Author and presenter Richard Osman on grief, his debilitating eye condition, and why his latest Thursday Murder Club book made his wife cry.
“You can’t fast forward through loneliness and grief. You have to exist with it, searching for ways to push on through,” explains Richard Osman. He’s referring to Elizabeth, one of the main characters of his Thursday Murder Club book series, who lost her husband Stephen at the end of the fourth book, The Last Devil to Die, which was released two years ago.
“Elizabeth’s husband was battling dementia and she helped him take his life,” recounts Richard. “In the aftermath of that, she retreated from the world. We were losing her. She needed a reason to re-engage.”
Here, he allows himself a slight smile before continuing. “This being Thursday Murder Club, she is approached by a man who matter-of-factly says, ‘Someone tried to kill me this morning’. That one line became the start of my new book, The Impossible Fortune. Obviously, Elizabeth is hooked. Her heart begins to beat faster. She’s back in the game!”
Even if you’ve been living under a rock on Mars for the past five years, chances are that you will still have heard about The Thursday Murder Club. Blasting into the best-seller lists in 2020, Richard Osman’s multi-million-selling international phenomenon rewrote the literary rule book as its heroes are all the other side of 75, living in a quaint retirement community in Kent.
The first book in the series was turned into a Netflix hit film this year starring Celia Imrie and Ben Kingsley, along with last month’s cover stars – Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan – as the fab four. And the latest – The Impossible Fortune – is published on 25 September.
“I created older main characters specifically because they have ‘lived’,” says Osman. “They have been places, done things, lived extraordinary lives. They have loved and lost.
“My mum still lives in the real-life retirement community that provided the inspiration for the Murder Club, and I spend a lot of time there. I come across people who, like Elizabeth, are no strangers to tragedy and heartache.”
“Loneliness, grief, death, assisted dying and dementia are natural talking points in a retirement community because they are everyday facets of life. I wanted my characters to feel like real people, so it feels entirely appropriate that we’re touching on these subjects.”
Osman, 54, is unsurprised when I mention that we got a huge response from readers to our recent interview with Sir Michael Palin, in which he discussed the difficulties of moving forward after the death of his wife, Helen.
“Loneliness is an epidemic,” he says with a sad shake of his head. “And it isn’t just a problem in old age, it can happen at any time. It can be the grief of death, the loss of a partner to dementia, or the pain of a divorce.”
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