Better than a Homicide Detective by Richard Osman - Mystery Readers Journal: Senior Sleuths (36:3)

Richard Osman's Author! Author!essay appeared in Mystery Readers Journal: Senior Sleuths (Volume 36: No. 3, Fall 2020). Since then Richard Osman has published several more mysteries in his delightful Thursday Murder Club series. The Senior Sleuth issue of Mystery Readers Journal is still available in PDF and print format. Check out the Table of Contents.  Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.

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Richard Osman: Better than a Homicide Detective

The detectives in my novel The Thursday Murder Club are four very unlikely friends, all in their seventies. Elizabeth, a former spy; Joyce, a former nurse; Ibrahim, still a psychiatrist; and Ron, a once-infamous labour activist.

I have been asked time and again why I chose older people as my sleuths. And the answer is simple. Because of my Mum.

My Mum, Brenda, is 78 years old and, in all honesty, I would trust her to solve a murder far more than I would trust anyone else. To explain why, I thought I should write you a little list. My list is entitled…

The Top 3 Reasons My Mum Would Be Better at Solving a Murder Than an Experienced Homicide Detective

My mum has an awful lot of time on her hands.

My Mum spent a lifetime as an elementary school teacher, and raised two sons single-handedly. So I want to make it clear that she has always been a hard worker. However, it is fair to say that, these days, my Mum has a pretty nice schedule. I mean, really, what is she doing all day? She gets up whenever she wants, she hangs out with her other 78-year-old mates, watches a bit of daytime TV, has a couple of glasses of wine at lunchtime, maybe a quick snooze, and then kicks back and relaxes for the rest of the day.

Which means, of course, that if one of my Mum’s neighbours was murdered, she would have plenty of time to gather evidence, interview suspects, illegally interfere with the police investigation, and track down the killer. Which is exactly what Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron do in the book.

My mum always knows who the murderer is on any TV programme or film I’ve ever watched with her.

Honestly, you’ll be 20 seconds into an episode of Murder She Wrote and my Mum will say ‘I bet the man in the orange jumper did it. He’s probably the ex-husband of the horse racing trainer, and he’s stolen some horse tranquiliser and slipped it into the drink of the local newspaper reporter.’ And we’ll watch to the end, and that’s exactly what will happen. As Jessica Fletcher leads the man in the orange jumper off to jail, I will look at my Mum and, once again, shake my head in wonder.

I should point out, however, that my Mum didn’t guess the killer in The Thursday Murder Club. So if you work out the solution you are even better than she is.

My mum is underestimated.

If you met my Mum (and it can be arranged, she loves visitors) you would leave thinking ‘what a lovely, kind, gentle woman.’ Don’t be fooled. My Mum is the cleverest person I know.

If you were a murderer (and I’m not accusing you, by the way, I’m just saying if), she would invite you round for a cup of tea and a slice of cake, you would have a lovely conversation about the weather, or the garden, and by the end of it, she will have worked out exactly how you did it. Minutes later, you would be in handcuffs.

This is Joyce’s skill in The Thursday Murder Club too. She is kind, thoughtful and polite, and she is always underestimated, and she is always overlooked. But she misses nothing.

We have got used to the people with the loudest voice and the strongest opinions running the world. My Mum, and Joyce, are a reminder that you should probably let the quiet people take charge once in a while.

My Mum would fit straight into The Thursday Murder Club. A gang of friends, from very different backgrounds, with very different experiences, who team up to solve whatever case you put in front of them.

They are clever and loyal, they have seen great happiness and great sadness, they are funny, they are unorthodox and they are old enough to not care too much for the rules. They are kind and ingenious, they value their friendship and they respect their differences. And—and this really can’t be stressed enough—they do have an awful lot of time on their hands.

The story is full of twists, full of dark misdeeds, full of mystery and full of suspects. But, at its heart, it’s about the brilliance of a generation of older people, who, we all know, can turn their hand to anything. They share my Mum’s heart and soul and intelligence.

So when people ask me why I have chosen a group of sleuths in their mid-seventies, my real answer is ‘why on Earth would I choose anyone else?’

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Richard Osman has worked as an executive producer on numerous UK shows. Richard’s popularity and tremendous knowledge of trivia led to him presenting his own BBC quiz show and several others, as well as being the host of Pointless with 7 million views. He is also a regular on panel shows and writes a column for the Radio Times.

Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.

MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL: SENIOR SLEUTHS (36:3)

Mystery Readers Journal: Senior Sleuths (Volume 36: 3, Fall 2020) is available as a PDF and hardcopy. Subscriber copies should arrive this week. PDF Contributor Copies went out. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.

MYSTERY READERS JOURNAL:
SENIOR SLEUTHS (Volume 36:3)
Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES

• I Want to Be Mrs. Pollifax When I Grow Up by Patricia Cook
• Marlowe’s Last Bow by Jonathan Woods
• Supreme Senior Sleuths by Robert J. Stern

AUTHOR! AUTHOR!

