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Stars Mark Gatiss and Polly Walker take DQ inside the world of Bookish, a murder-mystery series that introduces Gabriel Book, a bookshop owner with the knowledge needed to help the police tackle some baffling cases in post-war London.
He’s a member of comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen and co-creator of the BBC’s acclaimed detective series Sherlock. And now, the multi-talented Mark Gatiss is playing a detective himself in period murder-mystery drama Bookish.
The actor, writer, director and comedian stars as the erudite and unconventional Gabriel Book who, from his antiquarian bookshop, helps the police to solve a variety of mysterious crimes.
The show opens in 1946. Book is a maverick consultant for the local police, and the thousands of books that line the shelves in his bookshop in Archangel Lane – called Book’s – provide all the knowledge he needs to solve the most puzzling of crimes. His wife Trottie (Polly Walker) runs the wallpaper shop next door, but though they share a deep love, their union is a ‘lavender’ marriage to help conceal Book’s sexual orientation at a time when it was illegal to be gay. Connor Finch also stars as Book’s mysterious new employee Jack, Elliot Levey plays Inspector Bliss and Blake Harrison is Sergeant Morris, with Buket Kömür as the spirited Nora.
Gatiss first pitched his idea for a period murder-mystery series to Walter Iuzzolino and Jo McGrath of producer Eagle Eye Drama after they asked him about the kind of project he wanted to make – and he just happened to have a pilot script for the show in a drawer at home.
“I’d only written one,” he tells DQ. “I didn’t know who did it [the crime at the centre of the plot]. It changed twice. I got that far, but I had an idea for the feel of the whole thing and what sort of show it might be. But it was only once I’d shown Walter and Jo the first one that I came up with the next one.”
It was a serendipitous meeting, as Iuzzolino and McGrath happened to be looking for exactly this type of series to complement a crime slate that also includes Professor T, Before We Die and Patience. They immediately joined the project, describing the solitary script as the best they’d ever read. UKTV then commissioned a six-part series for its U&Alibi channel, with Beta Film boarding as the international distributor.
An avid reader of detective fiction, Gatiss says the idea behind Bookish came from “years of reading and loving Agatha Christie and all the others, and just wanting to distil that into something special – and something new. That’s the hardest thing.”
He continues: “The biggest thing is that every detective has a ‘thing.’ The idea of the bookshop came first and I thought, well, this is like an analogue computer. We hint there’s a vault underneath – there are lots of books – but it’s what he does with them.”
Gatiss has played a variety of characters in his screen career, from Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock and Mr Wickens in The Amazing Mr Blunden to Larry Grayson in Nolly and Tycho Nestoris in Game of Thrones. In The League of Gentlemen, meanwhile, his many parts included a sinister butcher and a hapless vet, plus multiple female characters. But initially, he wasn’t quite sure how to play the whip-smart and debonair Book.
“It’s a strange thing because you think, ‘Oh, well, I’ve written it,’ but then I literally said the words for the first time when we were doing the chemistry read [with Walker] and just went, ‘Is this how I’m going to do it?’ It’s strange, but it happened quite quickly.
“As a TV historian, I know across the years a version of this has always happened. Patrick Troughton, when he took over Doctor Who, had this enormous hat for two episodes. You just don’t know. The only thing I said is I have to be comfortable. So you have to find it. In a first season, particularly in the first episode, you’re just going, ‘Is this it?’”
Finding Book’s relationship with Trottie was also a “lottery,” says Gatiss, who had never previously worked with Walker. “But it was lovely,” he adds. “And that warmth comes across. It was a very happy set.”
Walker, best known for roles in Bridgerton, Line of Duty, Prisoners’ Wives and Rome, was offered the role without needing to audition. “That was very nice. It doesn’t happen often,” she says. “But with that comes a lot of pressure because you think, ‘Do they know me? Have they got mixed up?’ Then meeting Mark and wanting Mark to like me – there are no guarantees. When I read it, I was like, ‘Really, they want me?’ I normally play much harder characters or badder characters, so it was nice. I was quite touched. I said, ‘My God, they recognise goodness.’”
“I said she should play against type,” Gatiss jokes.
