'Murder Club' meets for only 2 hours

But the adaptation’s sleuths, including Helen Mirren, prove to be good company.

- ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC

HELEN MIRREN, from left, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie join the "Thursday Murder Club" in the Netflix film based on Richard Osman's novel.

I met the news that Richard Osman’s 2020 mystery novel “The Thursday Murder Club” would be adapted for the screen with a spark of glee, as happens when something you love is noticed by the wider world.

That the wider world had already taken notice—more than 10 million copies of the book have been sold — doesn’t make it seem any less my property. Wondering whether it would be any good could wait.

And here we are. Arriving Thursday on Netflix, the film version — not the miniseries some hoped for — offers a more or less straight plow through the book, though streamlined, simplified and softened. It has the advantage of a cast so appropriate it almost feels that Osman wrote the characters to accommodate them, and the disadvantage of having to discharge its complicated narrative and various human business in two hours. (Exactly two hours, as if that had been a goal.)

The setting is Coopers Chase, an improbably grand retirement community in the south of England. (I hadn't pictured it being so fancy, and I don’t remember there being llamas.) Here we meet four very different residents united around an unusual hobby, meeting weekly — that is, on Thursdays, when they have the room reserved — to discuss unsolved murders with an eye to solving them. (They lack only a podcast.)