Richard Osman has no intention of resting on his laurels. (Image: David Levenson/Getty Images)
Richard Osman is in the middle of a mammoth round of press interviews when we talk. He’s just got off the phone to Australia – the Aussies, needless to say, wanted to chat about the obsessive Fulham fan’s love of sport – and someone’s been making him cups of tea between calls to keep him going.
If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, it’s hardly a surprise. Since the 2020 publication of his debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, featuring a quartet of retired cold-case enthusiasts, the former host of hit BBC quiz show Pointless has become one of the world’s biggest authors – selling a staggering ten million copies of the four-part series. Today he looms large – quite literally, at 6ft 5in tall – over popular fiction.
His brilliant new novel, We Solve Murders, featuring a fresh cast of unforgettable characters, of whom more shortly, has unsurprisingly romped to number one in the book charts this weekend, despite taking a new tack. “If I was publishing a fifth Thursday Murder Club book, it would feel like a different vibe,” he admits.
Earlier this year, Osman, 53, told the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, supported by the Daily Express, that he felt like he was “cheating” on his beloved Thursday Murder Club characters by writing his new thriller.
He’s more sanguine today, telling me: “The first four books work as a quartet, so I thought I’d give them a bit of rest and recuperation and come into this new world and new characters and hopefully create something else readers will love.”
And it’s already clear he has – by taking the warmth of the original series global.
“I wanted to write a globetrotting murder novel,” he continues. “I thought, ‘What’s the most fun person to have at the heart of that?’ It has to be someone who doesn’t want to travel. So I’ve got this character, Steve, a widower who lives in a Hampshire village, loves his pub quiz and his cat and doesn’t want to go anywhere. But how do I get this guy around the world?
“Well, his daughter-in-law, Amy, is a bodyguard to billionaires. She’s threatened by a murderer and only trusts one person. And that’s Steve. So he has no option but to jump on a private jet – discovering, to his horror, there are no Scotch eggs – to help her.”
After that gloriously colourful elevator pitch, Osman continues: “We all come from trauma. You either run from it or you hide from it: Amy runs from it – she spends her entire life going around the world; private islands, private jets, war zones – and Steve hides from it.
“He becomes as small as he possibly can and surrounds himself with familiar people and familiar things. Once you have that opposition, I throw them into a plot – ‘I’m going to make terrible things happen to you. I’m going to put you in jeopardy.’”
On set of The Thursday Murder Club wth Ben Kingley, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and Celia Imrie (Image: Netflix)
We Solve Murders also features the fictional Rosie D’Antonio, described as the world’s bestselling novelist, “if you don’t count Lee Child”, and it’s a total cracker.
Any qualms Thursday Murder Club fans might have about Osman’s new set-up will disappear within pages. It might officially be a standalone, but it’s got series written all over it.
Not that its inevitable success will overshadow the original quartet.
Earlier this week, filming wrapped on a highly anticipated Netflix adaptation – executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Christopher Columbus – with an all-star cast. Dame Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie and Sir Ben Kingsley play, respectively, former spy Elizabeth, ex-union boss Ron, ex-nurse Joyce and retired psychiatrist Ibrahim, as the septuagenarian sleuths who meet weekly to solve cold cases at their Kent retirement village – based on the community where Osman’s mother Brenda lives. (The wider cast includes David Tennant, Richard E Grant and Jonathan Pryce.)
Osman bought his mum her flat after his success in television, chuckling today: “I’m a good working-class boy. It’s my proudest thing that I bought her a place in that retirement village. That’s what she dreamed of.”
Of that striking generosity, he adds with a smile: “It’s obviously paid me back!”
Osman has previously revealed that, as he observed residents there, he realised it would make “the perfect place for a murder”.
“I found it very moving. I found it very beautiful. Everyone’s in their seventies and, you know, we’re told to think certain things about people in their seventies.
“But they were having such a laugh,” he once recalled. “They were drinking, gossiping. There’s loads of politics. Extraordinary people from loads of different backgrounds all mixing together. And I thought, ‘This is an interesting gang of people’.” That original instinct for storytelling that created his fictional Coopers Chase Retirement Village proved spot on.
Published during the tail-end of the pandemic, it was an overnight sensation, reinvigorating what has since been sometimes sneeringly coined “cosy crime”.
So did it benefit from the lockdown-related surge in reading? In fact, he insists, it was done and dusted – including being sold to Spielberg – pre-pandemic.
“People were saying it didn’t feel like a book they’d read before, that it was bucking the market, and that it has a sort of warmth,” he says. “People say in a pandemic, people want warmth and they want happiness.
