Richard Osman's first book opened the gate for lots of us

BBC Radio 2 host and Channel 5 presenter Jeremy Vine chats to ELLA WALKER about venturing into 'cosy crime', what really scares him, and the big 6-0

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DO you like your crime true, cosy or would you rather go to bed without thoughts of murder rattling around your head?

“Crime divides the room,” says journalist and BBC Radio 2 host Jeremy Vine.

“Friends will either have watched every single true crime thing, or they'll say, ‘I don’t watch it because it gives me nightmares.”

Jeremy personally loves the lot, from his “queen”, Agatha Christie (“Who was like The Beatles; the first, the band that was impossible to follow,’) to the true-crime docs Netflix is awash with.

Above all, he loves a good old-fashioned English whodunnit, the kind Richard Osman has revived in spectacularly popular fashion.

“Osman's first book reopened it all, it's opened the gate for lots of us, which I'll always be grateful to him for,” says Jeremy, who now, 49 years on from reading his first Christie - Hercule Poirot's Christmas, aged 11 - has written one himself.

Murder On Line One is the first in a cosy crime series in which a sacked and grieving local radio host discovers that someone has been off-ing his loyal listeners, and so, he begins to investigate.

Jeremy wants readers “to feel suspense, but to know that in the end, everybody in it is in safe hands”.

For him, cosy crime offers a way to consider murder and violence in a “safe and controlled way”. Encountering it in real life is very different.

Jeremy grew up in Cheam, Surrey, and remembers it was “a different time in the Eighties, you'd regularly see fights in pubs”.

He was beaten up twice as a young adult, “not badly, just knocked around. And it gave me quite a fear of physical violence, because I’m not very good at fighting. In fact, I'm useless”.

As a student in Durham, he was carrying king prawn balls back from a Chinese takeaway when he found himself surrounded.

“The food was taken, and I suppose I deserved it, because it was that thing of town versus gown. I was in their territory.”