Richard Osman’s ‘The Impossible Fortune’ is less mystery, more a meditation on loss and ageing — and that’s what makes it so good

But the real mystery, as ever, lies elsewhere: in the private griefs of Osman’s four ageing protagonists at the upmarket retirement home Coopers Chase; in the daily courage it takes to face the world through one’s lowest, and in the absurd, beautiful business of staying close to people even as the world shrinks.

This is a novel about the waning of strength – physical, emotional, mental – rendered with grace, clarity, and remarkable tenderness. Elizabeth, former MI6 spy and the leader of the Thursday Murder Club, once an unflappable presence, is in the shadow of grief. She has lost her anchor, her husband Stephen, and in his absence, she finds her formidable sense of control faltering.

Elizabeth mourns not just Stephen, but the clarity of her own purpose. Osman gives her mourning space to breathe, handling this interior shift with restraint. There are no sentimental monologues, only the fog of days that seem too long and not long enough: “Always alone, and never alone: that was grief.” It is in Elizabeth’s stillness, in her recognition of life’s narrowing corridors, that Osman is at his most moving.

The courage of ordinary days

Elsewhere, Joyce finds herself contemplating joy and loneliness in equal measure. She worries about her newly-wed daughter Joanna. She worries about being patronised. She worries, in her quieter moments, about being left behind. Joyce absorbs old age with humour, patience – “My god, the older we all get, the more like children we are”, she thinks – and just enough rebellion to keep us cheering for her –“Joyce thinks that perhaps bombs are women.

Once they’ve exploded, that’s an end to it. Men are more like guns: they’re constantly reloading.” Ron still has the labour union leader’s stubborn moral backbone and machismo, hidden beneath a realisation of his increasing frailty.

Ibrahim, always gentle, unfailingly perceptive, is aware of an acute loneliness that no amount of television quiz shows can slake. Between them, Osman shows how age can strip away illusions, but not purpose, laughter or dignity.

Osman makes the unfolding of the mystery – the elements of danger, the search for suspects, the red herrings – engaging, but it never overshadows what is most affecting: what it means to grow older, to feel that life is contracting, to fear that one’s senses, one’s body, one’s mind may betray one, and yet to keep showing up, for friends, for family, and for love.

In this, his ability to blend melancholy with riotous charm places The Thursday Murder Club in the same emotional register as Steve Martin and John Hoffman’s web series Only Murders in the Building.

Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, and Martin Short in Only Murders in the Building. (Disney+ Hotstar)

Both use the trope of crime fiction to explore deeper themes: loneliness, ageing, reinvention. Just as Charles, Oliver and Mabel in Only Murders… form a makeshift family out of true-crime fandom and brokenness, Osman’s cast is bound by something richer than sleuthing: the shared knowledge of what it means to have once been in the thick of things, the awareness that time is running out and the daily decision not to accept it.

What comes after

The Impossible Fortune is, at its core, a celebration of age, or as Joyce puts it, “’What happened’ is never what defines you in life; ‘What you did next’ is what defines you.” A reminder that dignity doesn’t lie solely in how you once wore your strength or authority, but in how you carry your fragility. That humour and vulnerability, shared among friends, can be the most radical form of resilience. That memory, even as it falters, can still light the way forward.

The Impossible Fortune treats the humiliations of age – the aches and pains, the blurry edges of memory, the lack of confidence, the fear of becoming a burden – with wisdom, warmth and empathy.

And it reminds us that often, when fortune seems out of reach, when things change in the blink of an eye, when life refuses to follow a familiar course, the real mystery isn’t who did it; it’s how we keep going on when so much has already been lost.

The Impossible Fortune
Richard Osman
Penguin Viking
432 pages
Rs 899