Richard Osman: ‘I wanted to tell the truth about certain things that do happen when you’re older’

“I don’t have the cool gene,” Richard Osman says. We’re talking about his older brother Mat, who recently added to his decades-long career as bassist in the band Suede by becoming an author. Despite being a successful TV presenter, Osman jnr never wanted to be a public face. “I wouldn’t want to be on stage. To me, the best person in the world to be a famous rock star is my brother.”

Mat’s experience has given Osman a dim view of the music industry. “I thought telly was cut-throat, but they really use people up and throw them out in that business.” Having two author sons is a big thrill for their mother, he says. “I’ve had this long career in telly, and my brother’s had a long career in music, and my mum’s always been proud and interested, but now that we’ve both written novels, she’s finally, like, ‘Oh, this is what I wanted!’”

It’s well known that it was his mother’s retirement community that inspired The Thursday Murder Club, a comedy crime caper set in an upmarket retirement village in Kent – think one part Scooby-Doo to three parts Agatha Christie. The fictional Coopers Chase universe is ruled by its residents Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim – a former nurse, MI5 agent, trade unionist and psychiatrist, respectively. Osman’s 2020 debut was followed by The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed and, this month, The Last Devil to Die.

I really put them through the ringer this time ... art forgers, heroin dealers, romance fraud. But, also, it’s a much more personal book than previous books

The popularity of the series is remarkable. The biggest new fiction author of the decade in the UK and Ireland, Osman has been published in 43 countries. There’s even a movie: Steven Spielberg bought the rights in a 14-way auction. (Filming was supposed to start this autumn but has been halted by the Sag-Aftra entertainment-industry strike.) The cast has yet to be announced; Osman describes speculation as “the great parlour game of the Thursday Murder Club”. Even his family are in on the act. “My mum is constantly coming up with new ones. She watches anything on telly and says, ‘I’ll tell you who’d be good,’ and it would be the person she just saw.”

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Osman sums up the plot of The Last Devil to Die as: “A consignment of heroin enters the country on Boxing Day, and anyone who touches it in any way is doomed.” So, just as Joyce is thinking that “something a bit less murdery would be quite a novelty”, the gang find themselves busy once more. “I really put them through the ringer this time ... art forgers, heroin dealers, romance fraud. But, also, it’s a much more personal book than previous books. I wanted to put them through something different, and I wanted to tell the truth about certain things that do happen when you’re older. I get all the upsides – the joy, the mischief, the adventure. I have to write the truth of it as well, and I think I do in this book.”

The charm and skill of Osman’s writing lie in the fact that he never plays his characters for easy laughs or tears. He’s clearly capable of going full throttle on mayhem, yet The Last Devil to Die also pauses for moments of tenderness, compassion and reflections on ageing. When dear, kindly Joyce, the emotional bullseye of the series, shares her thoughts on “the urgency of old age”, she adds, with typical positivity, “there’s nothing that makes you feel alive more than the certainty of death”.

[ Richard Osman: ‘The worst thing in the world is someone telling you they’re writing a novel’ ]

Osman is interested in confronting trauma, and his characters each have their own troubles to contend with. “Someone very wise once said to me, trauma isn’t the problem, it’s how you deal with trauma that’s the problem ... I’m interested in people who don’t confront things. Annoyingly, by and large in life you do have to confront them.”

He has spoken publicly about his own traumas: his battles with food and how his father’s abrupt departure from the family when he was nine fundamentally changed him. As a child he stayed at home, watched telly and invented games on bits of paper. “I wasn’t outside looking at the wildlife – which by the way is a great thing to do – but it’s also okay to sit at home and live in the world of the imagination.”

Games became his career. After university, Osman moved into television production with Hat Trick and then Endemol, working on such hits as 8 Out of 10 Cats and Deal or No Deal. He ended up in front of the camera on Richard Osman’s House of Games and, for 30 seasons, Pointless. “I like to gamify the world. Something complicated comes along, I think, what’s a really simple, understandable tablet version of that dilemma? Let’s turn it into entertainment ... My brain likes making complicated things, and that’s what a crime book is: you start out as complicated as you can, and you end simply.”

Jokes take you out of the story, and with crime books you have to stay in the story

He still plays games; the day we’re talking, he’s having his 20-something son and daughter and their friends around for a board-games evening; his daughter bought him Wavelength for his birthday. “If you bring up kids to love playing, and to love games, they never lose it.”

His successes are well known, yet Osman has had plenty of failures too. “The question is never why did something not work, because almost everything doesn’t work. The question is why certain things work when the quality is the same. My thing is to always make something from the heart, something you’re proud of, and then just buckle in and hope that one thing in five is a hit.”

With novels, he begins with character, plotting a few scenes at a time. “I’ve got a bit of paper next to my computer, and I’ve written down the next five scenes. But quite often in the third scene something will happen. So your five things change, because you’ve taken it in a more interesting direction. And if you surprise yourself, you surprise readers.”

Bogdan, the fitness-obsessed young builder who is practically a fifth member of the Coopers Chase crew, evolved this way. “I wanted a representative scene about why a property developer was a bad guy. The scene was going to be that he was stiffing his Polish builder. Bogdan responded a couple of times to this character, and I thought, oh, hello, you’re great! He became integral to the whole series from two lines.”

Osman is a crime entertainment fan, enthusing about Poker Face, the TV series starring Natasha Lyonne – “my favourite show of the year by a long way” – and novels by Mark Billingham and Ann Patchett. Because his own novels are so funny, it’s surprising to hear he doesn’t write jokes. “Jokes take you out of the story, and with crime books you have to stay in the story. Everything that’s funny comes from the truth of the characters and how they respond to a situation. Anytime I start a new chapter, I think, whose point of view would it be funniest to experience this through?”

At the moment I’m feeling confident, because yesterday I had a good day. On bad days it’s like, okay, I’m going to hand the advance back, there’s absolutely no point doing this

His new book (title to be announced) features a father-in-law and daughter-in-law duo. “The daughter-in-law is a bodyguard to billionaires, so she’s always off around the world. The father-in-law is an ex-cop who lives a sleepy life in a small Hampshire village. He’s got his own little detective agency but has no interest in leaving his village. He likes to do the pub quiz; he likes to have a drink at lunchtime. When the daughter-in-law is in trouble he has no choice but to go join her world. I’m taking someone who doesn’t want to leave England and forcing him to jump out of aeroplanes and do things he doesn’t want to do.”

The book is in its early stages. “At the moment I’m feeling confident, because yesterday I had a good day. On bad days it’s like, okay, I’m going to hand the advance back, there’s absolutely no point doing this. On good days I can see where this goes; it’s exciting.”

Of his three careers, being an author is “closest to my heart and to who I am as a human being”, yet he sees the similarities between them: each is about ideas and how best to express them. “One’s a sprint, one’s a middle distance, one’s a marathon, but it’s all running.” It’s all the same job really, he explains. “The secret is knowing what to say.”

The Last Devil to Die is published by Viking