16-07-2025
Look out, Sherlock, Mark Gatiss has created a brilliant new sleuth
In Bookish (U&Drama), a detective drama by Mark Gatiss set in 1946, Gabriel Book is a super-sleuth without a super power. Book doesn't bang on about little grey cells or make Sherlock-style synaptic leaps. He is just a bookshop owner who has read a lot of books, and from there gleaned knowledge about what makes people tick. No violin-playing, no bravura deduction, no visions. It's actually quite refreshing.
Mark Gatiss, Bookish's writer and star, has also quite evidently read a lot of books, as well as seen a lot of classic movies. With his work on Sherlock and Dracula, as well as his annual ghost stories for BBC Two, Gatiss is steeped in crime fiction. He knows the genre inside out, and Bookish therefore toes a teasing line between things you've seen or read before and new ways of repackaging those old things for television in 2025.
Although the story is set in 1946, that strange era immediately postwar where a broken Britain was rebuilt in a hurry, away from the whodunits its themes are contemporary. Book is gay but has to hide behind a lavender marriage to avoid social stigma. Much of the show away from the mystery of the week unpicks how Book and Trottie (Polly Walker) aka Mrs Book, first met, and how and why they came to their convenient arrangement.
Similarly, at the beginning of the series a young man called Jack (Connor Finch) is released from Whitechapel prison and thereafter welcomed into Book and Trottie's embrace with suspicious alacrity. There is, obviously, some connection between Jack, Book and Trottie. What it is forms another gentle puzzle that bubbles along beneath all six episodes of what will surely be the first of many series. (In fact as I write a second has just been announced).
Bookish is first and foremost a clever, witty, well-plotted sleuther. From an opening two-parter about a poisoned butcher (Danny Mays, having a blast) to a finale about murder at the esteemed Walsingham Hotel, Bookish is a series of puzzles that are presented and then solved with a satisfying completeness. Gatiss plays fair by his viewer, asking them the same questions based on the same evidence that he asks of his detective. This, of course, is the Agatha Christie formula, but it is much easier to get wrong than right.
What it isn't is gritty or cutting-edge, and at times it veers towards arch. But then in a series called Bookish about a man called Book who owns a bookshop called Book's Books (and loves to tell everyone why the apostrophe is quite correct in this instance) there should be no expectation of gore or grime such as in Netflix's recent Dept Q or HBO's True Detective. This is an overwhelmingly fun-filled drama that happens to be about multiple murders. It helps that it looks superb, given what must have been a low budget, and its cast – featuring names as grand as Elliot Levey, Joely Richardson and Paul McGann – adds extra lustre.
Bookish is not game-changing, but it is not trying to change the game, just let us enjoy playing it. In the last 12 months we have had Ludwig, Death Valley and now this, all plotting a course for what British drama can offer having been priced out of the market for grandeur by US streamers. Another puzzle solved.
Bookish airs on U&Alibi on Wednesday 16 July from 8pm
