Mark Gatiss reveals how his new series Bookish is “explicitly” inspired by Doctor Who

Gatiss presents Bookish, a series that follows Gabriel Book, a man who runs a bookshop – a trove of knowledge that he can call upon to crack the crimes that are stumping the local police.

The character of Book sprung from an idea that had been buzzing around the Sherlock writer’s brain for eight years: a gay detective hiding his sexuality in a “lavender marriage” of convenience to Trottie (Polly Walker) in the late 1940s. After an aborted attempt at a novel, Gatiss bashed out a script during lockdown. And curiously, RT plays a small role here.

When producer Walter Iuzzolino told Gatiss at the 2022 Radio Times covers party that he was looking for a period detective drama for his production company Eagle Eye, things quickly kicked into gear: cameras rolled last summer with contemporary Antwerp doubling for post-war London and a second series has been commissioned before the first has even aired.

Gatiss’s partner in crime on Bookish is writer, historian and broadcaster Matthew Sweet, whom he met at the launch of the rebooted Doctor Who in 2005. The pair quickly bonded over a shared love of Victoriana, crime fiction and classic movies, and now Sweet is performing an unusual task for this new collaboration – as well as writing on the new series, he’s turning the murder mysteries back into novels, as Gatiss had originally intended. A reverse adaptation? Not exactly by the book…

A LIFE OF CRIME

Mark Gatiss: Murder mysteries are going through a purple patch. They’ve always been popular, but suddenly they’re everywhere. For me, it began by reading a lot of Agatha Christie on holiday as a kid. I remember picking up Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, from a newsagent in 1975. I knew very little about it, but I knew it was important. The cover – a bowler hat and an umbrella – felt like a statement.

Matthew Sweet: The cover of N or M? with a bloody telephone receiver really worried me. I thought of it every time I picked up the phone.

Mark: I’ve got a lot of the Christie paperbacks framed on my toilet wall. They’re great pop art. They’re so strange – The Murder at the Vicarage riffs on [Belgian surrealist artist] Magritte: a man in a dog collar with a tennis racket for a head rather than an apple. It’s creepy as hell.

Matthew: The TV adaptations were very important, too. The BBC’s Miss Marple series with Joan Hickson treated Christie with the same deference as Brideshead Revisited. Christie understood class better than her contemporaries, some of whom perhaps were too comfortable, or too barmy.

Mark: In its quintessential form, the British detective story combines the joy of crosswords with the puzzle of a dead body. But they offer lot of different pleasures. One of my favourites is The Beast Must Die by Cecil Day-Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake: the first half is from the point of view of a man trying to track down the hit and run driver who killed his child. When the detective finally comes in and it becomes more of a whodunnit, it’s a bit disappointing…

Matthew: The detective is a good observer of the world around them – even if the plot doesn’t make sense. A really good description of the inside of a tobacconists in 1926 will do it for me. It puts you into that world, and that can be pleasure enough.

Mark: I collect Golden Age murder mysteries with the most boring titles. They’re so charming! Murder in Hospital… He Could Not Have Slipped…and the best one: They Rang Up the Police. A friend sent me a photo from his holiday cottage of Case for Sergeant Beef. I said: steal it!

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Mark: John Dickson Carr, master of the “locked room” mystery, had a wonderful phrase: “Blood on the bandage”. He will put a big clue followed immediately by an act of extreme violence, which hides it. Isn’t that great? The trick is to present clues that play fair, without being too obvious. At the cast screening of Bookish, I found myself watching an innocent character thinking, “he looks suspicious…” You’ve sweat blood writing it, worrying it’s too obvious, then you realise there’s a red herring that you didn’t even realise was a red herring.

Matthew: The characters don’t change, but because they all have well-defined motivations, they don’t always react in the way you thought they would. You can fight against it, but the story demands it, moves in another direction.

Mark: Genuinely, the murderer does change as you write it. You can plot it and stress test it all you like, but once you start, you realise it makes no sense. You can change it quite a lot.

Matthew: It’s a machine with complicated moving parts. Like a mechanic, when you remove a component, you think, “Well, that’s going to create a funny knocking noise in the back now”. You might have to address that problem elsewhere.

