The Man Who Died Twice (The Thursday Murder Club Book 2)

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In the real world, people are rarely as obsessed with politics as we are told, he says. He compares it with football: some people are fanatical, go every week, know all the players’ names, etc. Most tune in every couple of years when there is a big tournament. THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE RECORD-BREAKING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES BY RICHARD OSMAN 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.”

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.” Does he remember what age he was when it started? “Oh, like 10 years old. Yeah, I wonder what the inciting incident was. And food when you’re 10 is something that you can’t control. You’re not going to become an alcoholic or a drug addict.” I would have been a terrible spy. I’m too tall, not bright enough, and if I have a secret, I tell everybody. I cannot tell a liePhotographer’s assistant: Caz Dyer. Set Design: Sandy Suffield. Assistant: Lucas Aliaga-Hurt. Grooming: Pauline Simmons. Photograph: Jay Brooks/The Guardian 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.’” 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.” Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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.

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.”

What also nettles are the copycat swirly font covers that have followed in the slipstream of the Murder Club’s success. “Richard Bravery created the cover – so great, so iconic. Now everyone does the same. We’re working on the next series. The two of us sitting there going, ‘We’ll show ’em. We’ll give them a different cover, a cover that makes them go: Ooooh, that’s what we need to copy now.’” 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. In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. The foursome can escape a confrontation with an armed murderer using nothing but a kindly smile and a poisoned slice of Battenberg. The threats, the victims, even the crimes themselves, never really matter. If the villains enjoy tea and cake too, their sins may be forgiven; the group employs a brand of vigilante justice that respects no laws or conventional morality. They adopt a Polish builder, Bogdan, though they suspect he’s a killer himself; become firm friends with charismatic drug dealer Connie after entrapping and imprisoning her; and bring cheery former KGB colonel Viktor along with them after deciding not to kill him.