Richard Osman reveals future plans for Thursday Murder Club | Books | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Richard Osman is in the course of a mammoth spherical of press interviews after we discuss. He’s simply acquired off the cellphone to Australia – the Aussies, evidently, wished to speak concerning the obsessive Fulham fan’s love of sport – and somebody’s been making him cups of tea between calls to maintain him going.

If all of it sounds a bit overwhelming, it’s hardly a shock. Since the 2020 publication of his debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, that includes a quartet of retired cold-case lovers, the previous host of hit BBC quiz present Pointless has turn out to be one of many world’s greatest authors – promoting a staggering ten million copies of the four-part sequence. Today he looms massive – fairly actually, at 6ft 5in tall – over fashionable fiction.

His good new novel, We Solve Murders, that includes a recent forged of unforgettable characters, of whom extra shortly, has unsurprisingly romped to primary within the guide charts this weekend, regardless of taking a brand new tack. “If I was publishing a fifth Thursday Murder Club book, it would feel like a different vibe,” he admits.

Earlier this 12 months, Osman, 53, instructed 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 extra sanguine right now, 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 heat of the unique sequence international.

“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 vibrant 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.’”

We Solve Murders additionally options the fictional Rosie D’Antonio, described because the world’s bestselling novelist, “if you don’t count Lee Child”, and it’s a complete cracker.

Any qualms Thursday Murder Club followers might need about Osman’s new set-up will disappear inside pages. It would possibly formally be a standalone, but it surely’s acquired sequence written throughout it.

Not that its inevitable success will overshadow the unique quartet.

Earlier this week, filming wrapped on a extremely anticipated Netflix adaptation – executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Christopher Columbus – with an all-star forged. 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, because the septuagenarian sleuths who meet weekly to unravel chilly instances at their Kent retirement village – based mostly on the neighborhood the place Osman’s mom Brenda lives. (The wider forged consists of David Tennant, Richard E Grant and Jonathan Pryce.)

Osman purchased his mum her flat after his success in tv, chuckling right now: “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 placing generosity, he provides with a smile: “It’s obviously paid me back!”

Osman has beforehand revealed that, as he noticed residents there, he realised it might 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 as soon as 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 authentic intuition for storytelling that created his fictional Coopers Chase Retirement Village proved spot on.

Published in the course of the tail-end of the pandemic, it was an in a single day sensation, reinvigorating what has since been generally sneeringly coined “cosy crime”.

So did it profit from the lockdown-related surge in studying? In truth, he insists, it was performed and dusted – together with being bought 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.”

Thus Osman, married to Doctor Who actress Ingrid Oliver, describes himself, fairly firmly, as a “writer about love and loss” – even together with his background in comedy and the dry, typically 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, particularly Steve on this case, clearly have a little bit 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 additionally 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 period when it’s turn out to be the norm for anybody with a touch of a public profile to write down books, Osman is completely unpretentious and really genial. No marvel he’s turn out to be such a favorite on the crime writing competition circuit. There’s additionally one thing very light about him, regardless of his bodily measurement.

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 definitely isn’t remotely posh or nerdy, as some critics appear to suppose.

He grew up close to Haywards Heath, West Sussex, having been born with nystagmus – an eye fixed situation which implies the world seems blurry. His father left when he was 9, his mom citing him and his older brother – Suede bassist (and novel author) Mat Osman, 56 – as a single mum. It clearly left him with an admiration of decided, resilient ladies, which bleeds by means of into his feminine characters. But it should have been laborious?

“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 presently ready for Brenda’s verdict on the brand new guide, however provides: “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 truth, Osman was an unintentional tv 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 assured, Osman’s solely flicker of doubt comes after we speak 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 may be excellent news for Thursday Murder Club followers. “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 provides with a chuckle.

When I inform him my 13-year-old daughter Phoebe learn his second guide, The Man Who Died Twice, in a single automobile 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 vary.

* We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Penguin Books, £22) is out now.

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