Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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 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.” 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.” 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.”

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.” 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.”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.’”

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.” THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE RECORD-BREAKING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES BY RICHARD OSMAN 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.” With Pointless co-host and old university chum Alexander Armstrong in 2015. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Christmas Gifts

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 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.” Photographer’s assistant: Caz Dyer. Set Design: Sandy Suffield. Assistant: Lucas Aliaga-Hurt. Grooming: Pauline Simmons. Photograph: Jay Brooks/The Guardian 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.