Murder, We Solve

Put aside pickleball. Join a murder club.

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, snooping.

Anyone paying attention knows what awaits us as we get older: solving murders. It’s practically demanded of us, if you go by books and film series. Our golden years are meant to bring criminals to heel, ideally with a quirky group of friends.

Eventually, we all become Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer and amateur detective played by Angela Lansbury in the TV series Murder, She Wrote.

God help the neighbors, because wherever Jessica is, murder follows. So much so, the town sheriff ruefully describes her hometown, Cabot Cove, as “the death capital of Maine.” In the last Murder, She Wrote episode Jessica revealed her responsibility for all of them:

“I was searching for verisimilitude in my novels,” she says.

I made that last bit up.

There are over 72 titles listed on Goodreads’ “Senior Sleuths” page. At the top of the list, unsurprisingly, is Miss Marple, the original gangsta Agatha Christie creation, and Murder at the Vicarage.

But there are many other great characters. The retired grandmother Mrs. Pollifax, heroine of a series by Dorothy Gilman, grows tired of garden club meetings, and so joins the CIA and becomes an agent. She is underestimated by the bad guys and outwits them all.

Then there’s 60-year-old teashop owner Vera Wong, conceived by Chinese-Indonesian author Jesse Sutanto. When murder comes to the teashop, Vera decides to solve it herself, knowing “she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could.” The title of the book, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, is genius.

Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce Ducote star in the Southern Ladies Mystery series by Miranda James. They are 80 and 84, respectively. They are described as “two snoopy sisters” who use their southern charm to catch killers. Murderers stand zero chance against such a superpower.

My favorite is The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The four Murder Club members and amateur sleuths are all retirees—a spy, a psychiatrist, a nurse, and a trade union leader. They live in a posh retirement community in bucolic Kent, England. If we have to leave our homes, Coopers Chase Retirement Village seems like the place we’d fantasize about—heated indoor pool, Jacuzzi, steam room, manicured gardens and walking trails, guest lecturers, jigsaw room. Even the food is good. Best of all, there are plenty of murders for the Thursday Murder Club to solve. You can’t go for a walk without tripping on a body.

One thing all these detectives share? They are considered “meddlesome” by the hapless police. “Meddlesome” is a word that’s often used in a crime context. Mystery, Inc.—the mystery-solving foursome of Fred, Shaggy, Daphne and Velma in Scooby-Doo—inevitably hear the phrase, “And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddlesome kids” by the criminals they expose.

It’s no mystery why so many of the main characters are women. I think the writers, women and men alike, are giving a literary finger to societies that refuse to acknowledge older women’s existence (which allows them to do their detective work unnoticed).

Many are widows, not lonely or sad, but fully engaged with life, family, friends, and crime. Useful to, if not appreciated by, the local constabulary.

What could be better than that?

I look forward to my own second act of solving murders, when it’s my time. I’m not terribly hard-boiled, but with a group of like-minded busybodies around me, I have no doubt we can annoy the police and keep death at bay—the murderers’ next victims’, and our own.