An unlikely supporting character in the latest instalment of the best-selling Thursday Murder Club series by author and TV personality Richard Osman is English Sparkling wine. Sarah Neish reports. Author and TV personality Richard Osman has tapped into the growing popularity and commercial success of English wine in his latest novel. The Last Devil To Die is the fourth in Osman’s fictional Thursday Murder Club series, soon to be released as a TV drama on Netflix, featuring an all-star cast including Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Sir Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie. References to English wine are scattered throughout the book, which like its predecessors follows pensioners Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim on their increasingly outrageous detective exploits. Osman appears to hold up English wine as an archetypal, respectable, clean-cut British business, and even hints that it could be a good route for criminals wanting to go straight and run a legitimate business. He dangles English wine as a scrubbed, squeaky clean carrot for one of his characters – drug dealer Mitch Maxwell – who has had enough of the dark underworld he inhabits following the theft of one of his heroin shipments. “Luca is dead and the Afghans won’t trust him any more. Time to diversify. He’s been talking to the English sparkling wine people. There’s a plot of land in Sussex, in Ditchling, south-facing slope, chalky soil, the works,” a passage in the novel reads. Better than Champagne Maxwell runs his criminal enterprise from an industrial estate in Sussex,
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Wine
