Richard Osman was at home discussing “The Impossible Fortune,” the latest book in his phenomenally successful “Thursday Murder Club” series, when one of his cats began idly sharpening her claws on the table, right where he was sitting.
The cat, Lottie, is not allowed to do that, but “what are you going to do?” Osman said. “They’re cats.” (He has a second, better-behaved cat, Liesl, but she was biding her time upstairs.) “Lottie is the one with the main-character energy,” he said.
At 6-foot-7, the author exudes a certain main-character energy himself, albeit of an affable kind — more canine than feline. This is despite his bona fide celebrity status. Long before he hit the literary jackpot with his “Murder Club” books, which star a quartet of elderly residents turned detectives in an upscale British retirement community plagued by an unusually high degree of criminality, he was a ubiquitous figure on British TV — the brainy creator, writer and host of a slew of popular quiz shows.
The books have launched him into a new bracket of prominence. Seventeen million in all formats have been sold worldwide since 2020, when the first emerged as an unexpected balm for the pandemic-weary British public. A film adaptation was released this summer, starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. Last year, Osman published the first book in a new series, “We Solve Murders,” in which a resourceful security operative and her father-in-law, a retired cop who wishes he could just stay at home, find themselves battling international assassins and much more.
We were discussing all this in Osman’s house on a leafy street in Hounslow, West London. His wife, the actress and comedian Ingrid Oliver, had ventured out reluctantly to the gym after what she described as a long period of non-exercise. Lottie had melted away into cat-world.
On the bathroom wall was an artifact from Osman’s other, quiz-centric life: a Guinness World Records certificate commemorating his record for “the most countries identified from capital cities in one minute” in 2013. (He got 30 of them.)
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