we join them with the unmasking of the criminal and the solving of the puzzle, which is so unlike real life, where puzzles confound and abound.
So if you want to understand the appeal of cosy crime, it’s here. It offers us order and closure on a scale we can relate to, against the backdrop of a wider world dominated by individuals such as Trump, Putin and Xi, one where people in their tens of thousands illegally enter the country by rubber dinghies without consequence and where we see heinous actions going unpunished – whether that’s petty crime on our streets or the invasion of sovereign countries in eastern Europe.
Just as it was in the 1930s when Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and the other queens of the golden age of crime fiction were in their pomp, so today cosy crime is balm for those of us enduring the unfathomable realities of a crazy world. For here, in this particular milieu, the killer usually gets their comeuppance and we actually get to understand why they did what they did in the first place. And after that, it’s time for tea, or a gin and tonic or evensong…
Read Deborah Ross’s review of The Thursday Murder Club in this week’s issue of The Spectator.
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