When I last spoke to Richard Osman, in the strange, uneasy summer of 2020, the genial TV exec-turned-Pointless host was still waiting, slightly anxiously, to see how his debut novel would be received. “I’m very proud of it,” he told me. “But as to what happens next… I don’t know.”
Flash forward to today, and that same Richard Osman is – as the publicity blurb for his latest book proudly trumpets – the most successful new fiction writer of the decade, having sold 10 million copies of The Thursday Murder Club and its three sequels. So it’s fair to say ‘what happened next’ was… a lot.
“Yeah,” he says, a little bashfully, when we pick up the conversation four years on. “The key is still the first part of that sentence – which is I’m very proud of it. But yes, I can exclusively reveal to Waitrose Weekend that I’m pleased with the progress.”
Does it take a bit of getting your head around, being the biggest new writer of the decade? “I don’t know what I think about that, really,” he considers. “No, I’ll tell you what I think about it: I don’t think about it. Everything, everything is the work – the stuff you write down on a bit of paper. And if I stop to think about it, then yes, it’s so lovely to have a reason to sit down and do the work. But you can feel as smug as you want on one day: if you don’t sit down the next day and do something difficult, then it all goes away. It’s the only way I can think about it, really, because it’s slightly too mind-blowing otherwise.”
It was clear from the start that The Thursday Murder Club – the tale of four friends in a Kent retirement village who meet to investigate unsolved killings, only to find fresh bodies piling up around them – was something special. (“Funny, tender and wise, it’s as dazzling a debut as you’ll read this year” was my verdict at the time.)
But now, our favourite geriatric sleuths are taking a year off while Osman introduces us to a new set of irresistible characters in his latest novel, We Solve Murders. This time, our heroes are Amy Wheeler, a kick-ass private security agent hired to protect wealthy clients, and her father-in-law Steve, a retired, widowed copper whose idea of excitement is watching Tipping Point.
“This is my full-time job now, and I hope to be doing it for many years – so I just wanted to do something different,” explains Osman of his literary sidestep. “I wanted to have a bit of fun, and do things I couldn’t have done with the Thursday Murder Club – though obviously I’ll be returning to those good friends.”
Thanks to Amy’s jet-setting world of private islands and speedboats, We Solve Murders is painted on a broader, more exotic canvas than TTMC. But even that’s thrown into sharp relief by Steve, who lives a quiet life in the New Forest, doing the pub quiz and insisting he can’t fly off to America on a rescue mission because he’s waiting for some shelves to be delivered.
“It’s much more kind of globetrotting,” agrees Osman. “And I did wonder, at the start, if I was writing in a slightly different genre now. And then within 10 pages you find yourself writing about someone eating a Twix and you think, ‘no, this is very much still you’. So yeah, it’s lovely to have a new world, and new characters to fall in love with, but I still feel this is a world that will be relatable to people.”
Completing the We Solve Murders gang is Rosie D’Antonio, a world-famous author who Amy has been assigned to protect. Is there any particular reason Osman wanted to write about a bestselling crime novelist…? “Do you know what? She wasn’t supposed to be part of it,” he explains. “I needed to give Amy a celebrity client, so I thought I’d make her an author. But as soon as I started writing Rosie’s dialogue, I thought: you’re going to have to be at the heart of this book, and this series’.
“She’s Jackie Collins, essentially. She’s of indeterminate age, she’s done everything, dated everybody… And she’s got a private jet because, as she says, she’s got Eighties money.”
Would you like a private jet, Richard? “Yeah, for the legroom, for sure,” he says, with the heartfelt conviction of a 6ft 7in frequent flyer.
“There’s a certain type of critic who can’t understand why one bit of popular culture has done better than another. I can’t lose any sleep over that.”
With success, of course, comes inevitable criticism – particularly the charge of over-exposure (in the week we speak, The Herald newspaper is advertising ’10 authors to see at the Edinburgh Book Festival… who aren’t Richard Osman’), and the lingering suspicion that he’s got where he is by being That Bloke Off The Telly.
“I don’t mind, honestly,” he says. “Readers and booksellers – who are the important thing – worked out very quickly who I am, and what I do. The papers always take a little longer to catch up, and that’s absolutely fine. And listen, you can’t say ‘10 authors to see who aren’t Richard Osman’ without saying Richard Osman.”
Some of the brickbats are pure snobbery: a recent New Statesman hit job describing ‘Osman’s Britain’ as ‘the country of Morse and Pizza Express and Robert Dyas and gins in tins’ positively dripped with contempt for ordinary people and our dull, provincial little lives.
“There’s a certain type of critic who can’t understand why one bit of popular culture has done better than another,” suggests Osman. “They don’t have the faculties to understand that. But I can’t lose too much sleep over it. I was blessed with a very mainstream sensibility – if I like something, lots of other people will tend to like it. As soon as I read that there’s a big new state of the nation novel coming out, I know it’s actually going to be a state of London novel. Whereas I try and write about the Britain I understand, the Britain we’re I’m from.”
