The Last Devil to Die is no exception. It’s a crime story, yes. But at core it’s a book about dementia and assisted dying. Where his mother lives, residents are over 75 and, “They had a big debate about it, incredibly rational, incredibly polite. Lots of disagreement, [but] everyone listening to each other. People who have been medical professionals, people who’ve been mental health professionals and people who’ve obviously lost loved ones. It’s something that you’re allowed to talk about. It’s not crazy to want to die when you’re in pain with no way of getting out of that pain. I absolutely respect the views of people for whom [assisted dying] would be an impossibility. But it’s an argument that’s not going away. We have such control over our lives, it seems weird that the final bit we have no control over. An awful lot of people would sleep easier if they knew their last few years wouldn’t be very difficult.” THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE RECORD-BREAKING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES BY RICHARD OSMAN

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. They met when she appeared on his show House of Games in summer 2020, and she moved in that October. The following year, he bought a ring and planned his proposal – which was to be in a special restaurant on the third day of a holiday in Oman. Once there, he got in an awful flap and blew the whole schedule by proposing on day one, tears all over his face. Is this an example of his inability to keep a secret? He laughs. “My heart wouldn’t let me. It was absolutely bursting.” Richard Osman was born in 1970, the second child of David Osman and Brenda Wright. He grew up near Hayward’s Heath in West Sussex. He was born with nystagmus, an eye condition which means the world appears somewhat blurred. A building will appear like an impressionist painting, he has said, and he can’t make out the birds in the trees. Whether or not it’s a consequence, he is able to tune in to a multilayered soundscape: “If six different conversations are going on, I’ll hear every single one. So that’s a useful skill.” But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. I would have been a terrible spy. I’m too tall, not bright enough, and if I have a secret, I tell everybody. I cannot tell a lie

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With Pointless co-host and old university chum Alexander Armstrong in 2015. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Teasing, I ask how he gets on with Oliver’s mother, Jo Gideon. Osman describes himself as a lefty and she is the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent, a red-waller instrumental in ousting Johnson. It’s the only time Osman looks terrified. He doesn’t lie. Instead he says: “Let’s not go there. We won’t go into that.” Photographer’s assistant: Caz Dyer. Set Design: Sandy Suffield. Assistant: Lucas Aliaga-Hurt. Grooming: Pauline Simmons. Photograph: Jay Brooks/The Guardian

Whether work was going well, or his marriage was going badly, there was another issue nagging away. In his 30s he had an anagnorisis of sorts: went to therapy and was diagnosed with addictive behaviours, the most explicit around food. For years he’d suffered bouts of binge eating, “an absolute compulsion to eat, an inability to stop eating, shame afterwards and then repeat”. The pattern could continue for weeks or months. “I find myself in situations sometimes where my behaviour around food is so absurd, it makes no sense. It’s certainly not self-care.” The foursome can escape a confrontation with an armed murderer using nothing but a kindly smile and a poisoned slice of Battenberg. The threats, the victims, even the crimes themselves, never really matter. If the villains enjoy tea and cake too, their sins may be forgiven; the group employs a brand of vigilante justice that respects no laws or conventional morality. They adopt a Polish builder, Bogdan, though they suspect he’s a killer himself; become firm friends with charismatic drug dealer Connie after entrapping and imprisoning her; and bring cheery former KGB colonel Viktor along with them after deciding not to kill him. In the real world, people are rarely as obsessed with politics as we are told, he says. He compares it with football: some people are fanatical, go every week, know all the players’ names, etc. Most tune in every couple of years when there is a big tournament. Some of the best fictional sleuths are older and wiser – from Miss Marple to Columbo to Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote – but he cannot abide the term “cosy fiction”, words he introduces to the conversation and has a severe allergic reaction to without any input from me. “If you really read my books, there’s some quite bad stuff happening, some very non-cute references. It’s definitely not cosy. Today you can write a book about a detective who runs a sweet shop in a seaside town and someone will publish it. But that’s OK,” he says moving from the heat of his own irritation. “I get it.” I’ve written my whole life. Graham Norton has always written, Dawn French has. It is not a surprise that these people go on and write books. You’re allowed to Does he remember what age he was when it started? “Oh, like 10 years old. Yeah, I wonder what the inciting incident was. And food when you’re 10 is something that you can’t control. You’re not going to become an alcoholic or a drug addict.”

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Coopers Chase, the fictional retirement village where his characters reside, is based on the community in Sussex where he bought a house for his mother, Brenda. He looked around and immediately realised the potential. Here was the generation who, culturally, “are overlooked by everybody. That generation did much more interesting and unusual things, overcame much bigger hurdles and obstacles. It’s a generation full of wisdom, full of brio, looking for new adventures and new mischief. There are very few consequences to anything they do or say. That’s freeing for a writer, to have characters who are going, ‘No one’s going to arrest me; I might as well do this.’” They are overlooked because we worship at the temple of youth, he says. “I mean, God knows what our generation will be like when we get to that age; insufferable.” While it doesn’t have the “doomed glamour” of alcohol or drugs, he has said, the behaviour is in essence the same – although “slightly more behavioural and slightly less to do with the substance itself”, as with love or sex addiction. “But the second you go to therapy, you realise that’s just a symptom of the problem. You realise you’re just numbing whatever pain; you’re numbing the things you don’t want to think or talk about.” He’s described his 40s as “really good fun.” He was single for much of it and there was a merry-go-round of dates. “I was always looking for the one, always knew I wanted to get married, absolutely wanted to fall in love. And, listen, I enjoyed the process. Friends would go, ‘I don’t think that is what you’re looking for. I think you enjoy playing the field.’ I would always say, ‘It really is what I’m looking for.’”

