Recommended Crime Fiction

[HerlockSholmes]

I don’t know if anyone else has read any of these books but I have to recommend the crime novels of Richard Osman, beginning with The Thursday Murder Club. To be honest I would never had decided to read them had they not been recommended to me by a friend from the USA so I decided to give them a go and I don’t regret it for a second.

I won’t go into detail but it’s basically set in an upmarket retirement village in Sussex (on the south coast of England) Four friends get together to form The Thursday Murder Club to look into unsolved crimes. The four friends are Joyce (a former nurse, now widowed) Ron (a former Trade Union organiser) Ibrahim (a psychiatrist) and Elizabeth (a former high ranking MI6 officer who’s writer husband suffers from dementia)

The stories are cleverly written, the characters are brilliant and the humour is great (with a fair bit of poignancy thrown in) Think of ‘a well written combination of Agatha Christie and Midsomer Murders) They’re difficult to put down.

I’ve read three of the five written so far and I’ll be picking up the fourth next week.

The first one was also made into a movie which I saw on Netflix just before Christmas. It was really well done. Joyce was played by Celia Imrie, Ron was played by Pierce Brosnan, Ibrahim was played by Ben Kingsley and Elizabeth was played by Helen Mirren. The bad guy in the story was played by David Tennant.

There’s one great moment where Helen Mirren disguised herself and looks just as she did when she played the Queen. I noticed straight away then Celia Imrie said “You look just like The Queen.”🙂

👍👍👍

[besleybean]

Yeah I have only seen the film, not read any of the books.

[HerlockSholmes]

I read the first two before I saw the movie and then read the third after I’d seen it. I was wondering about how I’d react to the casting because we all get a mental picture of the characters and there were two that I struggled to visualise. One was Helen Mirren as Elizabeth because I’d pictured her as more of a matronly Miss Marple type figure and no one would call Helen Mirren ‘matronly’ or compare her to Joan Hickson or Margaret Rutherford but it worked in my opinion. The other was the casting of Pierce Brosnan as Ron. I pictured him more like the late Bob Hoskins. Mainly of course it was because I picture Brosnan in a tuxedo playing Bond. He was really good though. 

It looks like a follow-up movie is on the cards too although it hasn’t been given the final go ahead. Both cast and director are all keen apparently. It’s a petty that Messrs Cumberbatch, Freeman and Gatiss don’t appear to have that same level of enthusiasm.