Richard Osman

There is a scene in The Last Devil to Die where Elizabeth, who is eighty-something years old and has seen some things, sits quietly with a friend who is dying. Nobody says anything particularly clever. The plot pauses. It lasts maybe two pages. I read it on a train and had to put the book down because my eyes were doing that thing where they get inconveniently wet. This, from a novel by the tall bloke off Pointless.

Born 1970, Billericay, Essex, though Haywards Heath is where he actually grew up. His old man left when Richard was nine and he has never pretended otherwise. You pick up on it in the books if you pay attention, this thread about chosen families, about people who stay when they do not have to. He went to Cambridge, read politics, met a bloke called Alexander Armstrong. They made a quiz show together years later. Pointless, on the BBC, 2009 to 2022. Before that Osman had run Endemol UK, the outfit behind Big Brother. TV executive, quiz host, production boss. Writing novels was not part of the plan.

“I wanted to write the kind of book where you felt like you were spending time with people you genuinely liked.”

The Thursday Murder Club came out in 2020 and caught everyone off guard. Osman was forty-nine. Nobody outside his family knew he had been writing it. Four pensioners at a posh retirement village review cold murder files every Thursday, then somebody on the grounds actually turns up dead. A million copies sold in the UK. Sequel, number one. Next one, number one. Next one after that, number one. Spielberg’s people rang about film rights, which is a phone call most debut authors do not receive. He started We Solve Murders in 2024. Retired cop, adventurous daughter-in-law, international trouble. Quicker books, but the same voice underneath.

Quick facts

• First novel at 49
• A million UK copies of The Thursday Murder Club
• Film rights: Spielberg
• Pointless co-host, 2009 to 2022
• Trinity College, Cambridge

The plots hold up and the comedy lands but that is not really why people keep buying these books. Osman gets what it is like to be seventy-five with bad knees and a memory that skips. He does not make it sad or sweet. He just makes it true.