Richard Osman’s new novel is called The Impossible Fortune. Without knowing what’s inside, this phrase might equally apply to the man who wrote it. These days, everything Osman touches turns to gold.
A teatime television mainstay and creator of BBC’s Pointless and House of Games, the now 54-year-old published his first novel in 2020 and has in the short time since, become one of the biggest and bestselling authors of the decade. Inspired by his mother’s retirement village, the Thursday Murder Club series, in which a group of senior citizen amateur sleuths find themselves investigating real-life murder, has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. In 2024 he also introduced another series to his oeuvre, the instantly bestselling We Solve Murders, and if this weren’t enough, he co-hosts one of the biggest podcasts going – The Rest is Entertainment, part of Gary Lineker’s stable at Goalhanger Podcasts, which receives more than three million downloads each month.
“It’s been a very happy decade for me,” he says. “In a decade which has been unhappy for other people, I would say I’ve had an outlier. I mean, if it’s any help to anyone, everyone had an amazing time in the 1990s and I’m not sure I did. So, I’m just having my 1990s in the 2020s.”
Across a video call, Osman is uncannily identical to the television personality many readers will know and perhaps love – calm, affable, quick-witted. He speaks from his home in London, where he lives with his wife, actor, Ingrid Oliver. In the background, one of his two cats slinks up and down a staircase. It’s Liesel, the “elegant lady” cat, he says. The other one, Lottie, is a “hot mess”.
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We’re speaking, as it happens, on a Thursday. Earlier that day, the film version of Thursday Murder Club dropped on Netflix. Directed by Chris Columbus and starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie and Ben Kingsley, the project has been in the works since before the first novel was published (when it was optioned by Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment), but Osman handed over the reins from the beginning, and has enjoyed it as an onlooker rather than a creator.
“I can’t take any credit for it at all – it’s all other people’s work,” he says. “I can look on it like a proud grandfather rather than the proud father.”
Osman’s aforementioned wife plays Joanna, daughter of leading lady, Joyce (Celia Imrie), but Osman, with his 6ft 7in form and familiar, bespectacled face (the glasses are owing to a visual impairment called nystagmus) was never tempted to make a cameo.
“I’m sort of weirdly recognisable. It’s quite hard to disguise me. They’d be going: why is that guy from House of Games in a Kent police station?”
No one could accuse publishing of moving quickly, but Osman has certainly outpaced the film world, as he prepares to release the fifth novel in the series. The Impossible Fortune opens at a wedding and sees our murder club spurred into action when the best man confesses that someone has tried to kill him.
Far from referring to Osman’s personal fortunes, the “impossible fortune” comes in the form of £350 million in crypto, hidden in cold storage.
“I’d read about the idea of cold storage and thought, well, that’s interesting,” says Osman. “This idea that the safest place to keep any data is not on a computer but absolutely detached from any sort of electronic thing, because someone can always hack into it. Literally the safest place for something is where it used to be: buried deep in a hole in the ground – I thought that was quite fun. It was really modern in a very old-fashioned way.”
While there’s an enormous amount of money at the centre of the novel, the actual worth of that money is constantly called into question. We watch investors chase crypto wealth to the nth degree, never wishing to redeem their enormous sums lest they reach higher heights. Asked if he would describe the book as anti-capitalist, Osman says it’s “anti-greed”.
“It’s anti the love of money; anti not knowing when you’ve had enough. That’s why it’s called the impossible fortune. An impossible fortune is an enormous amount of money, but there’s just something that’s just not right about it, that you know it’s too much.
“Listen, I’m not going to bring down capitalism with this book. I’m sorry to break that to everybody. But certainly, it’s fun to talk about these things in a non-lecturing way. I mean, we are being run by people who are accumulating more, and more, and more. There’s arguments that that’s a perfectly good thing, but there are also arguments that it’s not.”
Why does he think people chase sums of money beyond that which will have a material effect on their lives?
