BTS - Bookish

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Writer and actor Mark Gatiss tells IBC365 about why his new murder mystery series Bookish has teeth.

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It seems unlikely that Mark Gatiss would ever get angry but mention ‘Cozy Crime’ and the Sherlock creator exhibits mild exasperation.

“I find the term pejorative because it suggests there's no teeth to it when sometimes cosy crime can amplify issues or push against them. Jolly macabre is the kind of thing I like.”

The writer and actor is promoting his new murder mystery drama set in post-war London. Bookish centres on Gabriel Book (Gatiss) an antiquarian book dealer and amateur sleuth. Gatiss, who wrote the six part series, acknowledges his debt not just to Conan Doyle but to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and the gentleman detectives Lord Peter Wimsey (created by Dorothy Sayers) and Albert Campion (who featured in novels by Margery Allingham) all of whom have TV versions which could be categorised under cozy crime.

“It’s an easy thing to say for a genre that has many different styles in it,” Gatiss tells IBC365 at Italian Television Festival IGSF in Riccione. “As well as being a murder mystery the best of them have a lot to say about the world. Agatha Christie is very underrated in terms of the satire on class and social prejudice she wrote into her novels. The longer format [of TV] helps us explore character.”

He admits that some cozy crime can be too casual, “like a warm bath” adding, “I like to have consequences. Bookish exists in a broken world full of possibility but also sadness.”

He based his performance of Book on Pimpernel Smith the character played by Leslie Howard in the 1941 British feature of the same name about an archaeologist smuggling people out of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Technicolor look of the show was informed by his love of the films of Powell and Pressburger who captured war time surrealism in A Matter of Life and Death.

Another inspiration was actor and novelist Dirk Bogarde who experienced the liberation of Bergen-Belsen death camp in 1945 and a decade later made Doctor In The House comedies and became a matinee idol. “He journeyed from darkness into escapism,” says Gatiss. “I didn’t want Book to be too flippant. Getting the tone right was quite a job. He needed to be light hearted because he’s seen so much dark.”

Like Bogarde and Gatiss himself, the character of Book is gay. At a time when homosexuality is illegal in England he’s in a “lavender” marriage of convenience with best friend, Trottie (Polly Walker). It’s partly based on past relationships Gatiss has had with his best female friends.

“Post-World War II is an extraordinary period of horror and liberation. Women and gay people were liberated during the war. They had a different life experience and then after the war society tried to put a lid back on things which didn't quite work. I think we all should be educated about what a dangerous world it used to be and how privileged we are today. Equally how easily that can all be taken away.”

He adds, “One day we’ll have a lead detective who just happens to be gay and then we’ll know we made it.”

Writing a whodunnit

Gatiss conceived the idea during lockdown, originally as a novel, before turning it into a script.  Eagle Eye, an ITV Studios owned indie, learned of the project and fast-tracked development, largely filming it in Belgium where streets and sets were dressed for London. The series is being broadcast by UKTV’s crime channel U&Alibi with a second season ready to film in August.

Whovians might spot similarities in a narrative device in Bookish that mirrors one Gatiss penned for Matt Smith’s Dr Who in ‘Victory of the Daleks’ back in 2010. Dr Who, like Book, is in possession of a letter from Winston Churchill - the result of some undisclosed favour - which grants him access to crime scenes.

“You need your maverick detective to have access to the crime scene so I stole the idea I’d written in Dr Who to cut out the ambiguity,” he explains. “Book can just produce this letter and it gives him a way in.”

He continues, “I don’t like my detective to have too antagonistic a relationship with the police. I find it very reductive and dumb that the professional who works the case [in TV murder mystery] doesn’t get the credit. I wanted to make the police detective here into an ally. At the same time there is another character Sergeant Morris who is less sympathetic and suspicious of what he sees as Book’s meddling in the case.

Before “freely adapting” Conan Doyle for the BBC’s Sherlock Gatiss adapted three Poirot murder mysteries for ITV, and appeared in an adaptation of Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage.

“Murder mysteries are fiendishly difficult to write,” he says. “You have to find a balance between providing clues for the audience but not being so obvious that they get them straight away and not making them so obscure that at the end people feel cheated. You have to play fair.”

“There's a lot to be said for starting at the end and working backwards because then you can cover it up. It's actually true that the identity of the murderer can and does change in the course of writing unless their identity is absolutely intrinsic to the story.

I've read an awful lots of whodunnits so you become very used to the tricks and then you have to start second guessing the tricks. If someone does something out of character – like they suddenly knock a vase over – the viewer thinks that's important. Then you as a writer think does the audience know that I think that’s important therefore it’s a red herring? Paul McGuigan, director of Sherlock, said the murderer is always the first person you see twice. He’s right. In The Hounds of Baskerville (2010) I deliberately made the murderer not the person you saw twice. You can drive yourself mad trying to second guess the audience.”

The impact of AI

The books in Book’s shop aren’t arranged by category or alphabet but in accordance to a logic only the bookkeeper can deduce. A tome called ‘Cataracts of the Nile’ is filed next to one on eye conditions. Gatiss calls the arrangement an “analogue computer” and presumably has a similar library at home. He says he read from an early age and was in an advanced reading group as a child.

“When I was about five, I remember being able to pronounce the word Subterranean and I got a prize for it. I vividly remember being given a copy of Great Expectations also aged five from Santa. I didn't read it then but when I did many years later the plot twist blew my mind. It's still my favourite twists.”

Once, when ill with German measles, his parents bought him The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as a cheering up gift. “I never looked back,” he says. “I love the smell of old books. The feel of them and everything that comes with entering one of those antique book shops. That’s what informed the show.”

Oddly, for such a bibliophile, he has embraced electronic book readers.  “My Kindle has changed my reading habits. I read a lot more because it's so easy. That in no way takes away from the physical beauty of a lovely book, especially an old one, but it is incredibly useful.

“I've just read an amazing book about Dr Crippen called Story of a Murder [by Hallie Rubenhold] on Kindle and after I’d finished it suggests some others which are sometimes 99p. It actually has made me read more books.

“This is what AI should be. It's technology which is useful as opposed to replacing creativity. When the Kindle came out people were talking about the death of physical books but people still love books and physical media as a whole has staged a bit of a comeback despite what we were told. I'm hoping the same will be the case with AI.”

Gatiss recently appeared in Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning as head of the NSA helping to battle a rogue AI.

“I think the impact of AI will get quite bad everywhere and then there'll be a kind of arts and craft type of revolution,” he says. “People want to see other people's fingerprints on things. We were always told that when the robots came the machines would do the mundane jobs, like washing up, but weirdly, it's come for the Arts first. We didn't see that coming. I do not understand why we would want to replace the creative instinct. That's why we're alive. I understand why corporations want AI but why people would voluntarily do it I find baffling.”

The IGSF in Riccione and Rimini is a new incarnation of the Roma Fiction Festival, which ran for 10 years until 2016. It is organised by the APA, Italy’s producers’ association APA, in partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture and SIAE (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers). 

“You come to other countries like Italy or France and the TV and film industry plays a huge part, not only of the culture but of the economy,” Gatiss says. “People just accept that. But in Britain we simply don't value the creative industries. We’ve got a major problem. It’s an ideological thing which baffles me constantly.

“We have two things left in Britain. One is the Second World War and one is the 1966 World Cup and we cling to them like a life raft. We increasingly aggrandise and mythologise them out of any perspective. The British are obsessed by having once ruled the waves.”

Nostalgia is one reason why British TV continues to produce cozy crime murder mysteries, whether Gatiss likes the term of not.

“It’s one of our only remaining industries,” he winks. “We murder very well.”

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