The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
Published 2020 · 103,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · cozy mystery, crime fiction, humor, contemporary fiction
How hard is The Thursday Murder Club to read?
The Thursday Murder Club scores 32 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Osman writes in plain, contemporary British English — pub talk, tabloid slang, the clipped vocabulary of policing and property development. There's no technical jargon beyond the occasional procedural term (SOCO, PM report), and those are explained in context as soon as they appear.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Short declarative sentences and fast dialogue dominate; paragraphs rarely run past a few lines. Joyce's diary entries are even more clipped, written the way a chatty friend talks rather than the way a novelist composes.
- Abstraction: 24 out of 100
- The book stays close to plot and character — who lied, who had a motive, who was where on Wednesday night. There's no philosophical digression; even its handling of aging and death works through concrete scenes (a chess game, a diary entry) rather than abstract statement.
- Information density: 38 out of 100
- A four-person ensemble, a police-procedural B-plot, and a decades-old cold case running alongside the main murder ask readers to hold several threads at once. But each thread is signposted clearly with chapter headers and POV markers, so the density never taxes attention the way a genuinely difficult book would.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- The novel alternates close third-person chapters among Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim, and Donna with first-person diary entries from Joyce, so readers piece together the case from partial views the way the characters do. Elizabeth in particular withholds her real background from both the reader and her friends, forcing some inference — but the narration is never unreliable about what's actually happening.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- This is plot-and-character-driven cozy crime, not an allegorical or image-heavy text. The convent-grounds setting and the recurring Jigsaw Room carry light thematic resonance — piecing together fragments, life built over an older life — but nothing approaching sustained symbolism.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Osman's comic timing runs throughout — Joyce's dry asides, Ron's blunt non-sequiturs, the gap between Elizabeth's mild manner and her lethal competence — but the book means what it says about grief, dementia, and friendship. The irony is tonal seasoning, not a structural device the reader has to decode.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- Like most traditional whodunits, the novel withholds the killer's identity until the final chapters but ties off every thread by the end — motive explained, loose ends resolved, the Club back at their Thursday table. That's genre-standard mystery suspense, not the sustained ambiguity of literary fiction.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Five rotating POVs (four club members plus Donna) and a present-day murder investigation braided with a decades-old cold case give the book more moving parts than a single-track thriller, closer to Midnight's Children's flashback-heavy structure in mechanics if not in scope. The timeline itself, though, stays mostly linear and easy to follow.
How The Thursday Murder Club is regarded
The Thursday Murder Club holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.