Why Richard Osman's Fifth Thursday Murder Club Novel Proved Everyone Wrong

By Andy — 2026-07-06 — mystery thriller novels

I saw someone leave a copy of The Impossible Fortune on a train seat last week. That's what you want to see with a paperback.

It arrived on July 5, 2026, at £9.99, which is the real test. Hardback numbers don't mean much. Paperbacks—the ones people buy at Tesco, the ones they hand to their mum—those tell you what's actually happening.

Five Thursday Murder Club books. Five number ones. Not four out of five. Not three out of five. All of them.

The plot this time is a wedding. Joyce's daughter is getting married, the best man needs Elizabeth's help with something, and the club ends up chasing a disappearance and a murder tied to a very expensive bitcoin. Actually, that's not quite right—the bitcoin isn't just there to look modern. It's the entire mystery. It's the thing that turns.

What gets me is the numbers Osman hit with the first book back in 2020. Forty-five thousand copies in three days. Then it became the first debut novel ever to hit Christmas number one in the UK, something publishers thought was mathematically impossible for a new author. By 2025, two books in the series—the original and The Bullet That Missed—had each sold over a million copies in the UK alone. Platinum status, they call it.

Platinum status.

This wasn't supposed to happen for crime fiction. Especially not crime fiction written about old people sitting in a retirement home solving murders nobody else cares about. Publishers spent decades treating older readers like a secondary market, the ones you sell to when the real readers are busy elsewhere. Osman's sales figures made that assumption look embarrassing. Made it look, more or less, completely stupid.

The film landed on Netflix in August 2025, after a theatrical run in the UK. Chris Columbus directed it. Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie—that's a cast you don't assemble by accident. It scored 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is fine, decent, something like that. Not perfect, but a global Netflix release with those names still puts the books in front of millions of people who'd never stepped into a bookshop. The timing before the paperback—that wasn't coincidence.

He left television to do this, remember. Fifteen years co-hosting Pointless on BBC One. In 2020, that looked like a reasonable gamble on a promising debut. Now, with five consecutive number ones and a streaming adaptation watched by the world, it looks like the clearest decision anyone's made in British publishing in years.

There's a sixth book confirmed. A second book in his We Solve Murders series as well.

You don't need to read the first four to understand The Impossible Fortune. Each book stands alone. But most people finish one and want the others. That's what separates a good series from a real franchise—the characters pull you back, not just the plot. Osman built something most writers spend a whole career chasing.

And it all started with someone willing to leave television behind.

Tags: Richard Osman, Thursday Murder Club, The Impossible Fortune, Thursday Murder Club paperback 2026, Richard Osman UK bestseller, cozy mystery Netflix adaptation