“But in my view that’s what people always want. Like when Bake Off comes on. They want something that has a bit of warmth and comes from a place of kindness. And it can have whatever sticking-out edges you like, so long as people know it starts with heart. In my view, that’s what people respond to.”
With Steven Spielberg, who is executive producing his film adaptation (Image: Richard Osman Instagram )
Thus Osman, married to Doctor Who actress Ingrid Oliver, describes himself, quite firmly, as a “writer about love and loss” – even with his background in comedy and the dry, often pitch-black humour of his novels.
“To me, character is everything,” he continues. “If we don’t care what happens, you can have the greatest plot in the world but, without characters we care about, we’ll stop reading. So I always start with relationships. I start any book with characters talking to each other. I write dialogue to find out about them. This book was supposed to be a two-hander between Steve and Amy, but I needed Amy to have a client.
“So I came up with a Jackie Collins-type author, Rosie D’Antonio. I had this scene where Amy’s talking to her, really to find out about Amy, but by the end of it, I was thinking, ‘OK, this isn’t a two-hander any more, it’s a three-hander’. I didn’t know where she was going to fit in, but I knew I wanted her along for the ride.”
His characters, especially Steve in this case, clearly have a little of him in them.
“I do find myself sometimes in situations where I’m at a lovely book festival in Italy but I wish I was at home watching the snooker,” he admits. “I occasionally think, ‘If it was really up to me, I’d never leave the house.’ But I’ve learned over the years that I must.”
Osman’s also an avid pub quizzer, admitting: “People get annoyed when they see me walk in. They think, ‘Uh-oh, it’s the guy from Pointless’.”
In an era when it’s become the norm for anyone with a hint of a public profile to write books, Osman is utterly unpretentious and very genial. No wonder he’s become such a favourite on the crime writing festival circuit. There’s also something very gentle about him, despite his physical size.
He chuckles: “I am genial, I like the world to get along. Though I can be quite ruthless. I’ve been in business for a really long time and I’ve survived. I’m very happy to be ‘alpha’ if you need me to be.
“But by and large, the cultural impact I’d like to have is to be one of, I think, that there’s maybe more that connects us than divides us. And I wonder if we shouldn’t just celebrate who we are as a species?”
Osman certainly isn’t remotely posh or nerdy, as some critics seem to think.
He grew up near Haywards Heath, West Sussex, having been born with nystagmus – an eye condition which means the world appears blurry. His father left when he was nine, his mother bringing up him and his older brother – Suede bassist (and novel writer) Mat Osman, 56 – as a single mum. It clearly left him with an admiration of determined, resilient women, which bleeds through into his female characters. But it must have been hard?
Richard with his wide, actress Ingrid Oliver (Image: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)
“Exactly that,” says the father-of-two. “But I come from a family of very strong women and I’m of the view that, the more women we have in positions of power, the safer we become.”
Including Liz Truss?
“There are always exceptions, but I like writing about a world where people exceed your expectations, or do something you don’t think they’re going to do.”
He’s currently waiting for Brenda’s verdict on the new book, but adds: “She loved it that I worked in telly and Mat was in music, but she really loves that we’re both now writing novels because she’s a reader. The idea that her boys can write books, to her, is like witchcraft.”
In fact, Osman was an accidental television presenter.
“I was a journalist in my teens, and I wrote sitcoms. I was always a writer, really. And everything in between was an accident,” he says. “I always wanted to test myself on the idea of doing a novel. You know, in the way somebody who runs is like, ‘One day, I’m going to do a marathon’.
“I wanted to write a book that was the length of a novel, that looked like a novel, and would entertain people.
“If I did that, I’d have been happy to put it in the bottom drawer. Then, you know, you give it to somebody and it takes off. But the place I’m happiest is with a blank piece of paper and a pen. There was never going to be a lifetime where I wasn’t going to write a novel. It could have been a terrible novel, but I was always going to write one.”
Supremely confident, Osman’s only flicker of doubt comes when we talk about leaving the Thursday Murder Club behind – for now.
“You do think, ‘Will people follow?’, but it’s down to the quality of the work, isn’t it?
“Having had a few successes and a lot of failures, the successes are more fun. But I want to do this for the next 20 years, so I’m going to be writing lots of books and I have to do different ones.”
However, there is good news for Thursday Murder Club fans. “All I can say is, about three days ago I wrote ‘The Thursday Murder Club Five’ at the top of a piece of paper and underlined it,” Osman adds with a chuckle.
When I tell him my 13-year-old daughter Phoebe read his second book, The Man Who Died Twice, in a single car journey, he laughs: “Tell her being able to read in the car is a superpower. Very few people can do it… but it’s the only skill I have.”
Ten million readers and counting would beg to differ.
* We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Penguin Books, £22) is out now.
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