![]() ![]() Richard Osman knows this better than almost anybody. Commercial success doesn't just happen in a vacuum, after all-it takes a whole life, sometimes several iterations of that life, to get there, even as it often boils down to a simple idea: if you write what you want to read, and you enjoy doing so, others will want to read and enjoy what you write, too. I was catapulted back into reading purely for pleasure, which has become a rarity when so much of my time is devoted to reading for research, work, or critical purposes.Īuthors who can reconnect people with the primal emotion of pleasure reading are worth our close attention. When I first read Osman's debut, The Thursday Murder Club, a year after it had already stormed best-seller lists in England and elsewhere, I felt the same zing! as I did with those formative favorites and various subsequent crime novels in the two-plus decades since. Enduring characters are what keep me coming back to authors and their mystery series. They weren't so far removed from the Agatha Christie books I'd first read in high school-you still have to play fair in a mystery and plot it well-but they focused on series characters in a way that rendered them vividly human, not just passive chess pieces on the author's board. Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is.Their books were chiefly entertainments, yes, but they also opened windows onto contemporary society in ways that made me think more seriously. During the conversation, in advance of the publication of Osman's newest mystery, The Last Devil To Die, I keep glancing over at the bookshelf, a time capsule of mass-market paperback titles by the formative crime writers of my late 1990s and early 2000s youth: people like Lawrence Block, Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Mary Higgins Clark, and Walter Mosley. This is also the same room in which I made my enduring love of crime fiction into something resembling a career. And she, like me and like millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, cannot get enough of Osman's Thursday Murder Club series of mystery novels, which feature a quartet of retirement village dwellers who band together to solve murders. She's lived in this house for almost forty years-the balance of my life. ![]() It's early August and I'm in Ottawa, Canada's capital, to visit my mother, who turned eighty-one just a few weeks before. There is something fitting about speaking with Richard Osman from my childhood bedroom. This story contains spoilers for The Last Devil to Die.
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