We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman, Viking, 464 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-0241608364
Want a cosy mystery that takes place partly in Dublin, Cork, and RTÉ’s studios? We Solve Murders fits the bill. How about a cosy mystery with a grand, idiosyncratic detective champion? That’s not We Solve Murders.
Marple. Maigret. Marlowe. Holmes. Poirot. Montalbano. Gamache. Dupin. Dalgliesh. V.I. Warshawski. Kogoro Akechi. Karen Pirie. Glory Broussard. Martin Beck. Agatha Raisin. Do famous detectives solve mysteries on their own? Let’s apply the question Bertolt Brecht dares to ask in his poem ‘A Worker’s View of History’: ‘In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished / Where did the masons go?’ In the evening, when the mystery has been solved, where did all the people who helped the great detectives go? Their names don’t live on in the same way as the celebrisleuths.
A parallel lesson awaits readers late on in Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone: ‘It’s all well and good for the heroes to play cops and robbers in novels and on TV, but in real life it’s the side characters who take the blows, who bear the pain, so someone else can raise their arms aloft in victory.’
The mystery genre overflows not so much with stories of a collective enterprise, but with the seemingly solitary efforts of Übermenschen, quirky brainboxes whose transgressions evaporate in an atmosphere of perpetual forgiveness. That forgiveness is based on the diegetic audience’s and the reading audience’s faith in the detective’s aim to steady a wobbly world, to undo the spreading miasma of scepticism inherent in the lead-up to the disclosure of the murderer, a period when even one’s bed partner seems a reasonable suspect. While readers are aware of every human’s capacity for malignity, the mystery genre proposes that wickedness lurks around every corner, only, by the end, to assign the wickedness to a single perpetrator who is removed from the scene. Once the clever detective ensnares the murderer, in an instant, the cloud of scepticism evaporates. In cosy mysteries, the murderer rarely escapes justice. In fact, Phyllis Betz, an academic who has studied the criteria of the ‘cosy’ category, says the mystery is ‘always solved’.
With the enormous growth of the cosy genre, partly thanks to the international success of Osman’s work, cosy authors have appropriated some characteristics that have been staples of writerly mysteries, horror novels and thrillers. Thus people struggle to define what cosy is. Louis Menand, writing about genre for The New Yorker (November 2024) punts on the attempt to pin down any genre. In the US, the PBS television network that has aired many cosy TV adaptations like The Marlow Murder Club says on its website that ‘there is no strict definition for the cosy mystery’. One of the better efforts at description comes from a 2018 episode of the game show ‘Jeopardy’:
Alex Trebek: ‘She’s a fan of a type of mystery I haven’t heard of – the cosy mystery. What is it?’
Contestant: ‘It’s like an Agatha Christie, without a lot of blood and guts.’
The rising tide of published cosies has brought with it a rising tide of blood as well as more brutality to bodies, such as beheadings and dismemberments. Fans of ‘Midsomer Murders’ can chart how the series has become more graphic over its run. More than one murder can happen in a cosy but readers rarely encounter an event involving more than one corpse at a time. What remains almost always true is that individualism rules at both ends of a cosy, a single murderer and a lone detective to close the case.
The genius of Richard Osman’s cosy mysteries, especially his new series, We Solve Murders, is that one word ‘we’. Solidarity. Plurality. That ‘we’ echoes the spirit of rebelliousness captured by the ‘we the people’ of the US constitution. Osman acknowledges implicitly that murder mysteries are a social matter. For We Solve Murders, he assembles a team consisting of a bodyguard, the bodyguard’s husband, the father-in-law, as well as the world’s best-selling author. All the team’s members risk their lives to suss out the clues.
The spirit of all for one and one for all possessed Osman from the start of his mystery writing. He introduced the world to The Thursday Murder Club quartet – Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim, and Joyce – a group of wrinklies (a synonym for pensioners used by Gavin Troy of Midsomer Murders) from a retirement village who decide not to go gently into that good night. None of the quartet is related, meaning the collectivity relies on the bonds of age and friendship rather than blood to maintain coherence and trust.
Unlike the quartet in We Solve Murders, the detective group in The Thursday Murder Club cleaves to home and works a bit with the local police while maintaining its autonomy. The Club’s members succeed in part due to the presuppositions of those with whom the quartet interacts (for example, that elderly people are annoying but ultimately harmless) and their age-related invisibility. No celebrities. No famous detectives. No one from Burke’s Peerage. No one extraordinarily gifted, as, say, Darby Hart in A Murder at the End of the World.
