Mark Gatiss on is love for murder mysteries as detective drama series Bookish returns

Mark Gatiss chats about his passion for books and how Bookish has evolved as the detective drama returns for its second series. By Lynn Rusk.

This summer, audiences are being treated to the return of a number of cosy detective series, including the second series of Ludwig, which features a puzzle-solving detective, and now Bookish, which follows a crime-solving bookshop owner.

The detective drama, created by Mark Gatiss and set in 1940s post-war London, returns for a second series, with Gabriel Book, played by Gatiss, investigating the world of spiritualism.

After attending the former Bretton Hall College acting school near Wakefield, Gatiss, 59, first rose to fame playing a variety of roles in the BBC’s surreal comedy-horror series The League of Gentlemen, which he co-wrote as part of the comedy troupe.

A lifelong Doctor Who fan, the County Durham-born actor and writer contributed to the revival of the iconic sci-fi series as both a writer and performer.

He later co-created the acclaimed BBC series Sherlock, in which he portrayed Sherlock Holmes’s brother, Mycroft.

In Bookish, Book is gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. In the second series, he takes on a number of new cases while continuing to conceal his sexuality.

By this point in his career, Gatiss knows what it takes to create and star in his own show.

“I’ve done it really from the beginning with The League of Gentlemen, so it’s sort of second nature to me. But I suppose it’s partly, you know, control freakery, but also, if you have a very particular vision and idea of what a thing is, it just feels natural.

“The downside, obviously, is that you can’t be everywhere at once. So what you have to do is surround yourself with a team of really great people who can deliver it, who can make that vision a reality.”

In the show, Book turns to his extensive literart world to solve cases. When has Gatiss had to turn to books to help him solve different problems?

He says: “It’s more the idea that somewhere in this mass of books, fact and fiction, there’s always an answer to something, or it might lead to something.

“You read things for different reasons. I’m reading three things at the moment. I’m reading Middlemarch, which I’ve always meant to read and which is surprisingly funny. I’m enjoying it. It’s quite dense, but inside it, as it were, is a very modern book. I think I’ll get to it.

“I’m reading a book called What If Reform Wins? for fun, and I just finished an extraordinary book called City of Nets, which is a sort of cultural history of Hollywood in the 1940s.

“So I read different things, you know. But I suppose what we all do is, if you go back to certain things for comfort, you go to other things for stimulation. So I would say, yes, I always turn to books for different reasons.”

And of course, there are plenty of benefits to being literary-minded.

“A book opens up a whole world to you,” he says. “I think a book is like a time machine. If you’re stuck at a railway station in the middle of nowhere, if you’ve got a book in your pocket, it’s amazing. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s true, and it’s been like that for me all my life.

“There’s the idea of escape and opening up worlds of possibility, you know, and also it’s just an education, isn’t it? I can literally remember learning certain words from books that were never taught to me.

“I’m probably mispronouncing several of them, because you just know your own experience, don’t you? And then suddenly you discover that other people like the same book, or whatever.

“It’s a cultural currency, like film, television and all sorts of art. It’s a link, you know. There’s a famous story in Alan Bennett’s diaries where he’s reading something and there’s a pencil mark on a particular paragraph. He thinks, ‘I wonder why this was important to someone?” Then he moves the page, and it’s just a hair.’”

What makes the mysteries in season two different from ones that audiences have become familiar with?

Gatiss says: “They are different stories. It’s more ambitious. Inevitably, the first series was finding its feet, and we consciously wanted to be in Archangel Lane more because you have to get used to the world and the people and the precinct, for want of a better word. So, in series one, there are two episodes very heavily set around there, and then we sort of go just down the road to a big hotel.

“This time, I think it just feels slightly like it’s breathed out a bit. Episodes five and six, it says Germany, so it’s more ambitious. And I think it’s more like the show I had in my head, because we’re creating it as we go along, in that sense. I think it’s really come together.”

Of course, in the world of literature, there are plenty of detectives to take inspiration from.

“My favourites, obviously, are Sherlock Holmes, Poirot and Miss Marple.

“There’s a brilliant, forgotten one called Max Carrados, who was a blind detective. There was a vogue in the Golden Age of murder mystery where everyone was looking to create a detective, and everyone had to have a thing.

“That’s what the book’s thing is, the books and the idea of that. But Max Carrados, I think, is rather interesting. And there’s a brilliant one by Cecil Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, father of Daniel Day-Lewis, who used to write murder mysteries under the name Nicholas Blake. He wrote one called The Beast Must Die, which I think is one of the most amazing books. That’s a real favourite of mine.”

Bookish season two returns to UK TV on Wednesday.