‘I wanted to write a suburban Reacher’: Richard Osman talks to Lee Child about class, success and the secret to great crime writing | Fiction
In the four years since Richard Osman published his first Thursday Murder Club novel he has consistently topped the bestseller lists, and now his quartet of retirement-age detectives will be portrayed on screen by a cast including Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. Having grown up in Sussex, Osman started out in TV, where he created and co-hosted the gameshow Pointless. His forthcoming novel We Solve Murders – the start of a new series – features a writer billed as the world’s bestselling novelist, “if you don’t count Lee Child”. Child, the creator of former military police officer Jack Reacher, has enjoyed phenomenal popularity since he left his career – also in TV, where he worked on shows including Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown and Cracker – and started writing, with his first novel published in 1997. Raised in Birmingham, he moved to the US in 1998 and now lives between Manhattan and rural Wyoming. He wrote 24 Reacher novels before announcing in 2020 that he would be handing the series to his brother Andrew.
Lee Child I feel that writing is always a second-phase career, or at least should be. It’s that rare thing that not only can you do it when you’re older, but you should do it when you’re older. Pick your cliche: your gas tank is full, your database is compiled. You are a person. You are ready to write. Plus, of course, you’ve spent all those years reading, so you are that much more prepared. And this is something I wanted to ask you, actually, because you’re great on TV. My wife and daughter love House of Games to death, and we have a house in England with a cable box that stores every episode, and then when we get there every six months or whatever …
Richard Osman I’m so sorry to put you through that.
LC They’re hopeless at the averages part, and they always ask me for that because I’m good numerically, and between us we get through it very well. I’ve got a lot of experience in TV, so I know how hard it is to make it look easy. But you seem to be better as a writer. Do you feel that?
RO Yeah, I do. I loved television, as I suspect you did, and it’s a great career, and I love that instant connection with an audience. That’s also incredibly important when you’re writing, to understand that you are writing for someone very specifically, and that people can throw the book away and start another book. A career in TV really teaches you that. But after the first book, I think I came to understand that this is the thing that I’m best at, and this is the thing that I have always wanted to do, and this is the thing that I’m going to do until I’m 80.
If I’m a guest on Taskmaster or Would I Lie to You?, people wherever you are in the world have watched it. And it’s fun if I did well, and it’s fun if I did a joke. But a book is such a representation of your head and your heart, such a representation of who you are as a human being and who you were for a specific year, that for that to be set in stone – or maybe set in ice in a cold room is, I think, more meaningful.
LC It’s definitely who you were that year. And that’s what I love about it – that I can look back at my own books, and that’s who I was. That’s what was on my mind. That’s what interested me that year. And then my friends, I read their books, and of course it’s a story, it’s a great novel, it’s exciting, all that good stuff, but it’s also like a letter from them.
RO So your first book, Killing Floor – what year would that have been?
LC 1997.
RO: And the world was a very different place.
LC Totally, absolutely. I’d heard of email, because I was writing in 1995, and I thought it was this thing that was probably only available to universities or something. And so I had a line in that book where one professor sent an email to another professor, and it seemed like the most exotic thing at the time. Then when they made Killing Floor into the TV series, they had to update it, because doing retro television is very expensive compared to current day. And so there were smartphones and all kinds of things that I’d never even heard of at the time.
RO It’s funny – it takes 20 years to go from science fiction to social history, really. I write about television programmes or shops or anything that’s around, because I love reading Christie, or probably Dorothy L Sayers is a better example, and reading about the world as it was when they were writing those books, and about what people were eating and the restaurants they went to and the jobs they were doing. The story takes care of itself: you’ve got a murder and it’s solved.
LC I think, actually, crime fiction is the last of our socially realistic novels. If you read literary novels, they’re not particularly critiques of the times, mostly.
RO I keep reading that someone’s written a state of the nation novel, and I go: “Oh lovely”, because that’s what I want to read. So I pick it up, and it’s a state of London novel – it’s a state of a very specific group of people and in a very specific place. And as you say, crime fiction, because there’s a contract you have with the reader – here’s an impossible problem and at the end we’re going to solve it – you can go anywhere and do anything, and you can people it with real characters in real situations. I think the very strictures of crime fiction and thriller writing are what give you that freedom.
LC My writing had to be commercial because it was a reaction to losing my job [at Granada TV], and so it was a way of making a living. But that’s where I find the fascination. I’m not interested in writing for 3,000 intellectuals in Notting Hill: I would rather have 3 million regular people around the world, because the stakes are higher. If you are a literary reader, I think two things. First of all, you don’t expect to be 100% satisfied by any book. If it gets to kind of 85%, you’re very pleased. If you pick up a book and it’s not very good, you just put it down and you pick up the next one. But at the fringes of readership, the sort of people who buy my books or yours, they buy them to go on holiday, they buy them at the airport.
