The Impossible Fortune
The Impossible Fortune
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Richard Osman on The Impossible Fortune
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A spy in grief, and a stranger’s pleaBook five had a character problem before it had a plot. Elizabeth, the former intelligence operative at the center of the Thursday Murder Club, was still deep in grief after the events of the previous installment, and Osman needed a mechanism that could pull her back into action without it feeling engineered. A wedding gave him the social setting, and a stranger’s desperation gave her the reason.
The spark reignites in Elizabeth and she’s like, ‘Yeah, okay. This is what I do.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The plot trigger arrives as instinct rather than decision, which is exactly the distinction Osman needed: Elizabeth doesn’t choose to re-engage so much as she remembers who she is.
Once Elizabeth had her inciting moment, Osman needed a crime worth her attention. The answer came from a piece of financial journalism, read in passing, about a practice among serious criminals of storing wealth and data in physical vaults with no network connection whatsoever. He recognized the idea not as a gimmick but as a world with its own internal logic.
I’d read about the idea of cold storage and thought, well, that’s interesting. This idea that the safest place to keep any data is not on a computer but absolutely detached from any sort of electronic thing, because someone can always hack into it. Literally the safest place for something is where it used to be: buried deep in a hole in the ground — I thought that was quite fun. It was really modern in a very old-fashioned way.
The hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency at the story’s center is, in Osman’s framing, a vehicle for an argument about human nature rather than a thriller premise. He was specific about what the title signals.
anti the love of money; anti not knowing when you’ve had enough. That’s why it’s called the impossible fortune. An impossible fortune is an enormous amount of money, but there’s just something that’s just not right about it, that you know it’s too much.
How he wrote it
Hiding the answer in the jokesOsman doesn’t arrive at his stories with a completed map. He begins with character and a general direction, and the complications that emerge during drafting are, in his view, an asset rather than a problem. He spoke about this specifically in the Virgin Radio UK interview recorded for the book’s release, where he described the gap in experience between the writer stuck on a problem and the reader who never sees the month it took to solve.
The problems are always the best thing about your plot because you have to solve them and you’ve got like a month to solve them. Whereas the reader’s got like one page. They’re like, ‘how’s he going to get out of this?’ And the next page, they see how you got out of it. They don’t know it’s taken you a month of tearing your hair out. [paraphrased from audio]
The mystery mechanics follow from the same principle: figure out the ending first, then work backward to verify the clues were always present. The actual craft challenge is concealment, and Osman described in the same interview exactly how that concealment works once the structure is in place.
What you do is you get to the end and work out who did it. And then you have to tell people who did it. That’s the only rule... you have to be able to go back and go, ‘oh, he told us, he told us on page 7, he told us on page 14, he told us on page 109.’ So my job is then to hide that as well as I can. [paraphrased from audio]
Humor is his primary hiding tool. A reader who files a line away as a throwaway joke doesn’t scrutinize it for information, which is precisely the effect Osman exploits. The point appears in his Q&A with Dead Good Books, where he described the technique in the context of how the Thursday Murder Club books are constructed.
Crime fiction is a joy to write, to tell you the truth, because you make a contract with the reader which says, ‘I’m going to set you an impossible puzzle, and at the end we all know it’s going to be solved.’ Your job is to try and work it out. My job is to try and hide the truth from you. But I always think the key to these books is, despite that journey we go on, we want to stay with those characters.
On the question of what actually drives the books forward, Osman has a consistent position that puts him at odds with how crime fiction is typically discussed. He made the argument in a published conversation with Lee Child, where the debate about plot versus character in the genre came up directly.
From my perspective — I get in trouble with this at crime festivals — I think especially in crime fiction, we fetishise plot; we think that crime fictions are just clockwork plots. To me, it’s never about what happens. It’s about: why do I care what happens? And that’s all character.
New characters in the Thursday Murder Club get developed through a specific method: Osman puts them in conversation with established members and waits for something unexpected to surface. He described the process in his interview with Viking Penguin, where he was asked about bringing fresh figures into a series already carrying four books of relationship history.
Whenever I have a new character, I find out about them by making that character have a conversation with one of the others. Sooner or later they say something and I think, well, that’s interesting. You’re an interesting human being. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The hole that no amount fillsThe book’s argument about extreme wealth is not, in Osman’s telling, primarily an economic one. It is a psychological portrait of what accumulation becomes once it has passed any useful purpose. He worked this out in some detail in the Irish Times interview, where he was asked what the impossible fortune of the title actually represents.
I guess it’s power. If you’re the fifth richest person in the world and you wake up in the morning, you never think about the seven billion other people — you think about the four people ahead of you... After a while, there’s not a lot you can buy. You can buy countries or missiles, but all you’re really buying is power. Normally, with people like that, the hole they are trying to fill in their soul with money is so enormous that no amount of money will ever fill it.
The greed theme sits inside a wider ambition that Osman describes as running beneath all five books. He is writing, deliberately, against a prevailing story about how people behave. He laid this out in his Town and Country interview, where the question of tone in the series came up directly.
I do have strong views about the way the world is going and the way we speak to each other. I’m trying to write something that has a counter narrative to it. By all means, read it as a lovely, cute, cozy crime book. But I think I’m trying to do something else as well, which is to say I think we’re probably kinder, nicer as human beings than we’re currently being given credit for.
That counter-narrative only works, in Osman’s view, if it never tips into argument. His stated limit, from the same Town and Country interview, is one sentence but it defines what he will and won’t let the books do.
I try never to veer from the truth of what it is to be a human being.
Five books in, the contract he describes is what keeps readers returning: not the puzzle, and not the theme, but the conviction that the people on the page are genuinely worth following to the end of whatever problem he has spent a month building his way out of.