59 pages • 1 hour read
Richard OsmanThe Man Who Died Twice
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Authorial Context: Richard Osman and The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman is a British author, producer, and television presenter. Born in Essex, he studied Politics and Sociology at Trinity College, Cambridge. Osman stated that being raised in a female-dominated household (his father left when he was nine years old) influenced his desire to create strong women in his fiction. Coopers Chase, the setting of the Thursday Murder Club novels, was inspired by the retirement village where his mother now lives.
Osman’s interest in popular culture and background as a television producer is evident in his fiction. The Thursday Murder Club novels contain frequent references to British daytime TV programs such as Bargain Hunt and Homes Under the Hammer. Meanwhile, the characters who comprise the club were inspired by the 1980s television show The A-Team. Like the TV series, Osman aimed to bring together a contrasting group of characters whose skills complement one another. Osman’s writing style is also influenced by the format of TV dramas, incorporating short snappy scenes that jump from one character and location to another.
While The Man Who Died Twice can be read as a standalone book, events from the first novel in the series inform and set the stage for the sequel. The Thursday Murder Club follows four retirees investigating a series of murders. The action centers on a building development at Coopers Chase, which controversially entails demolishing the Garden of Eternal Rest. However, the building developers (Tony Curran and Ian Ventham) are murdered before construction can start. Meanwhile, an unidentified skeleton is found in the Garden of Eternal Rest.
The Thursday Murder Club investigates these deaths, enlisting the help of PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson. Their investigations lead back to Penny: a former police officer in a coma at Cooper’s Chase hospital. The skeleton in the graveyard is revealed to be a murderer killed by Penny when she failed to bring him to justice. Penny’s husband, John, murdered Ian Ventham to prevent the skeleton and his wife’s crime from being discovered. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s friend Bogdan turns out to be the murderer of Tony Curran as, years earlier, the corrupt businessman murdered one of Bogdan’s friends.
In The Thursday Murder Club, Penny, John, and Bogdan all escape conventional “justice.” Penny’s husband kills his wife and himself by lethal injection, while Stephen and Elizabeth keep Bogdan’s secret. The lack of legal process in the novel highlights a distinction between the criminal justice system and moral justice. This theme continues in The Man Who Died Twice, where gangsters, a drug dealer, and a teenage gang member meet their ends outside of the justice system. The sequel also develops the character arcs of the main protagonists and expands the scope of events beyond Coopers Chase.
Literary Context: Cozy Mystery Novels
Osman is a fan of mystery fiction, using many of the genre’s conventions in The Man Who Died Twice. Mystery novels typically feature complex, meticulously constructed plots designed to confuse or mislead readers. Centered on a crime (usually a murder), they traditionally pose two questions: Who is the murderer, and why was the victim killed? These questions are simultaneously considered by a lead investigating character or characters and the reader. The author presents a cast of possible suspects with motives. By the novel’s end, the culprit is usually brought to justice.
In The Man Who Died Twice, the central mystery is the identity of Douglas and Poppy’s murderer. The location of the missing diamonds creates a further puzzle. Osman creates a complex trail of clues for readers and the Thursday Murder Club to follow. Some are physical, such as a mirrored locket and an empty potato chip packet, while others are verbal (e.g., Douglas’s identification of a tree as the perfect site for a dead-letter drop). The author also employs the convention of red herrings to misdirect readers. An example is the way Poppy and Douglas are killed, leaving their faces almost unrecognizable. The red herring leads Elizabeth to suspect that either Douglas or Poppy may have faked their deaths. Later, Elizabeth experiences a lightbulb moment (another crime trope) when she realizes that Sue Reardon is the murderer.
In addition to the diamond theft and the murders, other subplots are introduced involving young offender Ryan Baird, drug dealer Connie Johnson, mafioso Frank Andrade Jr., and money launderer Martin Lomax. In the novel’s conclusion, the author follows genre conventions by exposing and punishing all the perpetrators. However, his investigators “bend the law” to do so. In the novel’s concluding chapter, a final mystery is solved as the identity of the “man who died twice” is revealed. The titular character is the husband of Sylvia Finch, who had dementia before his death.
The Man Who Died Twice can be further categorized into the subgenre of cozy mystery. Cozy mysteries exploit the contrast between violent crime and a genteel setting. More lighthearted than hardboiled detective fiction or crime noir, they often blend mystery, suspense, and humor. Cozy mysteries also usually feature an amateur investigator who is underestimated by others. The subgenre is most famously represented by Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Christie’s influence is clear in Osman’s elderly yet formidable protagonists and the deceptively idyllic setting of Coopers Chase.
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