I think there’s very few people who can write great novels in their twenties. I mean, Sally Rooney can, but who else can?
“I guess it’s power. If you’re the fifth richest person in the world and you wake up in the morning, you never think about the seven billion other people – you think about the four people ahead of you ... After a while, there’s not a lot you can buy. You can buy countries or missiles, but all you’re really buying is power. Normally, with people like that, the hole they are trying to fill in their soul with money is so enormous that no amount of money will ever fill it.”
But “banging a drum” about themes or issues is not the preserve of Osman or his fiction – he is, at heart, an entertainer.
“My natural instinct is always: where’s the joke? Almost any sentence in life can be a set up to a punch line ... I have to rein myself in.”
Born in Billericay, Essex, Osman grew up, for the most part, in Haywards Heath, near Brighton. He and his brother Mat (also a writer, and known to most as the bassist in the band Suede) were raised by their mother, after his father walked out when Osman was nine.
“I grew up, fairly soon, in a single-parent household. I remember very much being loved. I remember constantly, which has been the theme of my life, loving sitting down with a blank piece of paper and making things up.”
It was writing that would set his career in motion, beginning with journalism for the likes of NME in his teens.
“If you’d asked me at 20 what I was going to be, I’d have said I’d be a sportswriter.”
(A long-time Fulham fan, he instead chose West Ham as the team of choice for his Thursday Murder Club character, Ron – “you have to be careful putting your own darlings in there, just in case you need to do anything bad”.)
He was covering golf simulations for a sports magazine when he came across an advertisement for a job on a computer games programme.
“I thought, well, I’ve just done an article about that, so I know a bit about computer games.”
His newly acquired knowledge was enough to get his foot in the door, “and then I had essentially a 30-year career in TV. It all came from writing one article ... However much you plan a career, it’s the most unusual things that end up defining you.”
Despite a fruitful television career thereafter, the writing bug never left him. Aged 47, he took to the desk in earnest.
“I had picked up my pen a number of times in the previous years and started novels or ideas for novels,” he says. “[Thursday Murder Club] was the first time my brain had caught up with my ambition. I think there’s very few people who can write great novels in their 20s. I mean, Sally Rooney can, but who else can?”
A certain amount of success was to be expected from Osman’s books, given his platform, but what he’s achieved has been unprecedented. (Book four in the series recently broke Osman’s own record to become the fastest-selling adult fiction hardback ever.) Why does he think his books have such wide appeal?
“I mean, obviously, the answer is nobody knows. I think there were no barriers to reading them. I think they’re funny. They have laughter, they have tears, they have murders ... Publicity can sell you books in week one, but after week two, the only thing that sells books is other people reading them and telling you to read them. I think people enjoyed them and passed them on.”
The sheer volume of his novels in the ether means he often sees people reading them when out and about.
“If ever I’m on a train or a plane or anything, if someone sees me and they’re reading, they always say, ‘I’m so sorry, it’s very rude, but would you sign it?’ And you think yeah, of course! The greatest creative relationship in my life is with readers of these books.”
His approach to writing is pragmatic – writing a chapter a day, forcing himself to sit for two hours or so, his fingers “never off the keyboard”. These hours and words have accumulated to a prolific output – with five Thursday Murder Clubs under his belt, he’ll publish a second We Solve Murders next year, and is co-writing a West End version of Thursday Murder Club with comic and writer Tom Basden.
A Netflix adaptation of We Solve Murders is also in the pipeline, and with some of it set in an Irish vineyard (these do exist, he insists), he’s hopeful some of the filming will happen here.
“I’m hopefully coming to Ireland after publication [of The Impossible Fortune]. I always love to.
“Thursday Murder Club, I think sometimes, is such a weirdly British book, and I’m always amazed when people in America read it, or China. But I’m also amazed that people in Ireland love it. Our sense of humour is absolutely joined at the hip. But having a hit in Ireland is one of my great joys.”
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman is published by Viking
