Osman plans new Da Vinci Code-style book after fourth Thursday Murder Club instalment

Richard Osman is planning to publish the first in a new crime series inspired by The Da Vinci Code after his fourth Thursday Murder Club book, though he says more mysteries involving his bestselling elderly detectives will follow. 

Osman, who is published in the UK by Viking, told BBC News that his new series will be "a sort of Thursday Murder Club meets The Da Vinci Code", inspired by a recent visit to a bookshop. A deal for the new series has not yet been announced.

"I’d love one of those books that’s a caper around the world, but that also has some truth about the world, and also makes you laugh and has also has some of the aesthetic of Thursday Murder Club, but it’s Da Vinci Code. And I couldn’t quite find one,” he said. 

"So I thought I’d quite like to do that—a sort of Thursday Murder Club meets The Da Vinci Code."

The television star, who recently announced he would be stepping down from “Pointless” to focus on his writing career, said he hopes to publish the first in the new series after the fourth Thursday Murder Club novel.  

The original novel was bought for seven figures in a 10-way auction in 2019 and became a runaway bestseller. In 2020 he signed a deal with Viking for the third and fourth book in the series, brokered by Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment. The third book, The Bullet That Missed, is publishing in hardback on 15th September. 

Osman told BBC News that although he is taking a break, there will be “loads and loads more” Thursday Murder Club novels. "I love the four of them as a gang and I love the balance between them," he said. 

"You’ve got two working-class characters, two middle-class characters, two very strong women, two slightly more brittle men. And I love [that] I can talk about Britain, through those four characters. 

"The joy of writing this is [that] dark things happen in these books, but you can always talk about daytime TV and cakes. The minutiae of people’s lives, which is actually what we spend most of the time on, is very present in these books."