Making older people the prime movers, Osman bucked the media-driven trend of generational conflict that pits, for example, pensioners against millennials. Fashioning competing factions, as if one generation’s success comes at the expense of another, has been a far-right propaganda strategy suited to clickbait culture. In the US, the media has bolstered the propaganda by, for instance, blaming the ever-increasing cost of houses on the oldest generation rather than, say, the world’s largest private equity company, BlackRock, whose managers have bought up hundreds of thousands of homes for corporate profit.
After his extraordinary success with The Thursday Murder Club books, Osman wanted to make some changes. In an interview with The New York Times, he says he spiced up We Solve Murders with ‘globe-trotting thrills. I can’t really have the members of The Thursday Murder Club firing guns at helicopters or jumping off multistory car parks.’ Whereas Maggie Smith could have easily taken on one of the female roles in The Thursday Murder Club, We Solve Murders calls for Tom Cruise-level fireworks and choreography. Parkour isn’t for wrinklies. Still, in both series, the emphasis is on the ensemble, and the ways in which the individuals adopt an aggregating outlook. That feature sets Osman’s work apart in the genre.
Why is Osman’s ‘we’ radical? He is willing to throw a wrench into capitalism’s engine, which is designed to be asocial and isolating. Remember capitalists’ allergic response to unions. A unified group of friends runs counter to capitalism’s interest in individual excellence that reinforces hierarchy as well as expanding private property and personal fame. The Club members’ disinterestedness in money challenges audience assumptions about the ‘naturalness’ of obsessing about financial status, as if one’s identity is inseparable from filthy lucre. One of the characters in We Solve Murders sums this up nicely in a letter: ‘As for my story, it’s the same as yours. The same as so many people’s now. Money.’ For capitalists, the only life that matters is economic life, a tallying of winners and losers. More dramatically, the villain of We Solve Murders writes, ‘Where there is money, people die.’
In contrast, Osman gives us Bonnie in We Solve Murders, a character who has the chance to swim in a lifetime’s worth of money but shuns the economic programming of striving to have it all: ‘I don’t want it,’ Bonnie says. ‘I want to work.’ Perhaps Bonnie’s response needs to be taken to be as powerful as Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to.’ The life models presented to most of us portray work as drudgery, which might be relieved in one’s sunset years when enough surplus is accumulated to retire. Human labour as life-fulfilling is, for many people, unimaginable, as unimaginable as a world without capitalism. Capitalists want you to think not only that theirs is the only game in town, but also that you are a simpleton to propose an alternative.
As many Amazon warehouse workers can testify, capitalist work-life disables its participants. Capitalism fragments experience and pushes people to breaking points. In We Solve Murders, Rosie says, ‘Capitalism isn’t easy on any of us. You could just snap?’ In Danielle Arceneaux’s Glory Be, the narrator offers this: ‘Everyone likes to talk about how strong black women are, but no one ever talks about how painful the feet become. Perhaps it was the steel-toed shoes she wore at the grocery store all those years that mangled her feet. Or maybe it was the weight of having to do it all. All the working, parenting, cooking, and worrying had always fallen on her. Her feet had paid the price.’
Likewise, in Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook: ‘Whoever took any notice of a cleaner or a carer?’ It’s a question that could fit easily into Brecht’s poem.
Some critics of capitalism underscore capitalists’ indifference to human suffering, made famous by Jonathan Swift in A Modest Proposal and by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist: ‘Please, Sir, I want some more.’ In Dickens’s novel, that request is met with violence. That violence, including the murders that propel cosy mysteries, is a logical outcome of an Oliver Twist-like economic system that rewards few at the expense of the many, that sets generations against one other in a struggle for inheritance (Death at the Sign of the Rook: ‘Their mother’s corpse was hardly cold and they were wanting to plant the For Sale sign in the garden.’), that makes it shameful to be a sheep when you could be a greed-is-good wolf who forgets conveniently that Jesus is called the Lamb of God. As the author of The Specter of Capital, Joseph Vogl, explains, it’s a system that teaches the people within it that ‘under the aegis of that ominous invisible hand, our sole responsibility as economic agents is to be responsible for nothing and nobody but ourselves’. In other words, it’s a system designed to undermine the public good to benefit privatisation, the private eye being a manifestation of the privatisation of justice.
