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

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Whether work was going well, or his marriage was going badly, there was another issue nagging away. In his 30s he had an anagnorisis of sorts: went to therapy and was diagnosed with addictive behaviours, the most explicit around food. For years he’d suffered bouts of binge eating, “an absolute compulsion to eat, an inability to stop eating, shame afterwards and then repeat”. The pattern could continue for weeks or months. “I find myself in situations sometimes where my behaviour around food is so absurd, it makes no sense. It’s certainly not self-care.” 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.”

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.” 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.’” 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.”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.” 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

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. 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.’” 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.

Coopers Chase, the fictional retirement village where his characters reside, is based on the community in Sussex where he bought a house for his mother, Brenda. He looked around and immediately realised the potential. Here was the generation who, culturally, “are overlooked by everybody. That generation did much more interesting and unusual things, overcame much bigger hurdles and obstacles. It’s a generation full of wisdom, full of brio, looking for new adventures and new mischief. There are very few consequences to anything they do or say. That’s freeing for a writer, to have characters who are going, ‘No one’s going to arrest me; I might as well do this.’” They are overlooked because we worship at the temple of youth, he says. “I mean, God knows what our generation will be like when we get to that age; insufferable.” THE FIRST NOVEL IN THE RECORD-BREAKING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLING THURSDAY MURDER CLUB SERIES BY RICHARD OSMAN