Bookish: Mark Gatiss on the universe’s ‘howling chaos’ and the comfort of an orderly murder mystery

Bookseller and amateur detective Gabriel Book sums it up pretty well – his sleuthing skills provides order in a world that feels disordered.

That’s why people are obsessed with crime stories, both true and fictional. The appeal of every episode of Law & Order and NCIS is that chaos is banished and rule is restored.

Bookish is the creation of Mark Gatiss, an English actor, writer, novelist and director who has been in everything from The Favourite and The League of Gentlemen to Mission: Impossible and the upcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

A prolific presence on and behind the scenes in UK TV, Gatiss starred as Mycroft Holmes in the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock series, on which he also wrote. He loves a puzzle, and he understands why murder mysteries have become popular again.

“The world is absolutely f--king terrifying,” he told The Nightly. “It’s probably why people also turn to religion, because it’s some version of the world which is more ordered.

“(Murder mysteries) are a comfort blanket in a sense, it’s definitely cosy in that sense, because it’s about a world in which clever people can solve things.

“Conspiracy theories are so popular because they’re immensely comforting, because if you believe we didn’t go to the moon, if you believe Richard II was a good king, if you believe the CIA assassinated Kennedy, it means someone is in charge.

“The truth is the universe is howling chaos, and that’s what’s scary. So, if you can impose any kind of order onto things, then it makes you feel better. This is a world where bad deeds are punished, as opposed to trumpeted and celebrated.”

In the world of Bookish, evildoers are indeed no match for Gabriel Book’s intellect and order is restored at a time when stability and certainty was also hard to come by.

Gatiss chose to set his story in 1946 because post-WWII Britain has a rich history to serve as the backdrop to a detective show.

“It gets short-shrift and then suddenly the fifties kick in and people forget what happened,” he said. “Rationing was worse, and people used to say, ‘What did we fight the war for?’. It’s culturally fascinating as the beginnings of the welfare state, the most radical government we ever had.

“But you’ve got all these displaced people coming from war, lots of guns, lots of liberated people, especially women who had gone out to work and done men’s jobs, and then were sort of told in short order to go back behind the kitchen table.

“I’ve read so much about this period and what the post-war world wanted to be, and there’s so much optimism and then also, unfortunately, so much disappointment so quickly.”

That makes for a compelling crucible in which to place Book, a man with excellent observation and deduction skills, but also secrets. When he enters a crime scene, he taps his pocket to gesture to “the letter from Churchill” he carries which gives him access – why does he have this supposed endorsement? That’s a puzzle for us to solve.

He’s also a gay man in a lavender marriage with his best friend Trotty, played by Polly Walker, who said that it was “unusual, even for now, to play a female character that is so strong and independent”.

Walker and Gatiss had never worked together before but being both Northerners and of the same age, their onscreen chemistry playing lifelong friends came together very naturally and quickly – accelerated by Walker accidentally walking in on Gatiss in the bathroom on her first day. That’s one way to get any awkwardness out of the way.

Bookish was born from Gatiss’s third attempt to adapt his Lucifer Box novels (The Vesuvius Club, The Devil in Amber and Black Butterfly) into a TV series, when he realised it had been too long gone – “I didn’t want to go back to something I’d tried (to do) several times” – and he had this idea instead.

But let’s not call Bookish cosy crime, a term that, while useful, Gatiss finds a little reductive.

“It implies that it’s like baby food, but it’s just comforting. There’s nothing wrong with being comforted but you can do a bit more. (Bookish) has some teeth to it, it has consequences.

“This new iteration of (puzzles) started with Knives Out, which is a very clever, fiendish, old-fashioned murder mystery with lots of colourful characters. But it’s also about something, isn’t it?

“Agatha Christie, particularly at her best, is a great social commentator and people don’t give her credit for that.

“You can do both, and that’s the joy of it.”

Bookish is streaming on HBO Max from July 16