18-07-2025
Bookish is textbook cosy crime — but who cares when it's this good?
A long time ago, a German friend introduced me to a very catchy old comedy song by the German-American jazz singer Bill Ramsey called Ohne Krimi geht die Mimi nie ins Bett. Or, in English: Mimi never goes to bed without a crime story. The narrator, Mimi's beleaguered husband, ultimately turns to drink as he is left sleepless by his wife's insatiable lust for low-rent crime novels at bedtime: 'She takes no Goethe, she takes no Schiller … No, Mimi just chooses a superhard thriller.'
Gabriel Book, the proprietor of Book's Books and the protagonist of Mark Gatiss's new crime drama Bookish, on U&Alibi, would not approve. Customers who arrive at Book's Books in search of something lowbrow, the latest Georgette Heyer for example, are politely but firmly redirected to more challenging literature, like The Scarlet Pimpernel novels by Baroness Orczy. That they also introduced to the world the notion of a hero with a secret identity is a foreshadowing of what is to come.