Mark: You also have to accept you’ll be leaning into cliché. Episode six has a big denouement in a hotel. Book says, “I’m not usually a fan of this sort of thing, it’s redolent of the kind of thriller you find in WHSmith.”

THE PERFECT MURDER

Matthew: After working on this, we both know a lot more about poisons – what leeway you’ve got, how quickly they act. You realise the liberties writers have taken! And how many murders, that’s an important question…

Mark: If the story propels you along, you don’t need multiple murders, but equally, you can totally embrace that depending on the style of the episode.

Matthew: There’s a kind of rhythm, a music to a murder.

Mark: Music to a Murder – there’s a good title! It’s always a balance between the puzzle and reality. As a reader or viewer, you accept the rules: Poirot turns up, there’s a murder, he solves it. As a writer, you have to accept you’re working within the genre’s trappings. Otherwise, you start to ask: why are there so many murders in Midsomer county? Is Marple cursed? Arcadia Lane and Book’s shop is our precinct, but you can’t have a murder in every shop, otherwise it’s death row. Another good title! I had this idea that the shopkeepers would all be famous people like in Murder on the Orient Express, but we couldn’t afford that…

A DANGEROUS WORLD

Mark: I wanted to explore a gay detective in a lavender marriage. We talked a lot on Doctor Who about how you mustn’t put your 21st century goggles on the past and judge people. Book and Trottie get married for mutual convenience – as a lot of people did. In a lot of lavender marriages, both people were gay, but Trottie is a liberated woman who’s had an extraordinary war. They’re devoted to each other, as a lot of those couples were. But it’s not a world of easy answers, nor should it be.

Matthew: It’s a world of liars! People coming back from war and perhaps not being totally truthful about what they did during it.

Mark: It’s a double life in the context of this swirling world of crime, an era that’s often brushed aside as a time of drab austerity. It was radical: the world’s upside down, there are the foundations of the welfare state, and a lot of people who don’t know where they fit any more. When his authority is questioned, Book whips out his “letter from Churchill” – which is absolutely, explicitly Doctor Who’s “psychic paper”! I hate it when plots get bogged down in bureaucracy: if your detective isn’t a police officer, you’ve got to have an excuse, but the easier you can make it, the better.

A LIFE LESS COSY

Mark: “Cosy crime” is a bit pejorative, isn’t it? It brings to mind being spoon-fed. I want Bookish to be the sort of thing you want to watch on a Sunday night, but that doesn’t mean bland and inoffensive. It wears the costume of golden detective fiction but it’s not a pastiche. It tackles issues that remain relevant.

Matthew: To me, “cosy crime” means recoiling from a different sort of crime writing, that all happens in blue light with psychopaths, sadists and the destruction of bodies, which does nothing for me. Perhaps audiences are turning away from that.

Mark: You have to acknowledge the reason why we’re here – that “bank holiday-ness”. Peter Ustinov’s Poirot films are more camp than Orient Express, but the plots remain very dark. You don’t want to feel you’re watching some actors on holiday. We’ve ended up with some quite sad motives for the crimes.

BROUGHT TO BOOK

Matthew: Writing the tie-in novel, I put back in the shots that were too expensive to film!

Mark: It’s like you’ve written another draft – there are things we definitely should have done in the show but didn’t have time.

Matthew: I’ve imagined these books being written in the early 60s by Nora, a young woman who’s established in the series as the crime fiction fan. She’s writing them up as crime novellas that she’s adapting for the movies. So you’re still in the world and the story, but there’s a reason for them to exist.

Mark: It’s in the tradition of the Reminiscences of John H Watson (part one of the first Sherlock Holmes book A Study in Scarlet). Nora says this isn’t exactly what happened, it’s how she’s remembers it. Some characters may be invented.

Matthew: Books are so important in the series, and she makes it into a book. The story has acquired a history and a bit of dust. My fantasy is that in many years’ time, the TV series will conclude with a flash-forward to the 60s, with Nora doing a signing of these books of all the stories you’ve been watching.

Mark: It would be odd, given the show, if there wasn’t a tie-in book! It’s a pleasing artefact. It feels like it should be in Book’s shop!

Photography – Adam Lawrence @adamlawrencephotographer

Grooming – Rebecca Richards @rebeccarichardsmakeup

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Bookish begins on U&Alibi on Wednesday 16th July at 8pm.

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