Louboutins and leopard-skin: The fictional crime novelist who makes my heart sing
In celebration of a scene-stealing leading lady aged between 60 and infinity.
By Jane Cadzow
MY award for Book of the Year (Unadulterated Fun Category) goes to Richard Osman’s latest novel, We Solve Murders. It takes the prize largely because of Rosie D’Antonio, a character with so much chutzpah that she steals every scene in which she appears.
Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch
When we meet Rosie, on page eight, she is sitting on an inflatable chair shaped like a throne in a swimming pool shaped like a swan. The pool is on her private island off the coast of South Carolina. We learn that she’s a fabulously successful crime writer – the world’s bestselling novelist “if you don’t count Lee Child”. We are to discover that she’s also a world-class seductress: any man who strays into her path is fair game, though she’s always had a particular fondness for Hollywood stars. Rosie’s attitude is that life is for living. She dances at the drop of a hat. A large gin and tonic is rarely far from her hand. Leopard-skin is her signature print.
What makes all this especially appealing, at least to me, is that Rosie is well past the first flush of youth. She’s old, in fact. A running joke in the book
is that the other characters are constantly trying to work out just how old. They figure she could be anywhere between 60 and 80, but as she’s been famous since the 1980s, she’s probably at the upper end of the scale. Rosie is cagey about her age but disarmingly candid about all else. “You can ask me anything,” she tells her recently hired female bodyguard, shortly after offering to roll her a joint. “Ex-husbands, rehab, Burt Reynolds, I’m an open book.”
The bodyguard, Amy, has been employed because the latest D’Antonio blockbuster, Dead Men & Diamonds, included a thinly disguised portrayal of a notorious Russian oligarch. The oligarch took offence. After a bullet in the post and a kidnap attempt at a book signing, Rosie decided she needed professional protection. But being on a malevolent chemicals billionaire’s hit list hasn’t affected her sense of style. When she and Amy are forced to flee the island in a speedboat, she wears Christian Louboutin stilettos and takes a Louis Vuitton suitcase.
Elderly protagonists are nothing new for Richard Osman, whose books are not so much thrillers as crime capers. In his debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, published in 2020, and the three books that followed, the central characters live in an upmarket English retirement village, where they get together for pleasant lunches and evening cocktails when they’re not off catching crooks. The women in that series aren’t shrinking violets – one is a tough-as-nails ex-spy – but they hide their sleuthing skills behind demure exteriors. Whereas Rosie, an exuberant American, evidently missed the memo about the type of behaviour expected of female septuagenarians. At one point in We Solve Murders, she’s introduced to a bloke who, overawed to be meeting the celebrated author, admits that he’s not much of a thinker. “Do you work with your hands, Tony?” she asks, taking a long drag on her cigarette. Honestly, this stuff makes my heart sing.
I realised partway through the book that Osman was deftly presenting two contrasting approaches to ageing, or perhaps to life in general. One is devil-may-care Rosie’s. The other is epitomised by Steve, a retired English cop who lives quietly – very quietly – in a village in Hampshire. Steve enjoys joining his friends for the weekly trivia quiz at the pub but he’s happiest of all when he’s at home, watching TV with his cat on his lap. Because he’s Amy the bodyguard’s father-in-law, and she asks for his help, he’s reluctantly drawn into the mayhem that unfolds as she and Rosie race around the globe, hotly pursued by hitmen, international money-smugglers and god knows who else. Steve is so impressed by Rosie’s appetite for danger and ability to outwit master criminals that he’s surprised – and, I sensed, slightly disappointed – to learn that she has never actually killed anyone. “A Danish pop star once had a heart attack in my hotel hot tub,” she says. “But that was different.”
Osman, who is 54, has admitted in interviews that he is by inclination a Steve. Give him the cat and the TV any time. I completely understand this. I’ve never shared a hotel hot tub with a Danish pop star, alive or dead, and I think it’s too late to aspire to that now. Like Steve, I love being at home. My idea of bliss is a few hours’ pottering in the garden while listening to podcasts (including The Rest Is Entertainment, co-hosted by the multitalented Mr Osman). But Rosie strikes me as an inspirational figure, and I’d like to believe the person who wrote on Osman’s Facebook FanPage: “There’s a little bit of Rosie D’Antonio in all of us.”
A couple of weeks after turning the book’s last page, I bought myself a pair of leopard-skin shoes. Loafers, not Louboutins. But still.
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