The Thursday Murder Club
The Thursday Murder Club
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Richard Osman on The Thursday Murder Club
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A dead phone and a dining room full of ex-spiesThe idea arrived not from a writing desk but from a moment of enforced stillness. Osman was visiting his mother’s retirement community in Sussex when his phone lost signal, and the silence forced him to actually look at the room around him.
So there I was, in this gorgeous, peaceful place, miles from anywhere, with an English sun beating down, and my phone wouldn’t work. And that was the exact moment I thought, ‘Well, this would be an amazing place for a murder.’
The setting alone would not have been enough. What stopped him were the people inside it: residents whose careers had been substantial and whose knowledge had simply become invisible the moment they moved in. He watched them register that invisibility in real time.
Suddenly you could tell they felt that they were no longer of use. Suddenly you could tell they felt they’d been sidelined, and the world had moved on without them, didn’t need them, they’d become invisible. And the wisdom that they’d had accumulated over the ages... was all going to waste. And I thought, ‘Well, listen, if there’s a murder here, then the skill set of these people would be able to solve it.’ [paraphrased from audio]
That observation is the engine of the whole series. The mystery plot is the mechanism; the sidelining of older people is the argument.
His years producing television had given him a specific filter for ideas. He had spent decades asking whether a premise was genuinely new or merely familiar, and the retirement village murder club passed that test on first contact. He described the feeling in the language of his TV career.
My mum lives in this retirement community, and when I was there and chatting to everybody and hearing their life stories, I stumbled on this idea that there would be a murder, and that they would solve it — that to me felt familiar but different. It’s like a note on a piano. I thought: ‘Oh yeah, if I put that at the heart of what I’m doing, I can go anywhere.’
Before the idea could go anywhere, he had to manage his own anxiety about how it would be received. As a well-known television face, he knew the manuscript would be read as a celebrity side project before anyone had read a word. His solution was radical secrecy.
That was my worry in the UK, entirely. That’s why I wrote that book in secret.
He completed a full draft before showing it to a single person, which meant the book had to earn its own existence before his public profile could either help or harm it.
How he wrote it
Short attention span, reverse-engineered cluesHe began writing during the period when many people found creative work impossible. His method for breaking the paralysis was deliberately modest: not a commitment to a novel, but a commitment to one quiet month.
I chose to ignore the doubting voice for a month. Just one month. I made myself sit down for two hours a day and write. For me it was 1,000 words at a time. I didn’t go back and revise the previous day’s work. I didn’t fuss over the opening sentence. I wrote 20,000 words in that month, and, honestly, at that point there was no turning back.
Readers often praise the novel’s short chapters as a deliberate structural choice, a way of keeping pace taut. The truth is more personal and rather more mundane.
I try and write a whole chapter, about 1,000 words; that gives me a sense of completion. When people say they love the short chapters in the book, I think that is only because of my short attention span!
He writes without a plot outline, which means he routinely reaches a murder scene without knowing who committed it. When asked directly how he resolves that problem, he described a process that sounds closer to excavation than architecture.
I start with my characters just talking to each other... the story starts telling itself, you know, and then I’ll murder somebody, like you do. And I think, who on Earth has killed them? I can’t think for a second who might have done it. [paraphrased from audio]
The apparent intricacy of the finished plot is not evidence of advance planning. It is evidence of what revision can do once a writer finally has an ending. He explained exactly how the clockwork is installed after the fact.
When you finish and you write that 90,000th word, you’re allowed to go back! You’re allowed to go back and go, ‘Hold on, that ending doesn’t make sense now because of the ending I’ve got. So, I’m going to go back to chapter three and make it make sense.’ So, you can reverse-engineer an awful lot of plot, if you’ve got a plot and it’s something that really works, you can then go back and drop in all sorts of fun, interesting things into what you’ve already written. And suddenly, it feels like it’s intricately plotted. [paraphrased from audio]
This is one of the more useful pieces of craft advice in the synthesis for writers in the room: the tidiness readers admire is a product of the second pass, not the first.
Joyce, the warmly observant former nurse who keeps a diary in the novel, was not just a character but a rescue mechanism. Whenever the writing stalled, he returned to her voice.
I found it worryingly easy to get into the mindset of a 70-something woman! Any time I was stuck at all I would go back to Joyce... and the words would just flow out. Her thought processes are very similar to mine.
The personal thread
Writing what he’d spent thirty years readingHe had been writing in other forms since adolescence, reviewing for NME at fifteen and writing comedy for television in his twenties. But fiction was always what he consumed privately, and he was deliberate about waiting until he had enough life to fill a novel.
I think there’s very few people who can write great novels in their 20s. I mean, Sally Rooney can, but who else can?
The TV career was not a distraction from writing; it was training in what makes an idea work. His crime fiction predecessors had taken the same winding route, and he placed himself squarely in that tradition.
Val McDermid was a reporter, then became a crime writer, Mark Billingham was a standup, then became a crime writer; we all do something before. No one’s born a crime writer. And I write crime because I read it. And because I love to write, and because I love to write the sort of books I read.
On craft choices
Why these four people can go anywhereThe four members of the Thursday Murder Club, the novel’s amateur detective quartet, each bring a specific set of professional skills: a former spy, a retired doctor, an ex-trade-union leader, and Joyce, the diarist. But Osman’s explanation for why they work as a detective unit reaches past their CVs to three structural properties he built into them.
I’ve got people for whom consequences don’t really matter that much. And I’ve got people who are consistently overlooked. And I’ve got people who are forming unlikely friendships. And if you’ve got all of those things, then you know you can put any crime story you want underneath it, and people are going to enjoy the ride.
The invisibility of elderly people in British culture is usually treated as a social problem. For a crime writer building a detective team, Osman reconceived it as a competitive advantage.
It’s important to put people over 70 at the heart of our culture, because they’re not at the heart of our culture. Everyone’s obsessed with young people, which I get because they’re the ones who you can persuade to buy things. But as a crime writer, if you have detectives who are invisible, but wise? I mean, that’s perfect.
He set aside the genre’s conventional emphasis on plot mechanics early in the writing. His argument is that plot answers the question of what happens, but only character answers the question of why anyone should care.
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.
That distinction is worth testing against the book itself. The murder at the centre of the plot is deliberately secondary to the four people trying to solve it.
What he wants us to sit with
A counter-narrative dressed as a cozy mysteryThe ‘cozy crime’ label, with its suggestion of warm drinks and bloodless puzzles, is the one Osman resists most consistently. He described what the label misses when pressed on it directly.
Hopefully it’s not, hopefully it’s smart, mischievous, older people who go through an awful lot of pain in between solving crimes. I try never to veer from the truth of what it is to be a human being.
At the Netflix premiere of the film adaptation in August 2025, he put into plain terms what he hoped audiences would carry home. The argument was less about the mystery plot than about the people standing next to us who we have stopped noticing.
I hope people can take away that there are people all around our country who are incredible, who sometimes we overlook because we are very busy looking at people on Instagram.
There is a political dimension to the novel that sits just below the surface of the jokes. Osman has been consistent that it is there deliberately, and that he expects most readers to take the book at face value without finding it.
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 is what gives the book its staying power beyond the puzzle. The mystery plot resolves on the last page; the argument about how we treat older people does not.