We Solve Murders
We Solve Murders
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Richard Osman on We Solve Murders
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A gap on the shelf that he had to fill himselfThe book began with a specific frustration rather than an idea. Osman was looking for a thriller that moved at international pace but had the warmth he associated with his own Thursday Murder Club novels, a series set in a Kent retirement village whose elderly amateur detectives solved crimes over committee meetings and cups of tea. The hybrid he wanted did not appear to exist.
I was in a bookshop looking for something that’s a high-stakes international thriller but that also tells some truths about the world we live in now and makes you laugh in the way that The Thursday Murder Club does. I couldn’t quite find one, so I thought I should write one myself. A sort of Thursday Murder Club meets The Da Vinci Code, written by Lee Child.
The gap on the shelf also pointed to something the Thursday Murder Club format structurally ruled out. Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim are people in their late seventies, and their setting in a gated retirement village in Kent shapes what they can plausibly do. Osman wanted a heroine whose body and circumstances opened the action up rather than narrowing it.
I really wanted to write a heroine who can jump out of planes and attack bad guys, in a way I don’t think we’d see Joyce doing.
The timing was also a deliberate pre-emption. He had finished four Thursday Murder Club novels and calculated that the fifth would invite the question he preferred to raise himself. At the Barnes & Noble launch event for the book, he described it as a habit: move before you are asked to.
I knew after a fifth one, people would go, ‘Why don’t you do something new?’ So I thought, I’ll do it after the fourth one. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Characters who refused their assigned rolesOsman had conceived the book as a detective duo: Steve Wheeler, a retired cop, and Amy Wheeler, his daughter-in-law, a former bodyguard now working private security. Rosie D’Antonio, a flamboyant mega-bestselling novelist, was written into the opening scene because Amy needed a client. Then the scene made a decision Osman had not planned.
Rosie was only ever intended to be a minor character but kept barging in with her leopard skin and shoulder pads, to become a major part of the novel.
At the Barnes & Noble launch he was more specific about the turning point: by the end of that first scene he was so attached to Rosie that the book stopped being a duo and became a trio. He let the scene overrule the plan.
For locations, his method bypassed conventional research entirely. Rather than reading about places or visiting them for the book, he wrote only about places he had already been before the project began, so that the legwork was done without feeling like work.
I don’t love research — if I’m working, I like to be writing. We’d already been to St Lucia a couple of years ago, and absolutely loved it. So I thought, ‘Great, I can set a bit on St Lucia.’ Pretty much everywhere in the book, I had already been to, which meant that I’d pre-done my research.
One structural problem the book posed was hiding a villain who has to communicate repeatedly throughout the novel without giving themselves away through voice or idiom. The solution borrowed a contemporary tool and turned it into a plot mechanism. Osman explained it on NPR’s Book of the Day.
My killer says, ‘Turn me into an English gentleman in everything I write and say.’ And all the way through, we have no idea who it is because ChatGPT has absolutely flattened out their personality and the way they speak. [paraphrased from audio]
The cover design had a specific emotional brief. His mother kept the big airport paperbacks of the seventies and eighties around the house, and those covers lodged in his memory as objects of glamour. He wanted that register for this book, with one deliberate adjustment.
My Mum would always have the big seventies and eighties airport blockbuster novels in the house, and the covers seemed so impossibly glamorous to me, so that was the design brief. Len Deighton, Arthur Hailey, Jackie Collins, but with a Thursday Murder Club twist. A cute cat sitting on a gun pretty much sums up my writing too!
Starting fresh with new characters after four novels with the same four people was, by his account, genuinely frightening. He announced the book on the British morning programme This Morning and described the first few chapters as the most uncertain moment he had experienced as a novelist.
It’s like going to a new school. And I thought, you know, can I do this? And for the first three chapters, I was like, you’re not Joyce. You’re not Ron. And actually three chapters in, I went, oh my God, I love you. And that’s the moment when as a writer you think, okay, I think this has got legs. [paraphrased from audio]
On craft choices
Character as the only plot that mattersOsman’s most combative position in public is his argument about crime fiction’s priorities. He has made it at crime festivals where it earns him trouble, and he made it again in the Guardian conversation with Lee Child. The claim is simple and he does not soften it: plot is overrated, and the questions crime writers spend the most time on are the least important ones.
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.
The comic structure of We Solve Murders follows from his own temperament as much as from any formal decision. Steve Wheeler, the retired cop at the centre of the book, wants nothing more than his pub quiz and his cat named Trouble. The joke is architectural: pair the man who least wants adventure with the woman who cannot stop generating it.
Amy is the sort of person who wants to go everywhere and experience everything. To live every minute of every day, and always be on the move. You know the type! Whereas Steve, very much like me, just wants to stay safely at home and, very happily, do nothing.
The ChatGPT device that hides the killer also becomes, in Osman’s telling, a small argument about what artificial intelligence cannot do. He made the point immediately after explaining the plot mechanism on NPR, folding the observation into the book’s texture rather than leaving it as a gimmick.
ChatGPT does iron us out. It can write a great letter to our electricity provider, but it’s never going to write a great novel. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Empathy as a winning strategyThe book’s moral argument is one Osman states directly and has repeated across all his fiction. It runs against a media environment he finds misrepresentative, and he builds it into the plotting itself: who wins and how.
I do have strong views about the way the world is going and the way we speak to each other as it was. I’m trying to write something that has a counter narrative to it...I think we’re probably kinder, nicer as human beings than we’re currently being given credit for.
That counter-narrative has a structural expression. His villains tend toward the psychopathic because it lets the plot demonstrate something. The outcome of the mystery is not just a whodunit resolution; it is a proof of concept.
I love having a book where the empaths outwit the psychopaths.
He is also clear that We Solve Murders is not a departure from the Thursday Murder Club so much as the same sensibility given room to accelerate. Coopers Chase, the retirement village at the heart of the earlier series, sits roughly ninety minutes by car from Steve Wheeler’s New Forest village. The same brain wrote both. At the Barnes & Noble event, he put it in terms of what changed and what did not.
I felt I was writing the same book, is the truth. Because it’s, you know, it comes from the same brain. I’m not trying to write a different type of book. I’m not trying to write something hard-boiled...I’m just trying to write the stuff that always entertains me and makes me laugh. But we’re on helicopters instead of, you know, in a little Vauxhall Nova. [paraphrased from audio]
The shift in scale is real: international locations, higher body counts, a heroine who jumps out of planes. But the wager underneath is identical to the one he made with Joyce and Elizabeth. Get the reader to care about the people first, and they will follow those people anywhere.