“That’s not to say she’s some sap. She has a lot of strength,” Walker says of Trottie. “It’s interesting because normally there’s something in a script where I go, ‘Urgh,’ and I have to work past it. But I read it [Bookish] and wanted to know what happens. It was the mystery, the crime. I got involved in who did it, and it was unusual to play this dynamic as well [with Book]. That’s not often seen on television, that kind of relationship. I didn’t know what a lavender marriage was.”
With the six-part series comprising three feature-length stories, Gatiss found there was ample running time to explore the union between Book and Trottie, and to delve into the backstory of the recently incarcerated Jack, while also inviting viewers to help solve a trio of complex mysteries. Director Carolina Giammetta (Suspect, The Drowning), meanwhile, describes Bookish as “clever crime,” noting that it has a sharpened edge to it compared with ‘cosy crime’ series.
Gatiss continues: “It’s about balancing the backstory and how much you reveal of all that, plus juggling of the story of the week. That’s the challenge – not to get so distracted by Book and Trottie’s backstory that you forget keeping the suspects in the air. It’s a constant thing. I wouldn’t say we couldn’t do a single [story in each episode], but the elements of the precinct would be massively in the background because you just have to get on with it. The lovely thing about having longer is you can get used to people, you can suspect people, you can change motives.”
The first two-parter sees Book join forces with Inspector Bliss to investigate what appears to be a case of suicide – but suspicions quickly turn to murder. The second story is set within the British film industry, when a film crew comes to Archangel Lane and someone is poisoned. The third unfolds against the backdrop of a glamorous London hotel where Book is instructed to observe two foreign princesses, “and then things go awry” and Trottie finds herself among the suspects.
Guest stars appearing throughout the series include Joely Richardson, Daniel Mays, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Paul McGann, Michael Workéyè, Luke Norris and Jonas Nay. Tim McInnerny also appears, as do Elizabeth Berrington, Mark Umbers and Angeliki Papoulia.
Gatiss co-wrote stories two and three with Matthew Sweet, an “extraordinary scholar” of post-war history who is also the author of books Shepperton Babylon, about the British film industry, and West End Front, about London’s hotels during the Second World War. “I said [to Sweet], ‘Can you do one about that and one about that?’ The world [of British film] is so rich,” Gatiss says. “And then the third one is set in a great big London hotel, which is slightly creaking after the war. Those places were full of foreign spies, so it’s just a wonderfully rich world – and it’s that thing of the world being shaken up. Nothing is quite right.”
The modernity of the series arrives through the evergreen theme of people not quite fitting in, in this case after the war. “You have that all the time,” Gatiss says. “Particularly soldiers who just don’t know what to do. They’re trained to do one thing and suddenly they’re back in civvy street. So there’s that. It’s an optimistic time, but also quite scary.”
Despite the show’s setting and exemplary production design – the series was filmed in Belgium, where a row of shops was refitted to become Archangel Lane – it’s the characters that navigate viewers through the numerous murder mysteries. “The story is really important but the characters tell me the story,” Gatiss says. “Plots and whodunits are really interesting and great, but actually the characters take us through that. So it is a balancing act, and sometimes you can see it on the page; sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you see it when you’re shooting it and then, when you get to the end, it’s really clear.”
After collaborating with co-creator Steven Moffat and stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman on four seasons of Sherlock, it’s no surprise to hear Gatiss reveal Arthur Conan Doyle’s character is his favourite literary detective. He’s now reading The Village of Eight Graves, a 1950 detective story from Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo.
But whether it’s Holmes or Christie’s Poirot or Miss Marple, “there are so many interesting ones over the years. That’s what I’ve sort of drawn on to try to come up with an original one,” Gatiss says about creating Bookish. “We know how people are killed and we want it to be a clever crime. But if the world around is unfamiliar, that immediately lifts it because you go, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen this before. I’ve never seen this relationship on screen before, I’ve never seen this weird gang of people.’”
That viewer appetite for detective drama seemingly cannot be sated also gives Gatiss confidence that Bookish will find an audience when it debuts on July 16 – and UKTV is clearly equally confident, having already ordered a second season. “I’m thrilled there’s still a demand for it and, particularly in a world of modern police procedurals, that there’s room for it, but it’s not just cosy,” he adds. “It’s a warm environment and it’s a funny show. But it’s definitely got an edge, because that’s what the times were like.”
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tagged in: Bookish, Eagle Eye Drama, Mark Gatiss, Polly Walker, U&Alibi, UKTV