On a warm evening in the garden of an English village pub, a woman in her prime years of fame is tapped on the shoulder by a stranger. She has sold books in the tens of millions. She has outdrunk a legendary hellraiser and once shared a jacuzzi with an American rock band. The stranger wants her to pass a message to the local mechanic about some brake pads. Earlier, walking in, she was greeted as Steve’s mate. This is roughly two hundred pages before anybody realises what We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman has been about the whole time.
A Corpse in Tuscany and a Name Nobody Can Verify
The plot, briefly and without spoiling a thing. A detective agency bankrolled by that novelist, staffed by a retired Metropolitan Police officer and his close-protection-trained daughter-in-law, has been trading for half a year without solving anything. A client finally turns up: an English millionaire who sells wellness supplements containing nothing whatsoever, from a villa in the hills above Lucca. One of his bodyguards has been found dead outside the front door with a note attached, badly spelled, bearing the name of a Scandinavian rival said to have killed most of his competition.
The client’s insistence that the rival is innocent is the loose thread of We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman, and pulling it takes the trio to Barcelona, a Swedish penthouse, a country club melting in a California August, and a bridge and whist society in a Spanish basement. Everybody they interview describes a different man. One calls him a monster. One calls him a friend. One says he does not exist. A fourth is certain he is not remotely Scandinavian.
The Ledger Running Underneath We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman
Osman has always written well about ageing. Here he writes about something narrower and more uncomfortable: the moment the world stops offering you a price it once offered.
The novelist’s new release lands at number five and slides to fourteen. Her agent has died and been replaced by a cheerful twenty-six-year-old who suggests she might go viral by wearing two different hats. Her publisher, after a quarter of a century, declines to renew. She is fine, she keeps saying, and she is not fine, and the reader watches her calculate how many falls she has left in her.
She is not alone in the accounting. A young man in Hampshire has returned to contract killing because an algorithm took his job at a City brokerage and did it better. The client’s ex-wife spends a superb solo chapter talking herself out of buying a kitchen island, on the entirely sound grounds that a kitchen island requires a bigger kitchen, which requires a bigger house, which requires a longer driveway, at the end of which no neighbour will ever help you carry the shopping in. An office manager negotiates for a weapon in a Portsmouth alley by remembering exactly how she once priced a television weatherman playing Widow Twankey in Reading. Every one of these people is establishing what they are still worth, and the novel is quietly certain that none of them will like the answer.
The comedy never stops for any of this, which is why it lands. A pub regular explains that Bournemouth has no ring road but a system of interconnected A-roads performing the function of one. Two men agree that if you were invisible your clothes would not be, and therefore invisibility is only usable naked, and therefore best avoided in a cinema. A grown man learns which animal steak comes from. The book is extremely funny on the page rather than in summary, which is rarer than it sounds.
Where It Falters
Three reservations about We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman, none of them fatal, and none of them the sort of thing anyone will remember a month later.
- The travel is decorative. Three continents, and several of them amount to one interview and a return flight. The itinerary is doing less work than in the first book.
- The middle stalls. For a long central stretch the agency is establishing what did not happen and who was not responsible, which is accurate police procedure and inert storytelling.
- The client is a blank. Deliberately, and the reason eventually satisfies, but he sits at the centre of the novel for two hundred pages as an absence rather than a character.
Against that, the Spanish Interpol officer who arrives in a disintegrating hatchback is the best comic creation Osman has managed since the Thursday Murder Club began, and the aftermath of an unprovoked assault on a gentle man is handled with unusual care, right down to the flashbacks and nightmares he refuses to name in front of his friend.
Where We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman Leaves You
Two interludes dated 2001, both in first person, both very short, do more structural work than anything else in the book. They are also the only places where the novel drops its manners.
There is a running joke about detective fiction throughout. One character does not know that Sherlock Holmes is fictional. Another compares a former superior unfavourably with both Holmes and Poirot, on the grounds that the real man was reliably wrong, which at least made him useful. Readers who want the source material can still get the original stories for nothing. The gag is not decoration. Every figure in this novel is being read by somebody as a type rather than a person, and the book keeps demonstrating how much easier that is than looking properly.
The last fifty pages are very good indeed. Not because the solution is dazzling, though it is neat, but because Osman has spent the whole novel establishing that a reputation costs nothing to manufacture and everything to maintain, and then collects on it. What lingers afterwards is not the murders. It is a widower on a bench talking to a brass plaque, and a woman deciding, on a hospital floor, that she is not finished.
If You Finish This and Want More
We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman is the second entry in the We Solve Murders sequence, and the obvious next stop is We Solve Murders itself, which introduces this quartet and explains why leaving Hampshire causes one of them such visible pain. Anyone arriving cold will follow the plot without difficulty and will miss most of the feeling. For the same author in his other register, The Impossible Fortune is the most recent Thursday Murder Club and the warmer of the two series. Readers who came chiefly for the amateur outmanoeuvring professionals will enjoy Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto, and anyone who liked watching a case assembled from what people are prepared to claim about each other should try The Killer Question by Janice Hallett.
Further afield, Mick Herron’s Slow Horses covers similar ground on obsolescence with considerably less mercy, and Anthony Horowitz’s The Word Is Murder plays comparable games with who gets to narrate a crime and why anyone should believe them.
