This review contains spoilers
Anyone for a period detective drama set in London and featuring an eccentric but brilliant amateur sleuth? No, not that one – although Bookish is written by and stars Mark Gatiss, who co-created BBC One’s Benedict Cumberbatch-era Sherlock and played Mycroft Holmes. But if Mycroft was Sherlock’s older brother, then Gatiss’s new character, Gabriel Book, could be seen (chronologically as well as spiritually) as the son of Sherlock.
The year is 1946 in a bomb-cratered postwar Whitechapel, Book being the aptly named bibliophile owner of an antiquarian bookshop (“If I had only been called Butcher,” he hungrily opines later). He has a random-seeming but ingenious filing system that would delight fans of Only Connect, bakes his own ginger snaps and is given to saying things like: “Without tea I am merely reconstructed dust.”
This last comment is addressed to a young assistant, Jack (Connor Finch), who has come to work for Book straight out of prison and stands in for the audience as he gets to know his eccentric new patron. Jack is quickly introduced to Book’s “little hobby” when his boss is called to assist the police after some skeletons are discovered in a nearby bombsite. And no sooner has Book deduced that this is an ancient plague pit than he is summoned to the apparent suicide, by poisoning, of a local chemist.
Connor Finch as Jack (Photo: UKTV)The two discoveries – the skeletons and the dead chemist – are eventually linked to the same crime in a twist far too dense to detail here. Suffice to say, Gatiss is an old hand at this whodunit stuff; all those years adapting Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie haven’t gone to waste.
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It all looks authentic (even with Antwerp standing in for London) while Book’s unlikely presence during police investigations is explained by him possessing a mysterious “special letter from Churchill”. And while Bookish enjoys many of the trappings of cosy crime, then the titular detective’s domestic arrangements give the drama an extra dimension. For while Book is happily wed, it’s a “lavender marriage” of convenience; he is a gay man in a hostile era. He shares a bed with his wife Trottie (Polly Walker), but only for a bedtime read. After a chaste goodnight kiss, he’s off next door.
Some people reckon that Sherlock Holmes is gay, rather than asexual, but there’s no ambiguity with Book. And he is being blackmailed by the security services, seemingly for something to do with his wartime exploits. That and the real identity of Jack, who believes himself to be an orphan, are set to be the overarching mysteries of the series.
Bookish is grounded in an interesting period in our history, too, as Britain emerged disorientated from the Second World War. As Nora gleefully puts it: “Half the soldiers have come back with pistols stolen from dead Nazis. Just to think that people used to kill each other by boiling down arsenic from wallpaper.”
Polly Walker as Trottie (Photo: UKTV)Back to the crime-of-the-week, and as usual with these shows it’s instructive to look at the guest stars. Sure enough, both Rosie Cavaliero, as the dead chemist’s charlady, and Daniel Mays, as the local butcher, are prime suspects. Mays’s jovial butcher is in fact the killer, having murdered his wife, skinned her and added her bones to those of the plague victims. He then poisoned the chemist, whom he mistakenly believed to be blackmailing him.
Gatiss gives himself the best lines, while with Trottie, Jack and a perkily morbid young neighbour called Nora (Buket Komur) – the orphaned daughter of Turkish restaurateurs – he is surrounded by an engagingly unconventional family of sleuthing assistants.
Sherlock fans may have been disappointed by Gatiss’s recent statement that he had no interest in revisiting the much-loved BBC series, but here at least is the next best thing.
‘Bookish’ continues next Wednesday at 8pm on U&Alibi
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