Why We Love Richard Osman’s ‘Thursday Murder Club’ — and Other Novels With Older Sleuths

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Courtesy Berkley

A 60-year-old tea shop owner in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Vera Wong might not immediately seem like the sleuthing type, but when a dead man shows up in her store clutching a flash drive, she decides to channel her inner Sherlock Holmes. After stealing the drive, she assumes that the culprit will most likely return to the store to retrieve it, and she begins befriending and watching the customers who stop in the store as a form of detective work. Chinese Indonesian author Jesse Q. Sutanto also wrote the popular book Dial A for Aunties, which was optioned to be turned into a romantic comedy by Fresh off the Boat TV series cocreator Nahnatchka Khan.

The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher

This mystery set in an assisted-living community is full of warmth and humor. It’s centered around Florrie Butterfield, a kindhearted octogenarian who’s led a life of adventure and romance — while carrying with her a long-ago trauma. After the community’s young manager, Renata, falls to her near death from a top-floor window and ends up in a coma, Florrie and a new friend, Stanhope, try to find out what really happened. Everyone assumes it was an attempted suicide, but Florrie feels in her gut that there was foul play. As she and Stanhope piece together the puzzle, Florrie unspools her own dramatic story.

The Last Word by Elly Griffiths

Courtesy Mariner Books

Published in April, this murder mystery by British crime novelist Elly Griffiths, 60, (author of the Ruth Galloway mystery series) follows a mismatched pair of detectives who have their own agency in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex: the 84-year-old Edwin Fitzgerald, who claims to be the oldest detective in England, and the Ukrainian-born Natalka Kolisnyk, a math whiz who is a half century younger. After a local romance author is killed, the pair go undercover to investigate at a writers’ retreat at an isolated estate. When another murder takes place, they seek out the help of detective Harbinder Kaur, who is featured in three other Griffiths novels.

Lost Birds by Anne Hillerman

The Oklahoma-born novelist, 74, is the daughter of author Tony Hillerman. After his death in 2008, she continued his famous series about Navajo tribal police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, while expanding the role of a younger cop named Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito. In this latest edition, out in April, a retired Leaphorn takes on a case to find the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana (white) family but believes she is Navajo based on an old picture of herself in a Native American blanket. As he dives deep into the backstory of an adoption that might be more than it seems, Leaphorn is contacted by a man he met decades earlier, school custodian Cecil Bowlegs, whose wife has been missing for three weeks — then the call is cut short by an explosion. If you want to see more of these beloved characters, check out the AMC series Dark Winds, which follows Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon, 57) and Chee (Kiowa Gordon) in the 1970s.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

Courtesy Penguin Books

The laureate for Irish fiction from 2018 to 2021, Sebastian Barry, 68, released this acclaimed novel last year, which follows a 66-year-old recently retired policeman named Tom Kettle who lives in the shadow of a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. With his wife and two children dead, he deals with constant pain, but his self-imposed isolation is disrupted when former colleagues knock on his door and ask him to look into a cold case involving a murdered priest. Far from the realm of cozy mysteries, this is a dark and dreamlike tale that explores themes of trauma, unreliable memories and grief, but still retains some of the poetic lyricism and humane warmth you might expect from the best Irish novelists.