04-07-2025
Mark Gatiss: Don't call my new detective drama ‘cosy crime'
A few years ago Mark Gatiss wrote a foreword to a book about Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. 'What is required is order,' he began. 'Order is paramount. Order is a good and beautiful thing.' Now Gatiss, the television polymath once known as the tallest of the League of Gentlemen, has written for TV a fictional detective of his own in his new series Bookish. Gabriel Book, the eccentric but brilliant sleuth whom he also plays, is an erudite London bookseller who in the best sense helps the local police with their inquiries. Book has a deeply idiosyncratic idea of order and shelves the volumes in his shop neither by author name nor subject but according to a series of mental connections explicable only to himself.
Book's shop was inspired by a bookshop Gatiss visited more than a dozen years ago in Cecil Court in West End of London while searching for a portrait of Oliver Cromwell (he was playing Charles I at the Hampstead Theatre). 'It was absolutely barmy, ceiling-high with pictures and books and run by a very eccentric lady. I said, 'Do you have a picture of Oliver Cromwell?' She said, 'Shhh! Five minutes,' and disappeared into the bowels of the shop and finally came back with it. It was a mind palace moment. And I took that away.'
Gatiss in Sherlock in 2016 with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman
TODD ANTONY/HARTSWOOD FILMS/BBC
'Mind palace' is a phrase bequeathed by Gatiss and Steven Moffat's Sherlock, in sad limbo since 2017. 'We always said about Baker Street,' recalls Gatiss, who is eating a lunchtime fish curry with me in a Soho restaurant, 'it should be very cluttered, but not a mess, actually a place you want to spend time, and I said exactly the same thing about Book's bookshop.'
I say that I imagine Gatiss's north London home, which he shares with his husband, the actor and writer Ian Hallard, looks a bit similar. 'My own house is unfortunately a lot messier. It's a mess. Both my partner and I are utterly, terribly untidy. I said yesterday, 'I'm going to grab this house by the scruff of its neck.' But it doesn't seem to happen.'
But Bookish is less about where than when. It is set, rather novelly, in 1946. 'It's very underexamined, Attlee's Britain. We're obsessed with the war, but the postwar period is usually just brushed over. It's such a strange time. There was optimism, but people's lives were absolutely upside down. Lots of opportunity. Lots of disappointment. A lot of lying. A lot of people coming back and reinventing themselves totally.'
And although the Labour government was trying to build a new Jerusalem, it was not one in which gay men would be free. So Book, who is gay and in a loving 'lavender' marriage with a childhood friend called Trottie (played by Polly Walker), is a man of high status whose reputation could at any time be smashed if a policeman's torch shone on one of his foggy assignations.
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'A big plank of the idea of the series was about this world being full of opportunities but also extremely dangerous, and it's easy for us to forget — maybe less so because it's becoming increasingly dangerous again. But one foot wrong! Marriages of convenience, presenting this front to the world, were very common,' Gatiss says, citing the examples of the film stars Charles Laughton and Nils Asther ('the male Greta Garbo').
'It's Gielgud-inflected, of course, because it is exactly what happened to him,' he adds. Gatiss won an Olivier award for his portrayal of the actor at the National Theatre (and in the West End) in Jack Thorne's The Motive and the Cue in 2024. In the play John Gielgud, who was prosecuted in 1953 for 'importuning', hires a rent boy, but not to have sex with him: 'He just wanted to do something reckless.'
Of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the legal status of trans people, he says society has been 'obsessing about bathrooms when 300 miles from here people are still being flung off buildings for being gay'.
Would he call Bookish cosy crime, I ask — cosy crime being TV's unlikely hot new genre. 'I do think it's a slightly pejorative term because it implies that it goes down inoffensively like baby food. I don't think it has to be like that. I totally get it: I once said I thought I was put on the Earth to make things that I would like to watch on a bank holiday Monday. That's my favourite feeling. But I don't think it has to be bland or unchallenging. I think it has to be about something.'
Last year David Mitchell gave an interview to The Times about his cosy crime series Ludwig in which he said television should adopt a bowdlerised approach in which 'dead kids' in crime dramas were replaced by dead old colonels so that audiences' emotions would not be exploited.
'However, that's to be pejorative about that kind of strand, which is also extremely popular,' Gatiss says. 'But I do think the vogue for — for want of a better word — 'cosy crime' is probably a reaction against that. Some of it is sort of torture porn. Some of it is so nasty.'
