The new Seniors of Crime Fiction, on Page and Screen

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I may not yet have officially reached the “old broad” stage of my life — at least, not in the sense where I might reasonably take advantage of a degree of social invisibility to try my hand at solving and/or committing crime with the same kind of impunity as the (mostly) over-sixties in the list below, but I still know how to spot a trend when I see one. And while the elderly in general — and older women, more specifically — have a long legacy as superior amateur sleuths in crime and detective fiction, there’s no denying that there has been a boom in contemporary takes on the Miss Marple model in the last few years, both on the page and on the small screen.

To that end, we’ve pulled together this list of books and shows featuring older characters turning to a life of crime in their old age. Thankfully, most, like Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher, are using the invisibility old age affords them, alongside the skills and social connections they developed in their working years, to solve murders, but a few are turning that same combination to a darker end. Basically, whatever you’re in the mood for, there will be something for you here.

Note: On the television side of things, you’ll notice there’s a pretty clear frontrunner in the business of producing this kind of fare of late (rhymes with schmaycorn), so if that’s a streaming subscription you’ve been putting off getting, consider this list a good reason to finally give it a shot.

THE SLEUTHS

 

Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

Arguably the biggest mainstream mystery series to hit American television in the last few years, Only Murders in the Building leans hard into the intergenerational friction sparked by Mabel (Selena Gomez), Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Martin Short) bonding over 1) their love of true crime podcasts and 2) IRL murder. As with every other title on this list, there’s as much comedy as there is investigatively useful lived experience to be mined from Charles and Oliver’s elder statesmen status, but the humor never comes from a mocking or unsympathetic position. After all, as the digital/social media age races ever forward, there but for the grace of Google go any of us.

 

Queens of Mystery (Acorn TV)

While Detective Sgt. Matilda Stone’s trio of mystery-writing aunts might be considered by some to be too young for this particular list — pension age is 66 in the UK, and actresses Siobhan Redmond (Jane), Sarah Woodward (Beth), and Julie Graham (Cat) are 63, 59, and 57 respectively — between their signature materteral meddling and the fact that AARP kicks in here in the states at age 50, I’m going to go ahead and invite them all in. Because what fun the three of them have, sticking their collective noses in their niece’s professional business! And what a fantastic example of the thesis anchoring so many of the properties on this list, the idea that once a woman has 30 in the rearview mirror, they might as well be invisible in public life. Who better, honestly, to start a sideline as an amateur sleuth?

 

Darby and Joan (Acorn TV)

One of the rare procedurals to traffic in all the mysteries daily life has to offer other than murder (although yes, a murder mystery is what kicks this particular partnership off), Acorn TV’s Australian-set summer series Darby and Joan stars Bryan Brown and Greta Scacchi as a pair of retirees — him an Aussie police detective, her an English ED nurse — who literally run into each other on a road in rural northern Australia and then proceed to spend the next several months tootling around together in Joan’s cozy RV, solving murders, nailing kidnappers, and finding lost kids. There’s an underlying mystery about Joan’s recently deceased husband who appears to have spent their marriage running from a secret, sordid past, but that arc is ultimately less compelling than the week-to-week misadventures and slow kindling new romance between Jack and Joan, themselves. Bonus factor: Diesel, Jack’s loyal shaggy sheepdog.

 

Harry Wild (Acorn TV)

When star and Executive Producer Jane Seymour got together with the rest of the Harry Wild cast for the TCA Winter Press Tour earlier this year, she stressed how glaring the dearth of meaningful leading roles is for women after 70, and how powerful a motivating factor that was for her in taking on this particular project. To that end, Harry Wild finds Seymour stepping into the exhaustingly pedantic shoes of a just-retired Dublin literature professor who finds herself filling her newly empty days by partnering up with a local delinquent teen (Rohan Nedd) to meddle in her Detective Inspector son’s official police business. So, a bit of Queens of Mystery mixed up with a bit of Only Murders in the Building, but set in Ireland.

 

Magpie Murders (PBS/Masterpiece Mystery, but also in print, by Anthony Horowitz)

It may be true that “real world” protagonist of this meta mystery series from British novelist Anthony Horowitz, crime fiction editor Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville), is *technically* old enough to be looking up the UK’s official state pension age, but no one who’s met her would ever dream of suggesting retirement’s anywhere in her near future — not even her attractive, attentive, literature-loving Greek partner, Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), who’s looking to start a second career running a bed and breakfast on Crete and wants Lesley to make the leap with him.