• Difficult Endings by John Harvey
• Yooper Sleuthing in the Golden Years by Deb Baker
• Senior Sleuths Can Be Geezers or Geezerettes by Mike Befeler
• The Silvering Sleuth by Baron R. Birtcher
• Cat Caliban and M.J. Smith by D. B. Borton
• My Senior Sleuth by Garry Disher
• Observations Lead to Older Detective Duo by Carl Brookins
• Sixty is the New Forty by Robert Dugoni
• Write the Age You Know by Kaitlyn Dunnett
• How Quickly Does Your Detective Age? by Martin Edwards
• Subjected to History’s Judgment by Daniel Friedman
• A Conversion with Bronson by L.C. Hayden
• Detectives of a Certain Age by Richard Helms
• A Different Kind of Sleuth by Russell Hill
• Confronting Golden Ageism by Helen Jacey
• From the Golden Girls to Jessica Fletcher: The Road to Poppy Harmon by Lee Hollis
• Where Age Is an Edge by Ron Katz
• Senior Sleuths and Older Writers: A Conversation by Ellen Kirschman and Terry Shames
• Rancho de Taos by Gay Toltl Kinman
• White-Haired Love by Chris Knopf
• Who You Calling Senior? by Vicki Lane
• Why I Wrote the Gladdy Books by Rita Lakin
• “See You Later” But Not “Goodbye” by Gayle Leeson
• The World’s Oldest Working Cop by Peter Lovesey
• My Senior Sleuths Are Still on the Case by Ed Lynskey
• Sleuths of a Certain Age by Annette Mahon
• Old Age Can Be Deadly, Unless You Are the Fog Ladies by Susan McCormick
• A Senior Author Tries Sleuthing by Rosemary Mild
• Molly and the Inspector by Larry Mild
• Sneaking Into the Life of My Protagonist by Radine Trees Nehring
• Better than a Homicide Detective by Richard Osman
• Considering Writing a Senior-Themed Cozy Mystery? I Did. Here’s What I Learned by Carol Novis
• Senior Sleuths: Not Dead Yet! by Ang Pompano
• A Much Younger Sleuth by Cynthia Riggs
• Murder and Mayhem in a Modern Noir Style by M. Glenda Rosen (aka Marcia Rosen)
• Old Folks Are Just Neat by Nancy Swing
• Why My Protagonist Is a “Woman of a Certain Age” by Ilene Schneider
• Edward Gorey, Detective by C J Verburg
• Mysteries After Sixty by Livia Washburn

COLUMNS

• Mystery in Retrospect: Reviews by Sandie Herron, Lesa Holstine, L.J. Roberts, Lucinda Surber
• In Short: You’re Never Too Old by Marvin Lachman
• Just the Facts: A Cop for Three Quarters of a Century! by Jim Doherty
• Real Italy Mysteries by Cathy Pickens
• Crime Seen: Miss Marple and Beyond by Kate Derie
• POV: The First Hundred Years Are the Hardest by Rita Lakin
• From the Editor’s Desk by Janet A. Rudolph

AGING HEROES: Guest post by Kevin P. Thornton

The next issue of the Mystery Readers Journal will focus on Senior Sleuths. Here's a great article from Kevin P. Thornton that expands this upcoming issue. Thanks, Kevin!

Kevin P. Thornton:
Aging Heroes

When Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser story The Godwulf Manuscript was published in 1973, the author was 40 years old and a Korean War veteran. His hero Spenser was 37 and had also been on the same battlegrounds. When the last Parker-penned novel Sixkill came out in 2010, everyone, theoretically, was 37 years older. Yet although the history of the character hadn’t changed - he was still a Korean War Veteran – his age also seemed to remain the same. One of Spenser’s prouder boasts made in several of the early books was he once fought Jersey Joe Walcott, the former world boxing champion. In the real world Walcott retired from the ring in 1953. Had he been alive in 2010, he would have been 96. Parker may have ignored it, but his readers knew. Spenser was getting on a bit.

Every series writer, if she or he is successful enough, will at some point face the problem of aging heroes. Spenser at 37 is youngish, brash, cocky and nearly able to leap small buildings. Nearly four decades on he can still do one arm push ups, and while his adopted son ages from 15 to 37 in real time before he too stops, Spenser and Hawk seem in suspended animation. Realist fans are left to deal with the incongruities of a 74 year old still behaving as an overgrown teenager.

Parker’s way to resolve the mathematical conundra his success had caused was to ignore it. People were still buying the books and Spenser had become a beloved and genre-redefining character, able to survive the occasional pedantic question. It is interesting to note however that later in Parker’s career when he created new series characters Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone, their ages were not so sharply defined and they were able to hide behind an assertive vagueness.

The mathematics of aging in fictional detective series may be divided, broadly speaking, into three categories: 1) real time, 2) meh! it’s fiction, and 3) the mathematical finesse of space in time or vice versa. Spenser falls firmly into the second category, allowing readers to reconcile the numerical anomalies in their own way. Stone and Randall meanwhile are characters from the third group. While the world advances around them, they age in a much slower manner and there are less incongruities. While dogs age and die and phones move from the wall to the pocket, Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone hardly change.

