Richard Osman is contorting his 6ft 7in body into what resembles a vertical velvet coffin. It looks uncomfortable, but he is gamely following orders. Photoshoots aren’t his favorite part of the job.
“I would say it’s far enough outside my comfort zone that I can’t even get my comfort zone’s wi-fi,” he says, free of the coffin after the shoot has finished. Posing for photos, international tours, sore hands from marathon-level signings: all this is part and parcel of being one of Britain’s bestselling novelists.
Osman, 54, was previously best known as that affable quizmaster off the telly until he published his debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, in 2020. “I just wrote a book that I thought I would love,” he says. “I felt I hadn’t seen a book like mine when I started the first one.”
It became the fastest-selling crime novel in history and spawned copycat knockoffs with suspiciously similar swirly-font book covers. He followed up with three more Thursday Murder Club (TMC) books, which all feature a wily quartet of pensioners, Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim, solving crimes, then last year published another crime novel with different characters, We Solve Murders.
A film adaptation of the first TMC novel has just come out, starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, and then there’s Osman’s chart-topping podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest Is Entertainment. Oh, and he still does telly — Pointless Celebrities and Richard Osman’s House of Games on the BBC.
The TMC books have sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and, despite their honking Britishness, the rights have been sold in more than 43 countries. In China the novels are double the length thanks to endless footnotes. “You look through the footnotes and it’ll be ‘Nigella Lawson’, ‘Hairy Bikers’, ‘Jaffa Cakes’. They explain everything,” says Osman, perched on a pleather sofa in the photo studio in west London.
Whether he is on promotional duties in India, Japan or the Mediterranean, all readers recognize the idea of older people in society being invisible and underestimated. “They all say, ‘Oh yeah, it really resonates. We treat older people terribly,’” he says. “There isn’t a country in the world where they go, ‘What are you talking about? We love older people.’”
Now he has written the fifth TMC installment, The Impossible Fortune, where the famous foursome deal with a cryptocurrency windfall, grief and, obviously, murder. It’s funny, occasionally poignant and will surely shoot to the top of bestseller lists and be the go-to Christmas present for the tricky-to-buy-for relative.
Osman, who writes in a quiet room at the top of his Chiswick home alongside his beloved rescue cats, Liesl and Lottie, is optimistic that it is his best book yet. “It probably should be because I should be getting better, but that’s definitely not how it feels,” he says. “It’s like how going to the gym never gets easier because the stronger you get the more weights you lift.”
And now there are the films to consider. The author sold the screen rights for his series to Steven Spielberg’s production company five years ago and more films will follow. These are dizzying levels of success. “It’s crazy. You can’t reflect on it. You can’t even think about it. There’s no point. All you’ve got to do is go upstairs the next day and write the next one,” Osman says. “That’s literally the only job.”
Although that level-headed discipline doesn’t mean he is up with the lark at his desk. “I write when I’ve exhausted every single other thing I could possibly do that day,” he says. “Sometimes I wish there were more bins to take out because when I’ve done the bins already, that means I’ve got to go and write.”
In the new book, one character, a drug queen called Connie Johnson (a name that Osman assures me wasn’t a wink to Boris’s wife, Carrie Johnson), is asked about her favorite James Bond actor. “Pierce Brosnan. I’d climb that man like a tree,” Johnson replies. It is Osman’s one nod to the film in the book. “They’re different universes for me, but I had to at least acknowledge it.”
The film, which is directed by Chris Columbus of Harry Potter and Home Alone fame, has received mixed reviews, but Osman isn’t fazed. “Do you know what I make of it? Absolutely nothing because it isn’t anything,” he says, perhaps a smidge defensively. “We’ll find out if it’s good because people will watch it and enjoy it, or people won’t watch it and enjoy it.”
In person Osman is no different to podcast-host Osman: enviably knowledgeable, enthusiastic and easy to like. The Rest Is Entertainment is a must-listen for anyone keen on cultural goings-on and the hosts have an easy rapport. “We come at things from different angles,” he says. “Marina’s happy to be controversial and I’ve never found a fence I wasn’t comfortable sitting on.”
He has become an entertainment top dog partly by being uncontroversial, reassuringly mainstream and an all-round good egg. “I’m not interested in getting into a fight with anyone,” he says. “It’s not my personality type.”
During our chat Osman caveats his opinions to avoid causing any offence. He is pro-assisted dying, a subject that he covers in his first TMC book, but adds: “I recognize that the people who disagree with me are also coming from a compassionate place.” For his own reading tastes, he isn’t a fan of literary fiction with minimal plot. “If it doesn’t really go anywhere, if it’s just a meditation on something, I’m like, ‘I’m sure this is beautiful but I need some momentum,’” he says, before checking himself. “And that’s on me.”