RO My default is to write commercial fiction, because that’s just how my brain is. I want to do something that the maximum amount of people love; I want to write something that’s good and then sits right in the heart of popular culture. You want the sort of book where, if you’re on a long-haul flight and you open the first page, it takes you through that entire flight – that sounds trite, but it’s not, because how do you keep someone through an entire flight? You keep them with story, and you keep them with character, and you keep them with wit and with a personality that people want to spend time with. I love literary fiction, but there are ways and means of getting away with a mediocre literary fiction book where there isn’t a way of getting away with a mediocre mainstream book.
LC People have got to believe that these characters are, if not like them, then at least like people they know, or people they would like to be. I think that is your main strength, not to take away from the ingenuity of plotting: it’s full of love and charm, and bad things happen, but basically it is a fairly cheerful voice in the books, respectful of age, and nobody is ridiculous or awful.
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RO 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. And your books have something that I have in much smaller measure, which is a sense of natural justice: if someone does something awful, you go: “Come on, Reacher, kill them.” It’s a very natural thought, bad people getting their comeuppance – and someone like Reacher is the ultimate machine to deliver that.
LC All fiction is to do with giving you what you don’t get in real life. Even a cynical old man like me still believes that actually most people are decent, most people are full of kindness and goodwill and would like to do the right thing, but almost nobody can do the right thing because they are either physically incapable, physically intimidated or inhibited in some way. So real people live with a buzz of frustration all the time.
Readers, as a whole, are the most thoughtful and educated among us, and they know perfectly well that you shouldn’t just shoot the suspect in the head. They know that’s not allowed. It’s not a good idea. It’s not civilised. Of course we need protections for the accused. We need a fair process, all of that stuff, but it is so boring. Wouldn’t it just be better to shoot the guy in the head? So it’s a sort of double trick in that they are getting their vicarious satisfaction from that while simultaneously understanding these are not textbooks for how we should live.
RO I’m a great believer in just deserts, because we don’t see it enough. We can pretend we believe in karma all we like, but it’s nice to actually see it at play. We live culturally in a place where we’re constantly told that we disagree with each other and we all hate each other. And that’s not how most people live their lives. So I love having a book where the empaths outwit the psychopaths.
Bogdan in the Thursday Murder Club books is such a Reacher tribute act, because he is omni-competent: he’s a builder, so he can fix your shower, and he can be your cocaine courier, and he can punch someone at traffic lights if you really need him to. He’s a suburban Sussex Reacher. And so I thank you for the inspiration.
LC Well, you know, Reacher is a throwback, going back more than centuries, millennia: the noble loner, the mysterious stranger, codified 1,000 years ago as the knight errant, a man of rank for some reason banished from the establishment, sentenced to wander the land doing good deeds. And that character has shown up for ever.
I think he comes out that way because I don’t push it, I don’t try too hard. I thoroughly understand what I’m doing, but I put it out of my mind and just write from the heart, with slow bits, with emotional bits, with dumb bits, with constant modulation and variation in pace and personality. If you are desperately sticking to what you imagine is the required formula, that’s where you go wrong.
Growing up in Birmingham was huge for me, because Birmingham was entirely about making things, and they made them with no drama, just quiet pride. And that really imprinted in my brain: just do the work.
RO There’s lots of lovely bells and whistles in publishing and lots of fripperies. And if you sell some books, there’s all sorts of things going on, but there’s only one rule, which is: get the work done. Get your head down and actually do it. And that certainly comes from my family. My grandad left school when he was 14. Growing up working class at that time really stayed with him his whole life. So education was always a huge thing. My mum, growing up in the 50s and 60s as a working-class woman, wasn’t able to do the things she would have loved to do. So everything I do, I feel like that’s the rocket fuel behind me: that family, the things they weren’t allowed to do. And I suddenly find myself in the British middle class, and it’s very lovely, but it’s not where I’m from.
LC You know, the bulk of my life is now in the past, and so what is ahead? I’m not sure. I’ve loved every minute of being a writer, but I stepped back because I’m hypersensitive to how I feel as a reader – and as a reader, especially as a younger person, I felt so betrayed by authors that ran out of energy, that started phoning it in, and there were numerous examples. And so I made myself a promise when I started that if I ever sensed that I was running out of gas, I would stop because I would not put a second-rate product out there. And possibly I was a little hypervigilant. But on my 24th book, I can remember – it usually takes me between 80 and 90 working days to complete a book, and out of those 80 or 90 days, there were two mornings when I felt: “Oh, I don’t really want to do this today.” And to me that was a fatal sign, and so I stepped back and my brother got involved. We did four books together, and now he’s striking out on his own. I want to be a retired guy.
RO So a lot of people, when they get into retirement, they start writing books. Maybe you should think about that?
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