Mark Gatiss plays detective in sure-fire hit ‘Bookish’.

Ever since his influential comedy series The League of Gentlemen, Mark Gatiss has been a popular presence on British television as an actor, screenwriter and director. This month, U&Alibi broadcasts his new detective drama, Bookish, in which he stars alongside Polly Walker, Daniel Mays and Joely Richardson.

Gatiss’s character, Gabriel Book, is the owner of a 1940s London bookshop, an evocative setting that also represents Gabriel’s trademark as a detective. “In conceiving this, I thought, ‘What if the bookshop is like an analogue computer, so it's his brain?’” For Gabriel, a lifetime spent among books has given him not only encyclopaedic knowledge but also critical reading skills that can be applied beyond the printed page: “He reads people, he reads situations, he reads motives.”

Gatiss began work on Bookish during lockdown, originally writing it as a novel. “The tone I was after was a light black comedy, and I couldn’t get the tone right in the book. I think the pandemic was impinging too much. But I thought, ‘Well, I can write it as a script, because I know the tone of the dialogue’.” There followed a serendipitous meeting at a Radio Times party with Walter Iuzzolino and Jo McGrath of Eagle Eye Drama. “They said a lot of nice things, and then Walter – as if in the film of my life – said, ‘You haven't got a period detective in you, have you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I've got a script...’ I sent it to them, and they loved it, and shortly afterwards it was commissioned.”

Gatiss then recruited historian Matthew Sweet as co-writer, who was able to bring an expert eye to Bookish’s postwar setting. Having planned to hand over all the writing after the first couple of episodes, the imperative to sustain a coherent vision led him to work with Sweet throughout the series. To describe that difficult balance between control and collaboration, Gatiss reaches for a quotation from another series to benefit from both his writing and acting talents, Doctor Who. “There's a character called Omega, who is the first timelord who gave them the power of time travel and, in doing so, he's been banished to an anti-matter universe. He says, ‘I am the Atlas of my world, and it is not enough!’ I am the Atlas of my world, but I rely hugely on a brilliant team of people: Carolina Giammetta, the director, is fantastic; the producers, the rest of the cast and the production team in Belgium, design and hair and makeup ... it's been a lovely process.”

The need for Gatiss to be ever-watchful, particularly when filming in a different cultural environment, is exemplified by the muddle over a baking scene in the first episode. “I'm trying to make ginger snaps. I intercepted at an early production meeting some designs for these big glass retorts and test tubes, and I said, ‘What's this for?’ And someone said, ‘It's for the ginger schnapps.’ I could just imagine, I’d turn up to the set and there’s this laboratory!” An experienced producer as well as director and writer, Gatiss can also see both sides of the inevitable tussles over budgets and locations. “Some of that is an absolute wrestle between trying to keep the coherence and the integrity of the story versus sheer practicality.”

“It’s how you introduce a new James Bond: you do it with a cigarette, you do it with the glasses, you do it with the eyes. I’m not comparing myself to George Lazenby! But Book is the lead character, so you want to do it with some kind of flair”

— Gatiss

There is an old-world sensibility to the direction of Bookish, which is packed with mid-twentieth-century cinematic references. “There's a lot of The Third Man in there, a lot of Brief Encounter, because I think it's the best period for British film – it's so full of invention, craft and imagination.” The first appearance of his own character is a direct tribute to the beginning of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. “It's how you introduce a new James Bond: you do it with a cigarette, you do it with the glasses, you do it with the eyes. I’m not comparing myself to George Lazenby! But Book is the lead character, so you want to do it with some kind of flair.”

By contrast, the soundtrack eschews any pretensions to period authenticity. Gatiss describes Sarah Warne’s score as “almost acting as a character. It’s like jazz fusion and there's a lot of – I use the word advisedly – phat synths in it. Some of it’s a bit techno and it works, I don’t know why, but it does. She got the brief.” Part of that brief saw Gatiss again reaching into his bag of eclectic cultural references. “I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the Lord Peter Wimsey series of the 70s with Ian Carmichael? It has a very jaunty harpsichord theme. Only at the very end does it go into a minor key. I said that I wanted something like that. It’s a bit off-kilter, and that was the whole raison d’être of the series.”

Bookish’s referencing of a cinematic past, made uncanny by twenty-first-century inventiveness, is typical of Gatiss, whose wide knowledge of film and television colours all his writing. He has also distilled that expertise into documentaries such as the three-part series History of Horror in 2010, followed two years later by Horror Europa. “Unfortunately, the world in which those were conceivable has absolutely vanished. I always wanted to do the third one about Asian horror, or a sort of rest-of-the-world, but there was never any money.” He now turns to YouTube for the kind of content he used to find on BBC Two. “There's so many amazing documentaries, often self-financed. Lots of arts docs, Waldemar Januszczak still makes these brilliant things, a lot of amazing science documentaries.” While grateful that such programmes are still available, he can’t help but regret the loss of a shared experience of television viewing, and along with it an important venue of human connection.

Although he may never make another documentary on the subject, Gatiss sees much to be optimistic about in the way horror keeps reinventing itself. Examples he highlights include His House, starring Matt Smith, and the Iranian-set Under the Shadow. “What His House and Under the Shadow share is they take a lot of the great tropes of a horror film, but the situation and the setting is so different that you go, ‘Oh, this is new.’ If you set a ghost story in Tehran in 1980, or you set a haunted house story in a Barrett house full of refugees, and then make the ghosts their culture, then it's a new thing. That’s what I really respond to.” The importance of being open to new developments is something he learnt from his hero and early supporter Barry Cryer. “He was always interested in the next thing. He refused to become one of those people who sat in the corner saying, ‘It's not as good as it used to be,’ and it kept him young.”

That enthusiasm for lifelong learning means Gatiss is always on the alert for any snippet that might spark a new idea. With a second series of Bookish commissioned before the first has aired, he’s already gathering material. “One is this incredible thing that paper contains a chemical called vanillin, and when paper breaks down vanillin is released, and it smells of vanilla. That's what the smell of old books is – isn’t it beautiful? The other thing, which Simon Mayo told me, he said, ‘Do you know the word sluttery?’ It's a Victorian word, and it means chaos that is nevertheless full of creativity. Which is like the bookshop – it’s a sluttery.”

Bookish is available on U&alibi from 16th July.

Author: Rachel Goodyear