New Delhi, Sept. 6 -- Richard Osman's bestselling series of novels The Thursday Murder Club deserved a great adaptation, and the first book actually got one.

It's just that it wasn't on screen. I consumed that sponge-cake of a novel in the form of an audiobook narrated by the sublime Leslie Manville. The radiant actress, who was so astonishing alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, breathed such spark and subtlety into Osman's elderly sleuths that the book leapt to life. (Osman himself, with his affable baritone, handled the subsequent sequels, but Manville conjured a magic beyond the reach of mere authorial affection.)

It's masterful how Manville channeled the characters, the actress perfectly finding the balance between Elizabe...