In Glory Be, the character Glory frames her work as a bookie in capitalist terms to gain the assent of her daughter: ‘I’m an old, fat, black woman. Nobody pays me any mind. In fact, most people don’t even think I have a mind of my own, let alone that I’m someone who’s capable of thinking and doing for herself. This ain’t no criminal enterprise. I am a small-business owner. A risk-management consultant. Or … what is it you millennials call it these days?’ asked Glory. ‘Girl boss. Yes, I’m a girl boss. All about that hustle.’ Glory mocks the discourse of billionaires who tell everyone that the boss/CEO is god, and that hustling – aka pain and sacrifice – is necessary for the markets to succeed.
Osman’s team approach allows collective goals to emerge. No boss setting an agenda. In Osman’s mysteries, the group decides. You have Rosie D’Antonio urging Steve to come on board the detective agency that Amy the bodyguard is putting together with the help of Rosie’s wealth. ‘Come on, you’d love it,’ Rosie tells Steve. Not on board yet, Steve replies, ‘I think I’m the best judge of what makes me happy’. Having already coaxed Steve into life-threatening adventures, which Steve admits were exciting, Rosie says, ‘You know that’s not true.’ Eventually, Amy and Rosie persuade Steve to become a partner in the business, which Amy describes as an agency concerned about murders ‘people can’t solve, the ones people don’t care about. The ones people give up on.’ Note that Amy does not say that the ones that the police give up on. Murder is the people’s business, our business rather than the responsibility of a state bureaucracy on its own.
Not that Osman’s book or any of the recent cosy mysteries selected as examples here aim to overthrow capitalism. The successful cosy mystery authors would have to defy self-interest by taking an overtly anti-capitalist stance. However, it doesn’t mean the genre is devoid of features that lean in a politically progressive direction. Janice Hallett’s The Examiner posits ‘a sleeper unit’ devoted to bringing down ‘environmental terrorists’. The ‘terrorists’ work for a secretive company developing atmospheric defence tech. Hallett stops short of depicting the unit’s success. The forces protecting the ‘environmental terrorists’ manage to quash publicity about the unit’s action, which included a killing. ‘Officially nothing unusual happened.’ Capitalists have the means to cloak their sins.
Hallett’s willingness to explore the possibility of covert activity offensive to defenders of capitalism emerges in her presentation. She is known for abandoning omniscient narrators in favour of offering readers what lawyers call discovery – documents and other pieces of evidence, e-mail messages, transcripts of chat sessions, DMs, diary entries, student evaluations and the like. No single person tells the tale. Hallett empowers readers to figure things out for themselves rather than wait for a summation of the mystery’s solution, as in the endings to many Poirot novels. The detective-connecting-the-clues scenes in which the the culprit is named have become a familiar ingredient in the trust cosies establish with audiences. Hallett delivers answers, but not via a detective’s monologue. As the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, ‘Stories are told in order to ‘kill’ something. In the most harmless, but not least important case: to kill time. In another and more serious case: to kill fear.’ The fear that murders are random, inexplicable is undone in cosies.
Credit Osman and Hallett with a new egalitarianism for the cosy mystery genre. This isn’t to say that more worthy candidates are not available, but no one could keep up with the output. The literary critic Franco Moretti employs a macroscopic methodology called ‘distant reading’, which is meant to be juxtaposed to the practice called ‘close reading’. Moretti claims that anyone working on things literary takes up ‘a minimal fraction of the literary field’. A graduate seminar on Irish fiction might cover ten to twenty works, a microscopic amount compared to the 6,000 items mentioned in A Guide to Irish Fiction, 1650-1900. The editors of that collection lament that ’there is no single comprehensive repository of Irish fiction’. Similarly, anyone boasting of knowledge of cosy mysteries is someone who would have almost no time to publish anything about those works, given the volume of material that appears each year in that category.
How does Osman’s new egalitarianism manifest itself? The main players in The Thursday Murder Club depend, in part, on cooperation from the local police force. The We Solve Murders group has no such police connection, though Steve is a retired cop. The homogeneity, economic and otherwise, among participants in the Thursday Murder Club is absent in We Solve Murders. World-famous author Rosie has millions. Steve isn’t in Rosie’s financial league; monetarily, Rosie is Manchester City to Steve’s Grimsby Town. Not that Steve covets Rosie’s riches. Steve is content with life in his village where he craves the camaraderie found at his regular pub quizzes. He’s insistent about his quizzes: ‘I’ve put my priorities on hold for a number of days now. I’ve been tied up, I’ve been threatened with a gun, I’ve been in a helicopter with a hangover, and I’ve eaten kale. Now, sit down, shut up, and, for the next ninety minutes, or more if there’s a tiebreak, let me quiz.’ Steve’s Me-Moment is superseded later in the novel in his agreement to join the collective.