Gatiss and his co-creators Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson were pioneers, of course, of uncosy comedy. In The League of Gentlemen, which aired on BBC2 between 1999 and 2002, an epidemic of nosebleeds killed scores in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, its butcher sold human remains, and the weirdo couple who ran the local shop for local people were attacked by a mob. The sketch show/sitcom was revived for a series of Christmas specials in 2017 and then a tour, but Gatiss has no wish to return to it. 'I'm 60 next year,' he says. 'I don't want to feel I'm trapped in some sort of Nineties band reunion.' (This will be blow for Pemberton and Shearsmith who told The Times in April they would both be up for another tour).
In The League of Gentlemen with Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith in 2017
JAMES STACK/BBC
Bookish proceeds by means of a series of two-part mysteries, the second set in the film world where murderous paranoia and ill will reign. Last year the final episode of Pemberton and Shearsmith's Inside No 9, in which Gatiss appeared, similarly depicted an actorly bitch-fest at a wrap party. Is that what showbiz is like — or just a lazy cliché?
'Oh, it's a lazy cliché!' he jokes. 'It depends on the production. I'm glad to say Bookish was a very happy set. Yes, it's a cliché, but there's a lot of truth in there. It's just about handling fragile egos sometimes. I think one thing that is absolutely permanent is the fear of replacement: 'Is my star waning? Who's this coming up on the inside track?''
So what was it like among the League of Gentlemen, I ask the one member of the league who graduated not only to the National Theatre but Hollywood. Was there rivalry? 'I know it's boring, but really not. We've never fallen out. We're still very good friends. We got back together this time last year. We had an anniversary lunch at the Ivy because it was 25 years since the first episode. And it always feels a bit to me like the Magnificent Seven. There's something lovely about 'here we all are'. It's just delightful to see them. And you pick up where you left off, which is the definition of a great friendship.'
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Gatiss has acted in two Mission: Impossible films, including the latest, The Final Reckoning. In the first instalment he found himself on set with the British actress Indira Varma, and says they clung to each other before they discovered all the American actors around them were also 'shitting themselves'. He adds: 'But Christopher McQuarrie, the director, and Tom Cruise could not be more friendly and relaxed. So within a couple of days we were all having a great time.'
Gatiss is such charming and amusing company, it always takes me aback how gloomy he is about the greater picture. The British film industry is in decline, he says, citing a Disney executive who reportedly said 'streaming is dead.' Budgets are down. AI looms. People are leaving for other careers. 'It's wonderful to be working, but the current environment is so scary, not just because of AI, but because the state of the industry is parlous.'
I ask about the future of Doctor Who, which he has been a fan of since childhood and has written for and acted in. He points out that the Russell T Davies revival is two decades' old. 'I think genuinely, if Doctor Who doesn't come back, having come back before, it has now properly become an imperishable TV icon. Maybe it just needs another rest.'
As for politics, this Labour supporter is very worried about the rise of Nigel Farage, whom he describes in terms that would likely be actionable. 'The implosion of the Tory party is incredible. Genuinely, you can't imagine these things could ever happen in your lifetime. Now we need to make sure the Tory party is resurrected. That's the only bulwark against [Reform UK] because it's moderate conservatism.'
Bookish's Archangel Lane is a world that, although disordered by murders, makes sense once Book has worked out who committed them and why. This is the mechanism of most whodunnits, yet I am still puzzled how anyone writes one. Does Gatiss, for instance, start with the cue — the dead body — or the motive of the murderer? It is not a simple answer. Yes, you can work backwards, but you can also change your mind about who the murderer is and reapportion motives.
With Connor Finch in Bookish
TOON AERTS/UKTV
'What you're trying to do always is play fair with the audience. You plant clues, but if they're too obscure, they feel cheated. If they're too obvious, they just go, 'It's them.' That seems like an 'obviously' thing to say, but it's so true.'
I ask whether he changed the identity of a murderer in the first season of Bookish (a second begins shooting soon, again in Belgium). He did. But, I say, that would be like changing one side of a Rubik's Cube. Suddenly all the other sides would be out of place.
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'My comparison always is Jenga. I did something in series two where I removed a character. I thought, 'Oh, that's an easy fix.' And then I realised I had pulled a Jenga piece out and the whole thing just went down.'
He may be untidy at home, but he must have looked in despair upon the resulting chaos. For an artist like Gatiss, as for a detective like Poirot, order is paramount.
Bookish starts on July 16 on U&alibi
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