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Osman always loved crime. He grew up reading Christie and adored Patricia Highsmith, creator of Tom Ripley. He also likes the peculiar Britishness of the worlds created by Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark. It didn’t feel like a jump to write books, having written for TV. Although he has been accepted with open arms by the crime writing community, there is still a trace of the testiness he felt over an early suggestion that he is one of a slew of celebrities turned authors. “There’s certain books that come out and people are open about having a ghost. I get that people know what they’re getting and understand it’s a brand. But there’s also a group of people – Bob Mortimer is one – where we’re just writers. I’ve written my whole career, my whole life. Graham Norton has always written, Dawn French has. It is not a surprise that these people go on and write books. You’re allowed to. Also: no one is a writer. Everyone is something, then becomes a writer. You get to a certain age and think, ‘Well, I want to write a novel. I’ve got stuff in my head that I want to say.’ No one ever buys a second novel if the first one isn’t good.”

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On the other hand, he believes there is often a gross distortion in the things we’re told everyone likes. The TV series Succession, for instance. It’s only watched by a teensy sliver of the population, but for all the amplification it gets in the news we’d assume it was a nationwide preoccupation. Ditto GB News. “Statistically, they’re insignificant when it comes to what’s happening in this country. Yet you would think from social media that those are the two groups of people fighting each other. There’s no one in those groups. It’s just that everyone in them are the people we hear from. So, I drive my bus straight through the middle and park it far away from both sides.”

Osman’s murder mysteries belong to a class of fiction known as “cosy crime” – a category that includes Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, MC Beaton and, doubtless informed by Osman’s success, the Reverend Richard Coles’ Murder Before Evensong. It’s a genre Osman performs with unembarrassed literal-mindedness. Here is a cosy location – a luxury retirement village in a rural idyll. But what’s that, coming over the hill? Surely not – crimes! Each week, his four main characters meet to investigate unsolved murders over Victoria sponge, as fresh bodies pile up around them. They are: Elizabeth, a single-minded ex-MI6 agent; Joyce, a chatty, no-nonsense pensioner; “Red” Ron, a tattooed former union leader; and Ibrahim, a gentle, polite retired psychiatrist. They work with two local police officers, Chris and Donna, but are otherwise routinely underestimated by the criminals, secret agents and mafia bosses they meet. It’s a premise and tone borrowed most obviously from Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series (the character belonged to her own Tuesday murder club) but also familiar from all manner of rousing British village epics, from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry to Calendar Girls. Some might see the blossoming of this late second career as a thing of romance, an example that an entirely new life after 50 is an achievable thing. Osman is more prosaic. He draws a direct comparison between the mechanics of TV entertainment and the procedural format. “You know at the start that you’re heading somewhere, you’re at A and you are going to get to Z. You just have no idea how. I find it more creative to be given a framework, to be given constraints. As a TV host, I’m saying, ‘You don’t need to like me, here’s a show for you. Here’s a format. I’m going to take you in a direction. You answer some questions.’ And in a crime book it’s the same. You go, ‘Look I’m setting you a puzzle.’ Because otherwise, what is it [the novel]? Just me talking, which doesn’t interest me.” Osman says he is not the sort of person to write about “love and loss”: “I don’t feel like I am somebody who can sit down and describe what the sky looks like … the beauty of the summer flowers. Whereas I can write a story and move the action on. I’m very comfortable imagining worlds, imagining people, imagining what they might do.” I’d buy this more entirely if it weren’t for the faintly barbed quote Brenda gave to the Times about his writing style being “quite staccato”, which suggests she has no qualms chivvying her son. Either way, it paid off. Osman says he was probably the first from his school to go to Cambridge, where he did sociology and politics (although he still regrets not doing American studies at Leeds); his brother, “who is proper clever”, did economics at the London School of Economics. Osman watched dementia take possession of his working-class firebrand grandfather, watched him try to cling to moments of clarity. His mother told him that in hospital you could see his heart beating and knew it was never going to give up. “He was such a strong man. But he would absolutely not have wanted to be there.” Osman drew from this experience and also research. “The Alzheimer’s Society said, ‘If you’ve met one person with dementia, then you’ve met one person with dementia.’ That’s how I approached it really: knowing that everyone’s experience will be different.” What also nettles are the copycat swirly font covers that have followed in the slipstream of the Murder Club’s success. “Richard Bravery created the cover – so great, so iconic. Now everyone does the same. We’re working on the next series. The two of us sitting there going, ‘We’ll show ’em. We’ll give them a different cover, a cover that makes them go: Ooooh, that’s what we need to copy now.’”