And that, surely, is the point: here is a working class Essex boy from a single-parent family who’s made a career simply out of being ferociously bright. And if that upsets a few entitled, trust-fund Bloomsbury types, then more power to him.
“Listen, I was fortunate enough to be raised in an era where university education was paid for, and you could move to London, get housing benefit and afford to get a low-paid job in television,” he says of his modest roots. “I was born on a rising tide. I worry that people from my background wouldn’t be able to do that now.”
Born in Billericay (he’s been known to use Ian Dury’s Billericay Dickie as his theme tune) and raised in Hayward’s Heath in Sussex, Osman was nine when his father announced he was leaving home. His mother Brenda was a teacher who worked extra jobs in the evenings to help make ends meet (“we had a very poor father and a very brilliant mother” he told me four years ago), putting her own ambitions on hold to raise Richard and his older brother Mat, who now combines being the bassist in Suede with his own career as a novelist. “Reading is her passion, so while she sort of liked it when my brother was in a band and I was on TV, she loves it now we both write books,” says Osman.
Being born with nystagmus, an eye condition that results in severely reduced vision, helped foster an early passion for television (“I couldn’t see anything, but I could sit three inches in front of the TV and watch the world”). And after studying politics and sociology at Cambridge, it’s television where he built his career, devising formats and working as a producer on hit shows like Deal or No Deal and 8 Out of 10 Cats.
He got the gig co-hosting Pointless with his Cambridge contemporary Alexander Armstrong somewhat by accident (he was there to pitch the show to the BBC, and did such a good job, they put him on screen), and taped over 2,000 episodes before stepping down three years ago.
Today, he juggles writing bestsellers with presenting Richard Osman’s House of Games – regularly the highest-rated show on BBC Two – and sharing insider showbiz knowledge on The Rest is Entertainment, his terrific, hugely successful podcast with Marina Hyde. And then there’s the much-anticipated Thursday Murder Club movie, currently being made by Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg, with Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie and Pierce Brosnan in the lead roles.
Frankly, all this success is starting to look a bit sickening: please tell us you’ve had some recent failures, disasters or disappointments, Richard. “Life is constant disappointment and setback and failure,” he says, reassuringly. “My God, if I told you every failed television show I’ve been involved with over the past 30 years, you’d need to change your printer cartridge. That’s why, over the years, I’ve managed to hone my creativity to the stage where I don’t put any effort into things I don’t think are going to pay off. But I’m delighted to say my daily life is a constant failure, of cooking badly and being unable to change a lightbulb properly. If you’re worried I don’t have enough failure in my life, I can assuage those worries.”
One persistent struggle has been Osman’s lifelong battle with food addiction. “It requires constant vigilance,” he says. “Any addict will tell you that you’re always an addict, right? It’s whether you are presenting as an addict at that point or not. It’s easier at the moment than it has been, and it will get harder again. But for now, it’s all good.”
Putting even his recent professional triumphs in the shade is the happiness he’s found with his new wife Ingrid Oliver, the actor and comedian (best known as scientist Osgood in Doctor Who) who he met when she appeared on House of Games four years ago. “It’s just lovely to face the future when you’re with someone you absolutely adore and want to share stuff with,” says Osman, who has a grown-up daughter and son from his first marriage, which ended in 2007. “A lot of what The Thursday Murder Club is about is finding new adventures, and new things in your life. And it’s lovely to be on this shared adventure. We make a great team.”
In We Love Murders, Rosemary’s rule for life is ‘if you see a door, walk through it’. And it’s tempting to think her creator must feel the same way. But apparently not. “I’m the exact opposite,” insists Osman. “If I see a door that’s open I think, ‘am I going to have to get up and shut that door?’”
In fact, at 53, he’s come to the conclusion that he might have been using his sight problems as an excuse to cover certain personality traits over the years. “If you’ve got an issue like poor eyesight, it allows you to duck out of life a little bit,” he suggests. “And I think that actually rather suits me, because if I can find any excuse to say no to something, or not go anywhere, I’ll do it. Sometimes that’s the sole reason people have kids, isn’t it? So they can get out of social engagements.”
A self-confessed ‘alpha introvert’, he’s someone who appears supremely comfortable in the spotlight, and yet is happiest at home in Chiswick, west London with Ingrid and their cats Liesl and Lottie. “I like to be in the conversation, I like to be in the heart of things, I like to have an impact,” he says. “But then I also want to be able to leave the room as soon as I can. There’s that constant push and pull.”
Besides, he adds, he isn’t really the plate-spinning multi-hyphenate people think he is. “It’s not like I’m a gymnast and a rocket science and an author. I’m a podcaster, a TV presenter, a producer and an author, which are all about finding the right words to say in the right order. It’s all the same skill.”
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Viking) is out now
Originally published in Waitrose Weekend, 19th September, 2024
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