The Impossible Fortune, Robert Osman’s newest book for the Murder Club, is going to be filled with turns and twists.
“I love, love, love doing nothing. Doing nothing is, quite absolutely, my state of grace,” says Richard Osman, 54, who, most days, is doing very far from nothing.
He acknowledges that multitasking is not his strong suit. He has just finished recording 110 episodes of Richard Osman’s House of Games, has been hosting The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Marina Hyde, and has signed 5, 000 copies of his newest book, The Impossible Fortune.
“I do a good job of monotasking.” He wryly replies, “I’m good at focusing on one thing at a time, in extreme depth,” but even when he repeatedly tries to answer questions, he still has an incredible ability to respond quickly, succinctly, without hesitation.
Born in Billericay and growing up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, for a long time Osman was best known as Alexander Armstrong’s sidekick on BBC One’s Pointless, or for delivering us 8 Out Of 10 Cats on Channel 4. Since 2020 though, he’s the bloke who introduced Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim into our lives. And now the Thursday Murder Club gang are back for a fifth outing.
I’ve given them a year to recover and rest. Osman fondly refers to his characters as “four of his best friends,” noting that “they went through quite a lot.”
He adds that “for all of them, things have slightly changed.”
A distressed guest approaches the depressed detective Elizabeth and says, “Someone is trying to kill me.” The book opens with a wedding scene. “Can you assist me?”
What comes after a “huge amount of money” and “seemingly uncrackable code” intertwined with themes of friendship and loss.
Osman’s focus on the elderly, a group he describes as “incredibly wise but also invisible,” made them ideal detectives when it first appeared, what made the Thursday Murder Club stand out when it first came out. He is still fascinated by his older.
He says, “You are thinking a little bit more deeply about life and what it means, and what grief is and what the point of it all is” as he points out. He doesn’t worry about getting older, which is surprising given the difficulties of getting older.
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He chuckles, “I’m essentially an 80-year-old woman in everything other than my frame,” he says with a smile. No one wants to experience grief, nor do we want to become ill. But we are exactly at that location… However, I like the idea of being older and being less judgmental about what other people think of me.
A Hollywood adaptation of the Thursday Murder Club novels was inevitable given that there were already more than 10 million copies of the books being sold.
Securing British legends Celia Imrie, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren to portray the foursome in the Netflix film, helmed by Christopher Columbus, represents phenomenal casting, though Osman wasn’t concerned about having the stars influencing his mind whilst penning the next instalment.
No one, not even the mighty Helen Mirren, can knock Elizabeth out of my head, he retorts jovially, “because those characters are so ridiculously real, I know.” The consistently witty and compelling author, Osman, does have a slight resentment toward labels and imitators who frequently lead to success.
The series’ titles include The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, The Last Devil to Die, and The Impossible Fortune.
Some people may be off course due to such enormous success, but Osman, a father of two, has a work ethic unwavering. He advises, “Anytime someone has a hit is great, but it mustn’t deter you for longer than, say, five minutes.”
“Everything returns to sitting down and writing again, going back upstairs.” Without you writing the following book, nothing happens. I enjoy grafting. I enjoy getting paid, but I enjoy doing my day’s work.
His “really hard work,” he confesses with a chuckle, “really hard work” when his feline companions start hollering at him while hammered out upstairs at home, with the door firmly closed until they start yelling at him. He continues, “That’s a fairly simple job, I’m going to say.”
However, he claims that writing is “the thing I felt compelled to do.” That’s the thing I started with when I was 15 years old, and it’s what I’ll finish with as well.
The Impossible Fortune, a work by Richard Osman, is now available.
Source: Mirror
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