Bron Sibree interviews Richard Osman: a love letter to 80s airport novels

20 October 2024 - 00:00 By Bron Sibree
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Richard Osman is an author and television presenter. His novels, 'The Thursday Murder Club', 'The Man Who Died Twice', 'The Bullet That Missed', and 'The Last Devil to Die', were million-copy international bestsellers..
Richard Osman is an author and television presenter. His novels, 'The Thursday Murder Club', 'The Man Who Died Twice', 'The Bullet That Missed', and 'The Last Devil to Die', were million-copy international bestsellers..
Image: Penguin Random House

Just how does Richard Osman manage to create such wildly compelling novels? Mystery novels populated with characters so beguiling they ensured that his 2020 debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club became the fastest selling crime novel in UK sales history and was snapped up by Steven Spielberg’s production house, Amblin Entertainment. (Featuring a stellar cast including Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, filming is under way.)

Since then he’s penned three more in this series that is set in a retirement home, and sales have exceeded 10-million worldwide. Given that he has just launched a new series with an audacious new mystery novel, We Solve Murders , populated with equally beguiling characters and brimming with humour and wit, it begs the question: How does he do it? “Every single book I start I just have a rough idea of key people I’d be interested in exploring,” says Osman. “Then I sit and write conversations until one of them says something, where I go, ‘oh that’s who you are, this is going to be fun’ — that’s how I create characters. And if I’m looking forward to spending time with them, hopefully readers will as well.”

Osman is also quick to state that he’s not abandoning his Thursday Murder Club series or its elderly, mostly amateur sleuths. “They’re just having a lovely year off, because after the events of the last Thursday Murder Club book, The Last Devil, they deserve one.” It is simply that having written four Thursday Murder Club books and with no plans to stop doing so “I just wanted to create a new world, to create new characters, to entertain readers in a different way”. In the case of We Solve Murders, he says,” I had this idea of father-in-law, daughter-in-law — it just came into my head. I liked the idea of writing about family, but not that direct father daughter thing, but father-in-law and daughter-in-law I thought was an interesting relationship.”

'We Solve Murders' by Richard Osman.
'We Solve Murders' by Richard Osman.
Image: Supplied

Not long after retired British detective Steve Wheeler and his daughter-in-law Amy Wheeler, a bodyguard employed by a private security firm, arrived on the pages of We Solve Murders, Osman realised Amy had to have a client. “So I started writing Rosie D’Antonio, the world’s best-selling author if you don’t count Lee Child. And she was so funny and so vivid and so bold, I thought, 'you’re going to be in this book as well, Rosie.’” In the beginning, he recounts, he began to feel as if he were cheating on his characters from The Thursday Murder Club, which were inspired by people he met in his mother’s retirement village.” I’ve spent a lot of time with Joyce and Elizabeth, Ibraham and Ron, and I feel closely connected to them, they speak to me a lot. Then I thought ‘they’re just up the road in Kent, one of them might pop up at any moment, so it’s OK'.”

By then, he adds, “I’d fallen in love with these new characters as well, and I wanted to write a book that was really globe-trotting but that was about somebody who didn’t want to globe trot.” Indeed, all Steve wants to do is stay at home in his village with his cat called Trouble, do the pub quiz with his mates and sit on a park bench for nightly chats to his dead wife. Conversely, Amy thrives on adrenalin and is on a remote island guarding Rosie from a Russian oligarch. But when dead bodies pile up Amy asks Steve to help. As Osman puts it, “I needed something to drag him round the world, and I liked that idea that he is the only person she can trust, and that she is the only person he loves enough to put his life on hold and travel halfway round the world.”

All Osman knew, he insists, “apart from that and various other little bits on the way” was that he wanted to kick off this high-stakes mystery with the death of an instagrammer on a yacht. “But I didn’t really know where I was headed. I just send the characters on a quest and I see what awful things happen to them. I know some writers love to plan everything out. But I can’t. I have these characters that I love and I think 'what can I put them through now?’” Osman shares Steve’s reluctance to travel, notably when he’s writing, but he has been to all the places mentioned in this novel before, including Dubai where, he drily notes, “there is a lot of money sloshing round, and the economy there is intriguing”.

He insists too his characters are rarely based on anyone he knows. Yet he admits that Trouble is based “in large part” on his own writing companion, Liesl Von Cat and views Trouble’s presence in We Solve Murders as “a sort of cipher for home and a cipher for mischief as well. Those two things are like veins that run through all of these books, the love and warmth of home, but also, this kind of naughty mischief. They share the same DNA I think.”

Osman, you rapidly realise, makes everything seem effortless. Famous in England for his role in creating and hosting popular TV quiz shows long before he conceived of The Thursday Murder Club series, which he describes as “a sort of a love letter to Agatha Christie but takes it in a different direction”. In the same way, he adds, “this new series is a sort of love letter to those kind of, 80s airport novels where they’re going round the world. But the sensibility is the same, which is that very British, warm, witty, unconventional character-based stuff. So, even though I’m writing a globe-trotting, murder mystery, it’s still unmistakably me.”

An avid reader of crime fiction Osman takes issue with his own books being labelled “cosy crime”. He says: “I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a cosy crime novel. Most people who call it 'cosy crime' are people who have not read it. I’m writing about some fairly serious things I just choose to come at from a slightly different angle.” Indeed his books are laced with criminality and death — lots of it — yet conversely are also brimming with kindness, empathy and wit, “because both those things exist in the world. Serial killers have to go to the dentist, right? I try and write people as human beings.”