From another angle, Osman’s achievement in the cosy genre results from his being a Goldilocks of the cosy. He has found a middle ground between writerly cosies and more popular cosies, sometimes dismissed as ‘light entertainment’, according to Phyllis Betz. The range of authors and styles within the cosy category is fairly wide, driven by publishers capitalising on niche readerships, for example, the hairdresser Bubbles Yablonsky mystery series. Thus, the foggy boundaries for what counts as a cosy. Still, the difference between the writerly and popular cosy can be spotted in the following two openings, one from Stig Abell’s Death Under a Little Sky (the writerly cosy) and Thyme for Death by Susan Wittig Albert.
Abell: ‘It is a long way, as the heron flies, between lights in this part of the countryside. There is much silence and gloom in between, though the air is never completely still. Things rustle and murmur; creatures slink and scurry. Not just animals, but the occasional human too. The expanse is too forgiving for those with malign intent, and you can disappear into the twilit softness with great, alarming ease.’
Albert: ‘If I’d known how the week was going to turn out I would have sent it back first thing Monday and asked for a refund.’
Osman lands between those two styles of prose. He benefits from attracting readers who might fancy the attributes of ‘light entertainment’ found, say, in Carlene O’Connor’s Murder in an Irish Bookshop, as well as those from what might be described as highbrow mysteries (Tana French). In the same way that John Banville’s detective Strafford in The Drowned admits to being a snob for reading The Times instead of the Daily Mail, some less democratised cosy audiences prefer Banville, Louise Penny, Stig Abell, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, or any author with an umlaut, rather than cosies with punny titles like one from a wine country mystery series called Seven Deadly Zins (Zin = Zinfandel).
With the latter kind of cosies, the ‘light entertainment’, the fabric of the narrative tends to be amusing and breezy, more lace than tweed. Sex happens off the page, if mentioned at all. Scores of comfort-centric cosies (in Dutch, cosiness – gezellig – is an interior design feature), not part of the crime or true crime genres, include beloved felines or canines as a means of maintaining a playful gentleness alongside a strong attachment to atmosphere from specific locations like lighthouses, old hotels, bookstores, manor houses, bakeries, or bed and breakfasts. This kind of cosy sometimes also comes with a large dollop of Brexit-like nostalgia. Remember that it is only within the last decade that ‘Midsomer Murders’ included actors of colour in its cast. Kate Atkinson writes in Death at the Sign of the Rook, ‘The Murder Mysteries were set in some mythical pre-war England where vicars came to tea and jolly girls played tennis and the hierarchy of the class system was firmly in place. You could get away with a lot in this kind of fictional England without being blackballed. People hankered after it, they just didn’t like to admit it.’
Osman preserves several elements of cosies mentioned above. For instance, Steve cares for a cat named Trouble. Osman also flaunts a sense of humour, which is likely to trouble critics of capitalism who prefer even their always qualified heroes melancholic or omnisciently sarcastic. ideally both. Current evidence suggests Osman isn’t looking to be a saviour in that context.
Osman’s new series foregrounds the present in ways some so-called ‘light entertainment’ cosies tend to avoid given their focus on an imaginary past. By contrast, Osman pushes readers immediately into the AI-ridden present. The narrator shows us that the villain uses ChatGPT to conceal his identity, to spit out prose in the style of an English gentleman. Like that connoisseur of the middle way Goldilocks, he honours some of the genre’s traditions and simultaneously integrates contemporary bits, like influencers, encrypted messages, and isotonic water. Result? A tale that is ‘just right’, that means a tale more accommodating to an open-ended public, to a ‘we’ that chooses responsibility for a murderful world, though it’s possible to pretend that’s no concern of ours (‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’) by treating murders as delightful puzzles. Osman’s message, expressed through the character who introduces the idea of a business entitled We Solve Murders, is that we damage ourselves and our community unless we, all of us, are open to caring about all the murders. Not that all readers of We Solve Murders will care, but Osman’s characters dwell on the possibility that we all can care. Osman’s ‘we’ stretches toward universality.
1/2/2025
Bruce Krajewski is translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender’s Kant for Children (De Gruyter).
