E-Paper
Richard Osman: “Crime as a genre transcends genre”
The author of The Thursday Murder Club series on writing his wildly successful books, his relationship with his characters, and his ancestors who solved a murder case
Given your constant output — books, podcasts, television projects, and the Netflix adaptation of Thursday Murder Club — how do you juggle it all?
When I’m a reader if I am reading a series that I love, I don’t want to wait two or three years for the next book. So, I write a book a year. With the film, I literally did not get involved for one second. The film is someone else’s vision of the Thursday Murder Club, which is lovely.
But I like to work hard and want readers to find a new adventure for the Thursday Murder Club or We Solve Murders every year. That feels like the least I can do.
Do you have any writerly struggles since each book in the series has been about 400 pages?
There’s only one real struggle and that’s going upstairs and actually starting. It’s like going to the gym. The hardest bit is always putting your trainers on and actually going. Once you’re at the gym, you’ve got to stay there for an hour or you’re going to look like an idiot. And writing is exactly the same. I do anything to put it off but once I start, I work for two hours non-stop where the phone is off, no Internet, no distractions at all, apart from my cats. And I work as hard as I can after which my brain screams at me to stop.
Does the fact that you wear multiple hats help in creating that flow?
Even though I’ve done journalism, TV sitcoms, joke writing, novels are the hardest thing I’ve done, which I think of as a marathon. Although now that I’ve done five of them, I understand how it works. It never gets easier, still. Every year I think, ‘this will be the year where it’s simple, where it just flows,’ and it never, ever does. It’s always still incredibly painful.
In the year between each book, I take a couple of months off, spend a month thinking to come up with a nice little hook, and then spend nine months writing.
You said the two subjects you use every day are statistics and sociology. One helps you understand choice and the other gets you to the truth. How have these helped you write the Thursday Murder Club series?
That’s the two sides of the brain, isn’t it? I do believe that somewhere out there are real facts. At the same time, the magic of the world is in the gaps between the facts. Statistics can help you tell a story about the world, but sociology tells you that the world is not always as it seems and that numbers hide things. I love using those two bits of my brain – one of which is there’s a fact here and the other is someone’s lying to you about the fact that ‘there’s a fact here’. I like both – order and chaos. Hopefully somewhere in the books lies the gap between the two.
You have also often said that the four characters are four parts of your brain. Although you once admitted that Joyce is the most like you. Is that true?
I definitely recognise bits of myself in each of them. When I start a new chapter, I try to think, whose head will I be in here? And I’m aware that if I’m in Ibrahim’s head, it is a different bit of my brain, and for Ron, another. If you send someone into a room with a gun, those four bits of my brain will react differently, meaning my four characters. The fun for me in writing is thinking, who would it be most fun to point a gun at today? And I think Joyce? I indeed find her the easiest to write. Her brain works at the same speed as mine and is always going to different places. I love that way of writing. But in terms of actual personality, I’m maybe more Ibrahim.
What about the crime genre attracts you as a writer? Are you comfortable being called a genre writer or do you see genre as a marketing gimmick?
Crime as a genre transcends genre because you can tell any story. In it, we know there’s a murder, and at the end we’re going to find out the murderer. Those are the only rules. And even those you can break but within those, the journey you go on is about the characters you’re with and the state of the world or politics or economics as it is at the moment. I find it incredibly freeing knowing that a reader is feeling comfortable, lying in a hammock thinking there’s been a murder and it will be solved. So long as they’re enjoying the journey, you can take them anywhere.
With crime, people don’t feel like they’re being lectured or reading a State of the Nation book. But I get to write all the same stuff, and double my audience immediately because it makes readers feel comfortable. If I were to write anything else, it would be the same words, but they’d be much less successful.
I was just reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and I must have spent like 30 hours in the Wild West with this incredible group of Texan rangers that he created. And it was real in the same way that virtual reality is real. And what a privilege to be taken somewhere that the writer didn’t need to after working for years and years to entertain me, a reader.
What is the secret behind your unprecedented popularity?
Writing is the most satisfying thing and the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s probably the thing I’m best at. If I wanted to show the world my head and my heart it is in my books, not in television or anything else.
Also, I’ve always had quite mainstream tastes and like to be in the middle of our culture as part of something entertaining that comes from a good place. I love selling many books in many different countries because I’m proud of what I do. And the more people who read it, the happier I am. I feel like I’ve gotten to an age in life and I’ve done enough creative work that I know this is a thing that I’m happy that represents me, and I’m happy it is out there in the world.
Do you still imagine yourself writing in your eighties?
I’m never going to stop writing because there will come a time when I don’t have bestseller status and in some ways, that’ll be rather lovely. There can be a time when I’m 75 or 80 and I want to write a little tale about a small town and a small thing that happens. And I know that I’ll just pick up a blank piece of paper and a pen and I’ll just do it because I always have done. Since I was eight years old, I’ve always sat down with a blank piece of paper and a pen. I know every year that comes around I want to do it again. Next year, there’ll be another Thursday Murder Club and I’m already looking forward to it. I have to be aware that I have a series of characters, all of whom are over 80. It’s not like writing Harry Potter where you’ve got another 70 years. I’m aware there comes a point where you can’t write about 108-year-old detectives, but I choose not to think about that.
Why do you keep returning to these characters and what is special about this book?
I love them because they teach me a lot about the world. They’re very good at making me laugh and then on the next page, cry. They’re such real human beings that it’s not even a question of would you return to them? That’s like saying, would you return to a friend?
What have you learnt from them?
They are happy being friends with each other, despite differences, which I think is a powerful message in today’s world. They come from different places, believing in different things, but they find common ground. I love the fact that they are, at their core, kind, but all have a toughness, which sometimes in our culture we equate with not caring.
You discovered that your ancestor helped solve a crime.
Yes. On a British TV programme. I knew my grandfather was a police officer, so I knew I came from sort of crime solving. But, yeah, I went on a TV show where they trace your ancestors and around about 1820, my ancestor, who was a fisherman in Brighton, on the south coast of England, he, his wife and his mother, essentially, solved a crime. And the guy who did it, the murderer, was hanged. My great, great, great, great, great-grandfather was in court, and he couldn’t read or write or anything like that. And there were newspaper articles from the time about just the three of them walking five miles across the hills of Brighton to uncover this grave and then find the man who committed the murder. It was an amazing story, and I knew nothing about it at all. It was spooky how similar they were to the Thursday Murder Club.
Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.
