On paper, a crime fiction series set in a retirement village doesn't scream global bestseller.
However, since Richard Osman published the first instalment of the Thursday Murder Club in 2020, the series has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide, including 500,000 copies in Australia.
Osman, a popular quiz show host in the UK, is in Australia for the first time to promote the series' fourth instalment, The Last Devil to Die (2023).
It's hard to overstate the success of the Thursday Murder Club, which also includes The Man Who Died Twice (2021) and The Bullet that Missed (2022).
Steven Spielberg snapped up the movie rights early on and will start filming the screen adaptation in March 2024. Osman also recently signed a four-book deal with Penguin for $19 million, which includes two Thursday Murder Club titles and two instalments of a new crime series.
While many have argued that Osman's books are part of a renaissance of 'cosy crime', it's not a tag Osman welcomes.
"Cosy crime doesn't seem to quite cover it."
Bad things happen in his novels, he says.
"[My books] make people laugh, and I think critics find that quite difficult."
Write what you read
Osman, a long-time fan of crime fiction who cites Patricia Highsmith as his favourite author, always wanted to be a writer.
"I've always read crime fiction, which is why I write it. I think you have to write what you read," he says.
"I wrote Thursday Murder Club because I was looking for a particular type of book, and I couldn't quite find it."
The inspiration for Coopers Chase — the home of the Thursday Murder Club — came from a real-life retirement village Osman once visited in the English countryside.
However, he says the four central characters of The Thursday Murder Club represent "the four quarters" of his brain.
There's Elizabeth, an ex-spy; Joan, a former nurse; Ibrahim, a psychiatrist; and Ron, who worked as a trade unionist.
The unlikely friends form a formidable crime-fighting gang — and one that is helping to change the conversation around ageing.
"The one thing they've all got in common is they've got older and become invisible, but they have incredible skill sets, and they never take no for an answer," Osman says.
Anything but harmless
The Thursday Murder Club pushes back against the idea that people over 70 have nothing of value to contribute.
"We worship at the altar of youth," Osman says.
Pop culture often depicts senior citizens as harmless and peripheral to the action — but in the Thursday Murder Club, they are anything but.
The quartet's worldliness turns out to be a great asset and rich fodder for a crime fiction novel.
"When you're 75, there are lots of downsides," Osman acknowledged in a 2020 interview with ABC RN's The Book Show.
"You're around grief a lot, and loss and physical incapability, but you have such life experience, and you've dealt with every type of person. You've seen it all before."
As the Thursday Murder Club's success attests, Osman's audience relishes reading about a world where the antics of retirees are centre stage — evidence, he says, that readers were ready for a different depiction of old age.
"I think that I was really pushing an open door. As soon as these characters came along, who were older and felt like heroes … everyone went, 'Oh, finally, and about time'," he says.
"I think everyone was completely ready for it."
Tackling a taboo topic
In The Last Devil to Die, Osman takes on the troubling issue of dementia as the forgetfulness of Elizabeth's erudite husband Stephen descends into something more serious, severing his connection with the present.
Even though Osman says most families have experienced dementia, including his own, the debilitating condition is often considered a taboo topic — something the author wanted to address.
"We don't talk about it too much — it's so frightening," he says. "I wanted to give a character real dignity and respect and try to talk about it openly and honestly."
Stephen's experience of dementia was inspired by Osman's conversations with his grandfather before his death from a dementia-related illness.
"I wanted to try and get inside a character's head in tribute to my grandfather," he says.
Although his grandfather's decline was accompanied by great sadness, Osman says there was a lot of love and laughter, too.
"Love was the thing that endured … He felt loved, and he knew he loved you, and I wanted to get that across."
The Thursday Murder Club meets the Da Vinci Code
Osman will spend 2025 working on the first book of a new series centred on a detective agency run by a woman and her father-in-law.
"The daughter-in-law has a real jet set life — she's a close protection officer to billionaires, so she spends her life in Dubai and Macau and all over the world. And the father-in-law lives in a sleepy village and has no interest in ever going abroad," Osman says.
Like the father-in-law, Osman is happiest at home — "I'm not really a globetrotter," he says — and saw the dramatic potential in sending a homebody on "a Da Vinci Code-esque worldwide murder hunt".
He's also excited by the narrative possibilities presented by setting a novel in a detective agency.
"With a detective agency, someone can literally knock on the door of your office and give you your plot. They can say, 'Can you please solve this please?' In the first Thursday Murder Club, I'm not able to do that," Osman says.
But despite his plans to pen a new series, Osman has no intention to retire his much-loved crime-fighting quartet.
"I love those characters," he says.
"They've given me an awful lot, and I'm so deeply fond of them, and I love spending time with them, so I'll keep going for a very, very long time, I promise everybody that."
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman is published by Penguin Random House.
Richard Osman is appearing in conversation with Sydney Writers' Festival Artistic Director Ann Mossop at Sydney Town Hall on Tuesday, November 14, 2023.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiYGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTExLTE0L3JpY2hhcmQtb3NtYW4tYm9va3MtdGh1cnNkYXktbXVyZGVyLWNsdWItc2VyaWVzLzEwMzA4MzI0NtIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDMwODMyNDY?oc=5
2023-11-13 21:03:36Z
CBMiYGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTExLTE0L3JpY2hhcmQtb3NtYW4tYm9va3MtdGh1cnNkYXktbXVyZGVyLWNsdWItc2VyaWVzLzEwMzA4MzI0NtIBKGh0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvYXJ0aWNsZS8xMDMwODMyNDY
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