Should ever be in a situation where he’s burying a body, reckons he could get away with it…
As well as his TV work on shows Richard is also
And the 53-year-old reckons what he’s picked up as a crime writer could help him kill someone and get off scot-free.
The Thursday Murder Club novelist has explained that the secret to not getting caught would be leaving false evidence and taking anything incriminating – such as CCTV footage or traces of DNA – ‘out of the equation’.
During the latest episode of his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment with co-host journalist Marina Hyde, he was asked by a listener: ‘Richard, having written several best-selling crime novels, and being generally immersed in the crime genre for years, do you think you could commit the perfect murder – should the need arise?’
‘Honestly, yes is my answer,’ he replied without missing a beat.
Richard explained: ‘The way to commit the perfect murder is to assume you’re going to get caught and to commit a murder in such a way that you will get away with it in court.
‘For example, if you were to commit a murder and drop a glove that later on the prosecution asks you to try on in court, and it’s too small for you, suddenly they go, “Well, obviously he didn’t do it.”
‘This is your big bit of evidence that I didn’t do it. So, you would drop a glove that’s slightly too small for you somewhere.’
The best-selling author then explained how having a friend on the inside can help to better your crime writing.
As an example, he cited fellow author Val McDermid and her friendship with Dame Professor Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist.
‘When you write a crime novel, you have to find a murder that is difficult to solve, but then there’s always a fatal flaw that means you can solve it,’ Richard said.
‘Just do that, but without the fatal flaw.’
He proceeded to describe Val as ‘one of our finest crime writers with the most brilliant stuff’.
‘Val will take Sue out for dinner, and she’ll go, “What are you working on, Sue?” and Sue will outline to her some new techniques that forensic science has got. Val will go, “Hold on, but if I turn it on its head, I can get away with murder”.’
The TV icon recalled: ‘Sue was telling me one time that she told Val something, and Sue was about to go to a conference – something about human bones that she’d discovered. She’d done a paper on it and was about to give her first-ever speech about it – and then she read Val’s new book, and it was a main bit of the plot.
‘She was like, “I haven’t even announced it yet, Val.” You talk to someone like Sue Black, who can give you various ways of getting away with murder – which is usually how to hide or obfuscate evidence, but it’s working out the way that you can solve a murder, which usually these days is CCTV, phone records, DNA traces and stuff like that.’
‘But once you take all those out of the equation,’ Richard noted. ‘I think it’s possible to commit the perfect murder – don’t, by the way.’
Oh, yeah. Don’t ‘by the way.’
Do not fret, Richard Osman fans, as he’s assured he has no ambitions of turning to a life of crime anytime soon.
The writer said that he ‘spends a lot of time thinking about how people solve murders’ due to his job in the literary world, and so ‘the counter sight of that is how people try and get away with murders.’
‘I don’t approve of murdering and I’m never going to commit one – I’ll go on record as saying that.’
That’s good to know, Richard.
He added that ‘being a crime writer makes you think a lot about how one would get away with murder’ but he thinks it’s ‘pretty hard to get away with one’ anyway since being a murderer in the first place means ‘something has to have gone wrong with your logical thinking.’