 

The Thursday Murder Club (series), by Richard Osman

While the endlessly delightful Thursday Murder Club books will *eventually* be on the big screen (in a film produced by Steven Spielberg, no less!), the series currently exists solely in print and audio form. Oh, well, and on Instagram, where Joyce’s charming and unintentionally hilarious in-book account from the series’ second entry, The Man Who Died Twice, makes the Thursday Murder Club’s fictional exploits feel real, all the way down to Alan and his two balls (#Dog #Instagram). Considering the holds list for The Thursday Murder Club is still months long at every library I have access to, I think it’s safe to say that Osman’s meticulously imagined world of a quarter of murder-obsessed retirees — which just saw its third title, The Bullet that Missed, hit shelves earlier this month — is set to have enough cultural staying power to rival some of the Golden Age greats.

 

The Marlow Murder Club, by Robert Thorogood

Where The Thursday Murder Club uses the unlikely friendships of affinity that can be made in retirement communities as a scaffold upon which to build its intentionally collegial crime adventures, Robert Thorogood’s recently released The Marlow Murder Club starts from the understanding that adulthood can just be so lonely, and uses the restless yearning for connection that such loneliness engenders to power the budding intergenerational friendship between a reclusive 77-year-old crossword compiler Judith Potts, a middle-aged dog-lover, and a young vicar’s wife that’s at its small-town-mystery core. Less charming from the outset, but more clever and broadly uplifting by the end.

 

The Postscript Murders, by Elly Griffiths

The first book in Elly Griffiths’ new-ish Harbinder Kaur series, The Stranger Diaries, reads like any solid modern British detective novel. But with the release of the second installment, The Postscript Murders, in late 2020, the series moved squarely into “Elders in Crime” territory. Not only does it open on the likely murder of a 90-year-old woman, but it features her 70-something neighbor, Edwin, getting cheerfully tangled up in the amateur, intergenerational, multi-national* investigation that quickly follows. Even better, the more it’s brought up that Peggy Smith, the murdered pensioner, seems to have had a secret life as a semi-professional, wickedly prolific “murder consultant” for some of the biggest (fictional) names in British crime fiction, the more dismissive each new purported “expert” seems to get. Possibly more convoluted than is strictly necessary, the overall effect of this book is nevertheless satisfying.

(*One of the amateur sleuths is a Ukrainian woman who moved to the UK to escape the war with Russia, which notably began in the eastern regions in 2014.)

 

THE CRIMINALS AND KILLERS

Enkelstöten [The Simple Heist] (Acorn TV)

If the pair of old friends at the heart of this thriller-adjacent Swedish crime dramedy aren’t as prone to sudden acts of violence as some of the other over-sixties on this half of the list, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still capitalizing on their social invisibility and aging into a life of serious crime. And rightly so, considering that the very reasons Jenny (Lotta Tejle) and Cecilia (Sissela Kyle) are in the dire straits they find themselves in when the series starts all stem from the social, emotional, and financial toll of reaching old age. Grim! But it makes for compelling television.

 

The Old Woman with the Knife, by Gu Byeong-mo (translated by Chi-Young Kim)

As international as the field of professional killing seems to be, so, too, are the social and career pressures placed on women as they reach “a certain age.” In Gu Byeong-mo’s South Korean bestseller The Old Woman with the Knife, these tensions manifest in how the normal processes of aging slow a body down in ways that can, for a professional killer like the 65-year-old protagonist known only as “Hornclaw,” lead to dangerous mistakes.

 

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (series), by Helene Tursten

In Helene Tursten’s Swedish hit An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, meanwhile, it shows up in the absolute serenity with which 88-year-old pensioner Maude murders anyone who gets in the way of her enjoying a an old age in ultimate comfort, knowing that even if she ended up with the most tenacious, cynical young detective assigned to the case, not one person, when faced with kindly old octagenarian, would believe even the most well-founded of professional suspicions.

 

Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Rayburn

And in Deanna Rayburn’s latest standalone, Killers of, well, a Certain Age? Delightfully, this combination of international élan and universal ageism shows up first in the way that lifelong colleagues and expert assassins Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie hop from country to country and continent to continent in their bid to both escape the “retirement” hit that’s been put out on their collective heads, and then in the repeated success they have weaponizing the sexist and ageist assumptions of everyone so dead set on killing them.

 

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