Cosy mystery goes crackers
THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE by Richard Osman (Viking) ★★★✩✩
THE vast success of Richard Osman’s debut crime novel, The Thursday Murder Club, was a little baffling to seasoned crime fiction readers. Osman essentially piggybacked on an existing genre, the ‘cosy crime’ sector, in which amateur detectives solve a crime in ‘a small, socially intimate community’, as the Wikipedia entry on cosy mystery has it.
In his follow-up, The Man Who Died Twice, Osman honours the other ‘cosy crime’ rules – no sex and very little explicit violence, although an early scene featuring a mugging might test those of a more timorous disposition. Not that there is much plot to talk of here, rather a series of sub-plots that flit in and out haphazardly.
But where most cosy crime novels make a Miss Marple story look like a Quentin Tarantino film and skitter along the surface of their characters, Osman digs a little deeper. The four main characters, including Elizabeth, a retired spy, whose past in espionage drives this heroically absurd tale of stolen diamonds, evil fixers, drug dealers, international money-laundering and corrupt MI5 officials, are identifiably old. The trauma her fellow sleuth, former psychiatrist Ibrahim, suffers at the hands of muggers, followed by his withdrawal from the outside world, are excruciating and sublimely handled.
And Osman is acutely aware of how regrets multiply exponentially through life until all we can see is a spaghetti junction of roads not taken. Joyce, a former nurse, full of remorse at missed opportunities (and clearly Osman’s favourite character), says at one point: ‘If you could hear all the morning tears in this place, it would sound like birdsong.’ But all this heart cannot hide the fact that Osman’s writing is a little more ragged this time round and the plot utterly batty. Not so much cosy as crackers.