Richard Osman is back with a new Thursday Murder Club book, The Impossible Fortune, and it’s going to be packed with twists and turns
“I love, love, love doing nothing. Doing nothing is, quite absolutely, my state of grace,” says Richard Osman, 54, who, most days, is doing very far from nothing.
He admits he’s not wonderful at multitasking. He’s just wrapped on 110 episodes of his quiz show Richard Osman’s House Of Games, is hosting The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde each week and is signing 5,000 copies of his new book, The Impossible Fortune.
“I’m good at monotasking. I’m good at focusing on one thing at a time, in extreme depth,” he says wryly, but even when scrawling his name on a perpetual loop, he still has an uncanny ability to answer every question put to him immediately, eloquently, without hesitation.
Born in Billericay and growing up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, for a long time Osman was best known as Alexander Armstrong’s sidekick on BBC One’s Pointless, or for delivering us 8 Out Of 10 Cats on Channel 4. Since 2020 though, he’s the bloke who introduced Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim into our lives. And now the Thursday Murder Club gang are back for a fifth outing.
“I’ve given them a year off to rest and recuperate. I put them through quite a lot,” notes Osman fondly, calling his characters “four of his best friends”.
“Things have changed a little bit for all of them,” he adds.
The book kicks off with a wedding scene, where a distressed guest approaches the grieving detective Elizabeth and pleads: “Someone is trying to kill me. Can you help?”
What follows is an adventure filled with a “seemingly uncrackable code” and a “huge amount of money”, intertwined with themes of loss and friendship.
What made the Thursday Murder Club stand out when it first appeared was Osman’s focus on the elderly, a group he views as “incredibly wise but also invisible”, making them ideal detectives. He continues to be intrigued by old age.
“When you are older, you are thinking slightly more deeply about life and what it means, and what grief is and what the point of it all is,” he reflects. Surprisingly, delving into the challenges of ageing doesn’t make him fear getting older.
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“I am essentially an 80-year-old woman in everything apart from my frame and so, I’ve never worried about that,” he chuckles. “None of us want to get ill. None of us want to go through grief. But that’s where we are… But I like the idea of being older and giving less of a toss about what anyone thinks of me.”
With over 10 million copies of the Thursday Murder Club novels flying off the shelves, a Hollywood adaptation was bound to happen.
Securing British legends Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren to portray the foursome in the Netflix film, helmed by Christopher Columbus, represents phenomenal casting, though Osman wasn’t concerned about having the stars influencing his mind whilst penning the next instalment.
“Honestly, those characters are so ridiculously real to me that no one, not even the mighty Helen Mirren, can knock Elizabeth out of my head,” he says jovially. Osman, the ever-charming and engaging author, does bristle slightly at labels and imitators that often come with success.
The books in the Thursday Murder Club series are: The Thursday Murder Club; The Man Who Died Twice; The Bullet That Missed; The Last Devil to Die; and The Impossible Fortune.
Such monumental success could throw some people off track, but Osman, a father of two, has an unshakeable work ethic. “Anytime anyone’s got a hit is great, but it mustn’t delay you for more than, like, five minutes,” he advises.
“Every single thing comes back to going back upstairs, sitting down and writing again. Nothing happens without you writing the next book. I love grafting. I love being paid, but I love doing a day’s work.”
His writing – hammered out upstairs at home, with the door firmly closed unless his feline companions begin hollering at him – is “really hard work” he confesses with a chuckle, contrasting it with his “accidental bit of television presenting”. He adds: “That’s, I’m going to say, a fairly easy job.”
He says that writing though is the “thing I feel I was put on the earth to do. That’s the thing I started with when I was 15, and that feels like the thing I’ll finish with as well.”
Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune is now available.
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