Richard Osman was, for years, a reassuring presence in British living rooms – the towering, affable co-host of BBC’s Pointless, famous for the sly asides and the ability to deliver a zinger without raising an eyebrow. But in his fifties, Osman rewrote his own story. Today he stands as one of Britain’s most successful novelists of the past decade, the creator of a crime series that has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide and now enjoys the ultimate publishing accolade: a lavish, star-studded film adaptation.
When The Thursday Murder Club appeared in 2020, Osman was already a familiar face, but few expected him to instantly dominate the literary charts. The novel – a “cosy crime” romp set in a genteel Kent retirement village, where four residents meet weekly to dig into unsolved mysteries – raced to the top of bestseller lists. In the UK, it became the fastest-selling debut crime novel ever, and Osman, in an unlikelier twist than any of his plots, was hailed as the genre’s new phenomenon.
The book’s charm lies partly in its refusal to condescend to its older protagonists. They are funny, insightful, sly; their lives rich with memory but not devoid of appetite. “I wanted to tell the truth about certain things that do happen when you’re older,” Osman said. His sleuths juggle grief and arthritis alongside murder investigations – but with wit sharp enough to cut glass.
Subsequent instalments – The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed – confirmed his debut was no fluke. Fans ranged from crime stalwarts to holiday readers looking for clever, escapism. Osman has been frank about his approach. “I would rather be mainstream and successful than a critical darling,” he once told an interviewer. “When I’m writing, I’m not thinking, ‘I want you to admire me as a prose stylist.’ I just want to tell this story as entertainingly as possible. And I want you to keep on reading.”
Now, his famous pensioners have swapped the page for the screen. This month Australian audiences will see The Thursday Murder Club film, directed by Chris Columbus, whose CV includes Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films. Columbus calls his cast “the Mount Rushmore of the British Acting Giants”: Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. “It was magical,” the director says of the shoot, “to watch that group spark off each other – they have the joy and ease of people who’ve been doing this their whole lives, but they still surprise each other.”
Brosnan plays Ron Ritchie, a former trade union firebrand. Osman, who serves as an executive producer, was delighted with the choice. “Pierce Brosnan is who Ron would choose to play Ron,” he said, chuckling – a nod to the in-joke that Ron, in the novels, is a Brosnan-era Bond fan. The Irish star enjoyed the gag. “That’s bloody great. I love it,” Brosnan said. “Timothy Dalton was a fantastic Bond. Brosnan wasn’t half bad either.”
Helen Mirren, meanwhile, singles out the emotional heart beneath Osman’s humour. “Kindness is powerful,” she reflects. “And kindness is also courageous – because you’re putting yourself on the line in some way.” It’s a sentiment that could serve as the unofficial motto of Osman’s work: tender but never sentimental, warm but never naïve.
Osman’s route to literary superstardom was anything but conventional. Born in 1970 in Billericay, Essex, he grew up in West Sussex after his father left when Osman was nine. Money was tight, but academic promise took him to Warden Park School in Cuckfield and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a full grant, to study Politics and Sociology. There he met Alexander Armstrong, his future Pointless co-presenter – though his early career would be behind the scenes.
For years, Osman worked in television production, shaping popular panel and quiz shows such as 8 Out of 10 Cats and Total Wipeout. His height, quick mind and bone-dry humour eventually put him in front of cameras, and Pointless ran for more than a decade before he stepped away in 2022 to focus on writing.
That first book, begun in quiet hours away from the studio, was a late-life gamble. “When someone else reads my books for the first time, it’s absolutely terrifying, every single time,” Osman says. “Every time, you think: I’ve done something horribly wrong, or they’re going to see through me this time. Of course I don’t read them – I’ve not read a single review, nor will I. You have to trust yourself and trust your readers.”
The gamble paid off almost instantly. Osman found his voice with uncanny assurance: structurally adroit mysteries, yes, but elegantly leavened with warmth and a painter’s eye for detail. His older heroes are no caricatures – their humour, frailty, resourcefulness and moral steel are recognisable to millions. “I guess I’m always looking for when good people find a connection,” he says. “It’s joyful.”
Away from cameras and keyboards, Osman lives in Chiswick, West London, with his wife, actress Ingrid Oliver, and his two children. Home life, by all accounts, is calm, gracious and less murder-filled than his fictional villages – though there is the same undercurrent of laughter.
Fans relish the thought that his urbane sleuths might be versions of people he knows from his own London circle. He demurs, but admits his writing draws heavily on close observation. “After a certain age,” one of his characters notes, “you can pretty much do whatever takes your fancy. No one tells you off, except for your doctors and your children.” The line could apply just as easily to Osman himself – relishing his late-career freedom, and making the most of it.
Osman’s leap from broadcaster to novelist might look seamless in retrospect, but he is at pains to remind aspiring authors that it took nerve to start from scratch. “You have to allow yourself to try something new, however old you are,” he says. “And accept that you might fail. But if you don’t start, you definitely will not succeed.”
That sense of possibility runs through his fiction: characters redrawing the boundaries of their later years, refusing to be sidelined. It is part of what makes The Thursday Murder Club so beloved – readers are in on the joke, but they are also moved by its truth.
The film is likely to extend Osman’s reach far beyond his already substantial fanbase. With Columbus at the helm, a cast of Oscar-winners and a screenplay that preserves the novel’s warmth and wit, expectations are high for an international hit.
Osman hints that more stories are coming, both on page and screen. But for now, he is content to savour the moment – to sit in a cinema, watch his fictional friends walk and talk, and hear an audience laugh in the same places he laughed while writing. Not bad for a man who once worried that his readers might “see through” him.
If crime fiction is often about reinvention – the truth disguised until the final act – then Osman’s own career is its own clever twist: the popular quizmaster who, in mid-life, became the architect of one of the most unlikely literary empires of recent times. As the lights go down on The Thursday Murder Club’s cinema debut, one suspects that, for Richard Osman, the mystery is only just beginning.
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