Richard Osman set his Thursday Murder Club series in a genteel retirement home in Kent, so with his new novel, he was eager to explore the world beyond Coopers Chase. It’s very on-brand for Osman that the starting point for his globetrotting crime caper, We Solve Murders, is a character who absolutely does not want to travel.
Steve Wheeler is a retired police officer who runs Steve Investigates, a one-man detective agency specialising in minor insurance frauds, missing pets and petty thefts. The key to Steve, Osman says, is that, “he wants to stay at home in the New Forest, pet his cat, do the pub quiz, and hang out with his mates. So I think, how do I get him to go around the world?” Steve adores his daughter-in-law Amy, a bodyguard for billionaires. The combination of a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer hunting her makes Amy send an SOS. “The only person she really trusts in the world is her father-in-law. She calls for help, and Steve has to go.”
The whistle-stop tour that follows takes in South Carolina, Dubai, St Lucia, Dublin, Cork and assorted UK locations. Thursday Murder Club fans will be delighted to know that alongside the mayhem, We Solve Murders delivers plenty of laughs and a few tears. “I try and write with wit and warmth, and joy and some happiness,” Osman explains. “And then you do the darker side of things, and you make sure things are truthful.”
In The Thursday Murder Club, Osman originally intended to write a single scene for Polish builder Bogdan, but within a couple of sentences, Bogdan established himself as there for the long-haul. Something similar happened with We Solve Murders.
“I originally had Steve and Amy, then I thought, well, Amy needs to be looking after someone, so I wrote a scene early on where we find which client she’s with when the trouble starts. Rosie D’Antonio is essentially the Jackie Collins of crime. She’s always got a cocktail in her hand and mischief in her eyes. I had the two of them having a conversation and I thought, oh, do you know what, this book was supposed to be a two-hander and now it’s a three-hander because I love Rosie so much. I thought, great, I’m going to send these three around the world to try and catch a murderer, which is exactly what they did.”
Rosie, of indefatigable spirits and indeterminate years (she describes herself as “age-fluid”) is one of Osman’s finest creations. Having made a private plane-sized fortune from her novels, she is always good for a sardonic comment or a drink, preferably both at once. She will never run out of money, but worries she might run out of acclaim, for fame is, as Osman writes, “the sparkling tonic she has long been able to add to the neat gin of her private life”. (“I’m very proud of that line,” he says.)
Osman was happy to rethink his original concept to include Rosie, just as he had done with Bogdan. “My approach all the way through is not to over plan, but to allow myself to be surprised, allow the plot to surprise me, allow my characters to surprise me, allow new people to surprise me. And if they’re surprising me, my basic principle is that they’ll surprise the readers as well,” he says.
“The interesting thing with plot is, if you’re doing your job properly then everyone should be a suspect anyway. Even if, at the last minute, you want to change your mind, you’ve laid all the bricks for anyone being the killer. You can go back and tweak a few things, and your plot can still make a lot of sense ... I think from years of TV formats I’m quite good at immediately reining everything in, lassoing everything together, and putting it in an orderly fashion.”
Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment has a Thursday Murder Club movie currently in production, starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. Osman has been on set a couple of times. “It’s very exciting. You get to go on a golf cart. You get to see how handsome Pierce Brosnan is up close, that’s a bucket list item. Chris Columbus, the director, is the world’s nicest man. I told them I’m not going to interfere, and I think they didn’t believe me, but now they trust that I know what their job is: to tell their version of the story. If I was a betting man, I’d say they know that the best way to get the writer to shut up is to give him a chair with his name on it,” Osman says.
His actor wife Ingrid Oliver plays Joanna, daughter of Thursday Murder Club member Joyce. “I always think of Ingrid when I’m writing that character. It’s worked out perfectly. It’s lovely to have her in it, because I’ve got a really fun stake in the film in that regard, but otherwise I don’t like to go on set too much, because I don’t want people to feel like I have to be looked after. I don’t have to be looked after, I trust them.”
Also keeping Osman busy is The Rest is Entertainment, his podcast with Guardian columnist Marina Hyde. It launched last year, produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Podcasts. Billed as an insider look at pop culture, the show has become an unfailingly interesting exploration of life at the intersections of celebrity, traditional and social media, politics and entertainment.
“I’ve worked in this business a long time, and I’m quite good at working out if things will do well or not. I’m not flawless in any way, but I have an instinct for the business. I had done an event with Marina and I really, really liked her. I try not to mouth off too much because I’m surrounded by people who are cleverer than me. But the world I know about is entertainment and television and books,” Osman says.
“I know insider stuff that’s interesting. And if don’t know it, I know someone who will. Marina obviously comes from a slightly different world to me. I said, why don’t we do this, it would be quite a fun thing to do. I love spending time in her company. I love it when she absolutely goes off on one ... she’s quite something!”
Osman and Hyde are articulate and intelligent hosts who enjoy and respect each other’s company and opinions. “I’ve never seen a fence I didn’t want to sit on,” he says, in sharp contrast to her acerbic, hilarious takedowns. During a recent episode, they were discussing how people might leave the social media platform X. Osman suggested a soft goodbye, whereas Hyde advocated a yank-the-plaster-off exit. On the show, he said they sounded like, “two completely different types of therapists, and you know within the first session which one works for you”. She laughed. “They keep coming back to you because you’re telling them what they want to hear, whereas I’m curing them!”
Osman is “honestly, genuinely shocked” by the podcast’s success and reach; his daughter told him all her 20-something friends listen. “People are desperate for stuff that’s informative, but comes from people who know what they’re talking about and people who aren’t awful, I think. Culturally that’s what we’re starved of,” he says.
I had assumed a team of researchers beaver away to produce so much content (they record two episodes weekly), but no. “We maybe talk on Sunday about what we’re going to talk about on Monday. Stuff I know about I’ll have a little think about, stuff I don’t know about, I’ll look up. I message various friends, you get little insider bits ... everyone is happy to help. There’s no commissioning editors, no one saying no, or this needs to change. No one’s giving you notes. You do the thing that you want to do,” he says.
“Once it’s fun, we’ll keep doing it.” Regularity is also key. “I knew this right from the beginning: always on. You have to be on every week. You have to become part of people’s routine. If I’m away, or if Marina’s away, we record anyway. We do everything we can to be in the same room, which a lot of podcasts aren’t, but if not, always-on is the deal.”
This work ethic also applies to his writing: a fifth Thursday Murder Club novel is scheduled for publication in 2025, and a sequel to We Solve Murders in 2026. “I respect people who take four years to write a book, but I feel like my job is to write a book a year and to deliver something people want.” And people want it in spades: Osman is the bestselling adult author of the decade, selling 10 million copies of the Thursday Murder Club globally (seven in the UK alone: this man really does know his audience).
Has working in television for decades taught him how to relate to people easily? “Subconsciously I like to find what connects people, that’s for sure. We live in a world where we’re constantly force-fed the things that separate people, and we’re constantly told what sets us apart from other people. My thing is always however much you disagree with someone on thing X, you might find you agree with them on thing Y, and maybe that will help us out with dealing with thing X.” His skill lies in creating characters with heart; people who forge ordinary human connections which enable them to do extraordinary things.
“I guess I’m always looking for when good people find a connection,” he says. “It’s joyful.”
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman is published by Viking