While reaffirming his aversion to writing cosy crime, he adds: “We live in an absolutely crazy world at the moment, we’re constantly being divided in two, and being told that we all hate other. And culturally, that voice is loud enough. I think it’s nice to have a different voice sometimes, which is, ‘you know what, you can work together and you can solve problems. We can have some warmth and some kindness along with our strength.”

Osman also takes issue with the way that plot is fetishised in crime fiction. “People think crime fiction is all about clockwork plots where everything fits together. And I’ve never, ever, ever believed that because to me plot is quite secondary. I always think it’s not what happens in your book that matters, it’s why do I care what happens. And that’s all from character. You’ve got to have a plot that’s fun and compulsive, but nothing works if you don’t have characters who people will fall in love with.”

As for why people fall in love with his own books, he says: “I choose not to think about it too much because I don’t want to write to a formula. For me every single thing is about a reader picking up the book and reading it.” It’s hard to disagree with Osman as he tells booksellers and librarians in the acknowledgments of We Solve Murder: “Every time you hand over a book you are handing over a piece of magic”. 

'A Month in The Country' by JL Carr.
'A Month in The Country' by JL Carr.
Image: Supplied

RICHARD OSMAN ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

A Month in the Country by JL Carr. If there’s a book that I’ve recommended in my life more than any other, it’s this. It’s quite short. It’s about a summer month in a North Yorkshire village just after World War 1, and a guy who’s uncovering a mural in an old church, which makes it sound like the most boring book that’s ever been written. But it is the most beautiful book that’s ever been written. It’s just shot through with nostalgia. It has humour in it and it’s beautifully about human nature. It’s one of those books that I defy any writer to read and work out what it is that JL Carr was doing, because it’s so deceptively slight and at the end has such emotional heft. I would like to write something a 10th as good as A Month in the Country.

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith and the four sequels — all of which I absolutely love. It’s quite hard when you’re writing to read any sort of contemporary fiction because if it’s bad that infects you and if it’s good it depresses you. So I was reading all the Highsmith stuff. It’s written by somebody who isn’t around now and isn’t about to write another book. She writes in such an unclichéd way it’s hard for her to infect the way you write. I love how she is incredibly unjudgmental about her characters. She has Ripley who is one of the worst men in the world, but you just cheer him on. And, you think, 'how have you done that, Patricia?' That idea that you don’t need to tell people that someone is bad. You don’t need to signpost that someone can be unusual and difficult, and do a nice thing in one moment, and a bad thing the other moment. We all know that as readers and writers but I think Highsmith does it better than almost anyone else. The absolute key for writing is to read good writers who you love. Not read writers who you’re told are good, good writers who you love and who tell stories that grip you. And if you read those, you hope over the years that it seeps in.

'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd' by Agatha Christie.
'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd' by Agatha Christie.
Image: Supplied

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Without giving any spoilers, it’s just a reminder sometimes that you can pull the rug from under readers. And however much I say about plot being less important than character, if you've got an absolute cracker, then fair play to you. Christie had a number of genuinely, jaw-dropping plots and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of them. But again, she doesn’t write it in a showy way. She writes it in a, ‘don’t you worry about me, I’m just writing a gentle little story about the English countryside, I’m afraid someone’s been murdered again' -exactly what people would say is cosy crime. I mean, that ain’t cosy crime, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not cosy crime. She just writes it in a cosy way. She draws you in, and, she’s doing that deliberately. So, I think that Christie is such an inspiration because she looks like she’s writing about one thing, and she’s writing about something entirely different, which is why she’s endured.

Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn. I think it’s the funniest book in the English language. It’s about the last great days of the British newspaper industry in Fleet Street and a guy who works on a very sleepy obituaries and country diary desk of a national newspaper. It’s about the end of that industry and the very beginnings of television, both of which Frayn writes about beautifully. I love Woodhouse, but, those are definitely comic novels, I’m not reading a true story about real things that have happened. If I were to give you an example of the book where I think, 'this is really making me laugh but I believe every single word of it,’ then Towards the End of the Morning would be the book for me. Everything Frayn writes is brilliant. He’s an absolute genius. But, this has got nostalgia. It’s got sadness. It’s got nice jokes in it. It’s got great set pieces and it’s about a disappeared world. And I find all of those things together to be very seductive.

'Lux the Poet' by Martin Millar.
'Lux the Poet' by Martin Millar.
Image: Supplied

Lux the Poet, by Martin Millar. He’s a kind of slightly punky writer who just writes these books that have very, very short chapters, that have changes of perspective in every single chapter. There was a whole group of them, Lux the Poet is the first one I read where I thought, 'I see how I could write a book. I see how someone with my brain and my attention span, could write a book’. It had depth. I read these when I was at university, someone recommended them. It wasn’t until 30 years later I started writing, but how I felt when I read those books was still in my brain, which is a testament to something I think. It’s just that thought of, ‘I can hop from counter to counter. I can take you on a journey. I can be in different places. I can use different voices.’ I know there’s lots and lots of books written from different perspectives but there’s something about that book and the speed of it that absolutely cemented in my brain the sort of book that I would be able to write.

 

 


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