The Thursday Murder Club seems like a no-brainer for someone connected with British television to eventually come to write. After all, the list of memorable British crime dramas is longer than the list of memorable American detective novels. Where things get weird is the particular British television personality who came to write it. One might not be so surprised to discover that this murder mystery was written by someone like, say, actor Laurence Fox from the British cop show Inspector Lewis or, perhaps, legendary creator of British crime shows Jimmy McGovern. But the guy most closely associated with shows like Pointless, Total Wipeout and Deal or No Deal is something else entirely. And yet, true enough, it is Richard Osman who spent a year-and-a-half secretly writing a debut novel that would result in one of the most wild and woolly auctions for the publishing rights in recent history.
Eventually, that battle royale was won by one of the big men on the campus of the publishing world, Penguin Random House in a deal that also includes rights to the sequel, The Man Who Died Twice, which was published almost a year to the date after The Thursday Murder Club hit stores in early September of 2020. As would be expected only from a debut novel penned by someone who is already famous, the novel hit the ground running with brisk sales and never stopped to look back. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, The Thursday Murder Club became the first debut novel to sit at number one on the best-seller list on Christmas Day.
Osman has revealed in multiple interviews that the origin of the story which pits members of a retirement community against police in a race to solve a murder traces back to an up-close and person view of life in a similarly upscale retirement village. Steven Spielberg’s production company purchased the rights to adapt both the this novel and its sequel and in an October 2021 interview, Osman revealed a fascinating detail being discussed about the production, claiming that although the retirement community characters are in their seventies, the plan would be to cast actors about twenty years younger and digitally age them because, according to Osman, there is the fear that casting age-appropriate actors might put future entries in the franchise in jeopardy due to the potential difficulties facing actors in that age bracket.
