Richard Osman is in the middle of a mammoth round of press interviews when we talk. He’s just got off the phone to Australia – the Aussies, needless to say, wanted to chat about the obsessive Fulham fan’s love of sport – and someone’s been making him cups of tea between calls to keep him going. If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, it’s hardly a surprise.
Since the 2020 publication of his debut novel The Thursday Murder Club, featuring a quartet of retired cold-case enthusiasts, the former host of hit BBC quiz show Pointless has become one of the world’s biggest authors – selling a staggering ten million copies of the four-part series. Today he looms large – quite literally, at 6ft 5in tall – over popular fiction. His brilliant new novel, We Solve Murders, featuring a fresh cast of unforgettable characters, of whom more shortly, has unsurprisingly romped to number one in the book charts this weekend, despite taking a new tack.
“If I was publishing a fifth Thursday Murder Club book, it would feel like a different vibe,” he admits. Earlier this year, Osman, 53, told the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, supported by the Daily Express, that he felt like he was “cheating” on his beloved Thursday Murder Club characters by writing his new thriller. He’s more sanguine today, telling me: “The first four books work as a quartet, so I thought I’d give them a bit of rest and recuperation and come into this new world and new char.