Real time writers, on the other hand, either set out to write a character who ages with them or end up doing so by accident. Both Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and Ian Rankin’s John Rebus have grown old apace with their stories and have fallen into police retirement, and the challenge their writers face is keeping the characters relevant even as they lose their place in the squad room. Rankin and Connelly have done so, others have not, among them Sara Paretsky – more on her later.

Creating a long-running series featuring a much-loved character can be both a blessing and a curse. As time passes in the real world the writer has to decide how to deal with a fictional timeline. Ruth Rendell had Inspector Wexford still solving crimes in his retirement whereas Sue Grafton keeps Kinsey Milhone at the same age and in the same historical context. Both are real time solutions, both work for the respective characters.

Twenty five years into her most famous series featuring Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, Val McDermid has thought about their ages, but not to the extent it troubles her. “I feel an affection for Tony and Carol, a sympathy for what they’ve been through. Who knows how old they are? They’ve probably aged about one year for every book, rather than in real time. It’s fiction and I can do what I want. I guess they’re about mid-40s.”

John Connolly realized this right at the beginning of his series. “The spark for Charlie Parker was an image of a man going to visit the grave of his wife and child, flowers in the back of the car. For me the big thing was letting the characters grow older. You can take the Patricia Cornwell route, which is to keep your characters a certain age all the way through but the series can’t really develop if you do that because you’re just going to keep repeating certain tropes, the character is set in aspic. The other option is to do what somebody like James Lee Burke has done with Robicheaux, who ages with the writer effectively. Robicheaux is into his early 70s, so the books become meditations on mortality.”

So what is a series writer to do? It is difficult. Most writers don’t know at the time their first book is published that it will become a series. Quite often, if you go back and reread an author’s first book you can see places where a writer might have made her own life easier, had she but known of the looming success. Would Lee Child have changed Reacher if he knew they’d be together – author and character – for a quarter of a century? Was Jesse Stone Parker's attempt at a younger better Spenser?

Perhaps one of the better ways to deal with is the pragmatic approach adopted by Sara Paretsky who aged VI Warshawski in real time until both writer and PI hit fifty. VI stayed there as Sara moved on, acknowledging that part of the attraction of such characters is that they are vibrant heroes able to change their world and keep up with the adventure they encounter. In VI’s case aging in real time would have been a disservice both to the protagonist and the readers.

It would be much easier to write a series character if we knew it was going to be a series. However not knowing doesn’t mean there aren’t timely things a writer can do.

1. Try to avoid tying a character to a specific historical event. If your character was twenty-five serving in the Falklands, no amount of jiggery-pokery can change that he is a sixty-three-year-old pensioner in 2020, and not the strapping Royal Marine he once was.

2. Always try to write younger than you are, so that by book fifteen when you the writer are hitting seventy, your famous protagonist might only be sixty. Readers are accepting older heroes more and more, and it is easier to write from experience. You know what sixty feels like when you are seventy, it’s hard to imagine eighty from the same viewpoint.

3. Trust in your writing and your characters. At the end of the day, fans stick with you because they are invested in your hero and his life. They may sigh inwardly at the anomaly of an OAP-aged Boston detective bench-pressing twice his own weight, but they will stay for your writing. That’s what brought them to you in the first place.

4. Create a hero you hope you can live and grow with. Agatha Christie at one point hated Poirot and wanted to kill him off, Conan Doyle did so with his detective, and Lee Child recently gave Reacher to his brother to continue writing. If you like who you created, it makes it easier to continue with her/him.

5. Be careful with names. When Wilbur Smith wrote his first novel – When the Lion Feeds – his hero was Sean Courtney, pronounced Shawn. Half the buying public insisted on calling him Seen Courtney, which set the Author’s teeth on edge. Where possible, pick a name that’s easy, you may be stuck with it for a long while.

6. Never try to explain the time/age/space anomaly in too much detail. It ups your nerd ranking way beyond where a mystery writer should be, and most of the readers don’t care.

The exception to rule 6 is Reginald Hill. The creator of Joe Sixsmith, and Dalziel and Pascoe, wrote a foreword to the original edition of One Small Step wherein he imagined a conversation he should have had with Andy Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell, see rule 5) and Peter Pascoe. In it he expounds his theory of dual chronology, touched on lightly elsewhere in this article though not with Hill’s delicacy. As Pascoe says to his author “. . .[so] we should regard historical time, i.e. your time, and fictive time, i.e. our time, as passenger trains running on parallel lines at different speeds?”. Hill concurs.

There is much more to this delightful interlude, and it is worth hunting it down to read and savour. Suffice it to say that Hill explains the inconsistencies of time within space in his series as ‘the chronic dualism of serial literature’, which may not cover all the anomalies discussed here, but is certainly a most elegant way to describe them.

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Kevin P. Thornton has over twenty short stories published and available in reputable sales outlets, He is seven time finalist in the Crime Writers of Canada annual Awards. He has never won. He lives in Northern Canada in a town that has been wholly or partly evacuated four times recently due to floods or fires. It’s not that he is unlucky, but don’t believe him if he says he has winning lottery numbers. He is a past or current member of the MWA, CWA, CWC, ITW, SMFS, the Sisters in Crime, Mesdames of Mayhem and Writers’ Guild of Alberta. He like to belong.