You’d never know it from reading crime fiction, of course, but most bullets miss their target, which is probably why they manufacture so many. Happily, Richard Osman’s aim is true with The Bullet That Missed (Penguin Viking, £22), his third offering in the Thursday Murder Club series.
Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce and Ibrahim are four pensioners who live in the peaceful English coastal town of Fairhaven, and who stave off the boredom of retirement by investigating cold case murders, each bringing a certain skill set to the party — one an ex-psychiatrist, another a veteran rabble rouser, another a former spook with British intelligence, and so forth. Here they’re investigating the death of Bethany Waites, a young journalist who disappeared — presumed murdered — 10 years previously while pursuing a story about VAT fraud on a large scale.
This being the Thursday Murder Club, of course, it’s not long before they’ve hauled in a TV celebrity, a former KGB colonel and a psychopathic Viking bibliophile who specialises in cryptocurrency to push things along. The TV presenter and comedian Osman debuted with The Thursday Murder Club in 2020, and has very quickly established himself as a bestseller with a deftly crafted blend of cosy crime, deadpan comedy and intriguing characters. If you can imagine a set of investigators that are two parts Famous Five to one part Miss Marple in a story infused with the acid wit of Mick Herron, you won’t go far wrong. Hugely entertaining, dryly funny and quietly brilliant in its plotting, The Bullet That Missed is one of the most purely enjoyable crime novels of the year.
Best known as an author of sci-fi, AG Riddle is in fine genre-blending form with Lost in Time (Head of Zeus, £16.99), which opens in the near future when “one of the scientists whose invention almost eradicated crime is arrested for murdering another scientist who also helped eradicate crime”. Dr Samuel Anderson protests himself innocent of murdering his partner — business and personal — Dr Nora Thomas, but the punishment stands: as per the time machine Sam helped to create, he is sent back 201 million years to the Late Triassic, there to survive as best he can. Meanwhile, back in the near future, Sam’s daughter Adeline is doing her best to prove her father’s innocence, which — if successful — could very easily result in Adeline outing herself as the murderer. Leaning heavily on sci-fi pioneers such as HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, AG Riddle concocts a mind-bending plot that may or may not make sense (if you’re sufficiently au fait with quantum entanglement and the Fermi paradox, which your correspondent is not, you might spot a plot hole or two). If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of reader who is happy to play along when an author throws up “a quantum physics Hail Mary”, Lost in Time is tremendous fun and a breath of fresh air.
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Disorientation (Picador, £13.99), the debut from Taiwanese-American author Elaine Hsieh Chou, is narrated by Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese-American graduate student at Barnes University in Wittleburg, Massachusetts. Eight years into her dissertation on the revered Chinese-American poet Xiao-Wen Chou, Ingrid discovers a shocking truth: Xiao-Wen Chou is not dead, as everyone believes; worse, he is a white man who has spent his entire adult life in “yellow face”, hoodwinking literary America with his poems on the Chinese-American immigrant experience. And so Ingrid turns literary detective, determined to reveal the truth about Xiao-Wen Chou, even if — the horror! — she might be sabotaging her chances of tenure. Every good fictional sleuth, of course, explores the culture as she or he goes about investigating a particular crime, and Elaine Chou is superb at skewering casual racism, cultural colonisation and the pretensions of highbrow literary scholarship (“Concatenation of protohybridity,” jots down Ingrid as she strains to devise an original idea for her dissertation. “Hypertextual palimpsest. Cultural estrangement, cultural perambulation, cultural dissemination. Parsing a bricolage of a disintegrated self.”) Sharply observed, laugh-out-loud funny, Disorientation is a satire that is deadly serious about exploding “the good little immigrant myth”.
“I write books about how to write books,” declares Ernie Cunningham, the narrator of Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a skill that comes in useful when Ernie decides to record the events of a Cunningham family reunion at a remote and snowbound hotel in Australia’s skiing belt, which gets off to an inauspicious start on the first morning when it’s discovered that someone has apparently burnt to death in the middle of a snowdrift. It’s no surprise to learn, once he gets down to cases, that Ernie writes books about how to write mystery novels, and especially those that adhere to those “Commandments” devised by Ronald Knox for Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, GK Chesterton and all the other authors writing during the Golden Age of Mystery. Indeed, Ernie swears to be scrupulously honest with the reader, informing us at an early stage (and providing the relevant page numbers) of all the murders that will take place during the course of his story, and also promising that there is “only one plot-hole you could drive a truck through”. A comedian in his native Australia, Benjamin Stevenson has previously won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut (Greenlight); if meta-narrative genre mischief-making is your thing, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone will probably be your favourite book of the year.
The Indemnity and Oblivion Act was passed in 1660 to pardon crimes committed during the English Civil War, although there were some exceptions to the pardon, most notably the regicides responsible for the execution of King Charles I. Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion (Hutchinson, £22) focuses on two of the regicides, Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe, who flee evade capture and execution by fleeing across the Atlantic to America, where they believe their Puritan beliefs, and their loyal service to Oliver Cromwell, will secure their protection in the recently established Colonies. They have reckoned, however, without Richard Nayler, “a most useful shadow” whose anodyne title of Clerk to the Privy Council belies his true vocation as “an avenging fury”. Harris inserts the fictional character of Nayler into what is otherwise a novel based on historical fact, an Iago-like schemer who provides a fascinating counterpoint to the character of Whalley, who, notwithstanding his Puritan principles, plays fast and loose with the fifth commandment. The result is a wholly satisfying revenge thriller, and one firmly anchored in the chaotic worlds of post-Civil War England and the embryonic American Colonies, with both sides justifying their brutality by espousing “the righteous and revenging justice of the Lord”.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters, published by No Alibis Press
