Robert Thorogood

Who is Robert Thorogood?

Before Judith Potts, there was Detective Inspector Richard Poole, marooned on a Caribbean island in a suit and tie, solving murders and sweating through every scene. Thorogood created Death in Paradise for the BBC in 2011. It became one of those rare dramas that outlasts its original cast by decades, a Sunday-night institution that has now run to thirteen series and counting. Thorogood handed over the writing room years ago and moved on to something rather different: a seventy-seven-year-old crossword setter in Buckinghamshire.

The shift is less surprising than it sounds. Both projects share an instinct for the closed-world mystery, for communities small enough that secrets eventually surface. Death in Paradise uses an island. The Marlow Murder Club uses the Thames-side town of Marlow, all Georgian high street and expensive riverside properties, the kind of English market town where nothing is supposed to happen.

“I wanted to write someone who had been underestimated her whole life and was absolutely fine with it.”

Judith Potts lives alone in a rambling house she cannot quite afford to maintain, sets cryptic crosswords for a living, and takes a swim in the Thames every morning regardless of weather. She is eccentric, brilliant, occasionally infuriating, and deeply good company. When a neighbour is murdered, Judith decides the police are approaching it wrong. She recruits Suzie Harris, a dog groomer with a transit van and a sharp eye, and Becks Starling, a vicar’s wife who is rather more capable than anyone around her suspects. Three women who would not otherwise share a kitchen table, working a case nobody asked them to work.

Comparisons to the Thursday Murder Club are inevitable and Thorogood is sanguine about them. The demographic overlap is obvious. But where Osman builds warmth through an ensemble of equals, Thorogood puts Judith front and centre. The books are quicker, funnier in a broader register, and rooted in a very specific English landscape. Marlow as a character is as important as any of the three women.

Quick facts

• Created Death in Paradise for the BBC, 2011
• Marlow Murder Club series began 2021
• Judith Potts is 77, a cryptic crossword setter
• Set in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, on the Thames
• Series translated into multiple languages

What order should I read Robert Thorogood’s books?

Read the Marlow Murder Club from the beginning. The three women’s friendship develops across the books and the later plots reward readers who have seen how the dynamic was established. Book one is also the strongest entry point for understanding Judith’s particular brand of logic.