Osman doesn’t like the term “cozy crime”, which is often used to describe his killings-and-cake-baking books. “I want to talk about death and assisted dying, dementia and grief and loneliness, and it just feels like ‘cozy crime’ is a reductive term,” he says. “But I absolutely get it.” Inspired by visits to his mother’s retirement home in Sussex, Osman decided to write about older people who were inevitably full of stories and allowed him to touch on the big topics of mortality, grief and dementia.
Novelist superstardom came after a successful television career. For decades he worked behind the cameras producing, writing for Have I Got News for You and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and later becoming creative director for Endemol.
Osman grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, with his single mother, Brenda, a primary school teacher, and his elder brother, Mat, who became the bassist in the rock group Suede and now also writes novels. There is apparently no fraternal literary competitiveness. “When people talk about mainstream culture, Mat comes from somewhere else,” he says. “I love that sort of brain. I just don’t have it.”
It was a television-loving household and Osman, who was born with nystagmus, an eye condition that he compares to seeing as if you’re always driving in fog, found that television gave him the chance to see detail for the first time — the bird in the tree, the cricket ball hitting the bat. After graduating with a degree in politics and sociology from the University of Cambridge it made perfect sense to pursue a career in telly.
“Everyone seemed to be from public schools and no one seemed to watch telly. So my drive was, ‘I want to make the stuff my family would like, I want to make the stuff these people sitting around me don’t seem to have even heard of,’” he recalls. “That was always the drive to prove myself in that regard with a huge chip on my shoulder, and somewhere along the way the chip disappeared. The drive now is to have fun and to do stuff I’m proud of.”
He is hugely proud of the books and turns down television offers to focus on writing. Osman lives with his second wife, Ingrid Oliver, an actress who stars in the TMC film as Joyce’s daughter, Joanna. He is writing the next novel in the We Solve Murders series as well as co-writing a TMC play with Tom Basden, who co-wrote and starred in this year’s delightful rom-com The Ballad of Wallis Island. The play will have a different plot to any of the books. One day he wants to write something totally different — “I’ve always wanted to write something quite time-travelly” — but for now the murders will continue.
He pooh-poohs my suggestion of workaholism — “My natural state is doing nothing with the cat on my lap and Ingrid next to me, that’s where I’m happiest” — but he certainly isn’t a man who would take August off. He’s surely made enough millions that he could take September off too if he wanted.
The Rest Is Entertainment has put out episodes every single week since it began in November 2023. In a recent episode the hosts discussed “always on” culture, in which artists never stop churning out new material for their insatiable fans. “If you want to build something these days you do probably have to be always on because the mainstream core of culture has gone and now it’s fandom. It’s now a smaller silo of people and they need constant feeding,” Osman says. “That’s where the culture is going.”
We talk about family: how his success means he can spoil his mother — “The greatest joy of my life is that she can have the things that she wants” — and how he is charged with reading lines when his wife is filming audition tapes. “Whenever she gets a job I’m always, like, ‘What do they think of me as the air traffic controller? Were they interested?’” he jokes, adding that he’s a dismal actor. And how his daughter from his first marriage, Ruby, has read his books but his son, Sonny, has not read any of them. “They have very different ways of being proud of me and I’m comfortable with both,” he says.
Talk turns to the power of BookTok, which can turn unknown writers into multi-millionaires, and the unhealthy economics of the book industry. ”Thursday Murder Club being successful means Penguin has got more money and I would rather they were spending that money on new writers and distinctive voices than a celebrity novel, but people follow the market,” says Osman, who understandably doesn’t count himself as a celebrity novelist because he’s been writing for his entire career. The world of commercial books and the world of literature are two different beasts. “If you want people to buy more literary fiction, I’m afraid that’s probably the wrong moon to be barking at,” he says.
In the past Osman has spoken openly about his addiction to food and binge eating, which started when he was 10, shortly after his father abandoned the family. Women stop him in the street to tell him their husbands suffer similarly but don’t seek help.
I naively wonder whether Osman’s stellar success in the past half decade has helped him to overcome his painful issues with food. “Nothing changes anything,” he says, frankly. “I remember when my kids were born, I thought this will change it and, of course, it didn’t. All it makes you feel is even more ashamed.”
Thanks to therapy he has managed to banish the shame and his addiction has made him more empathetic, which is a helpful trait as a novelist who needs to inhabit multiple characters. “So many of the things I do are irrational and yet we spend our lives judging other people for being irrational,” Osman says. “We’re all just doing our best.”
Laura Pullman is the New York correspondent for The Sunday Times of London
