Oh, that we could all live in the world of Bookish, where the secret to getting ahead is simply being very well-read: a meritocracy of gold leaf and vellum. The possibility of being stabbed with a hairpin or having your tea spiked with strychnine seems a fair trade-off.
The series creator and co-writer Mark Gatiss also plays its titular star, Gabriel Book, a warm, twinkly bookseller (some unashamed nominative determinism, that), who moonlights as a private detective. In place of Sherlock’s mind palace, Book consults his mind library, pausing while the fast-flicking pages purr; the ring of a typewriter sounds when he has arrived at what he was looking for. Bookish gets around its Miss Marple problem – there are only so many murders an amateur detective can reasonably happen to come across before you start to suspect that really they are the common denominator – with, of all things, a letter from Winston Churchill, which seems to permit Book access to whatever he damn well likes, including police investigations.
He is accompanied by his dog, Dog, and wife, Trottie (Polly Walker), who runs the neighbouring wallpaper shop – and sleeps in the bedroom next door. Though the pair are deeply committed partners in life and sleuthing, this is a lavender marriage – Trottie providing cover for her husband’s homosexuality. This secret brings a seriousness and melancholy to otherwise frothy proceedings.
It is 1946: smoke still hangs over the bombed-out capital, and the troubled and lost wander its streets. One such figure is Jack (Connor Finch), newly released from Whitechapel Prison, who is summoned by an unexplained letter to work at Book’s. Another is the impish Nora (Buket Komur), an orphan who aspires to write detective fiction, along for the ride. The mystery of why the Books have come to take in Jack weaves around the six-part series’s standalone cases (each of which runs over two episodes), as does what exactly Book did to earn his door-opening letter from the former PM. And then there are Book’s clandestine chats with an eye-patched Tim McInnerny on a bench overlooking parliament. By contrast, the bread-and-butter murders come to feel almost incidental.
All this is familiar ground for Gatiss, the co-creator of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and though he is freed from literary source material to hew to, Bookish remains archly referential to its crowded genre. The murder weapons in Book’s first case are Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl respectively: prussic acid and a joint of beef. A cat-and-mouse chase is played out in larger-than-life shadows, putting me in mind of Basil Rathbone. There are red-herring clues and bumbling bobbies, false confessions and casts of characters gathered in drawing rooms for the big reveal. Book notices details the police don’t, and the camera helpfully points them out: a coin gleams in the dirt of a plague pit, an island in a film of dust reveals a missing figurine. Though Bookish is set in London, it has a village-green feel, its key players living on the same street, the butcher, the chemist, the cobbler. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest if it turned out Reverend Green had dunnit in the kitchen with a candlestick. Adding to this homely nostalgia are wartime references to ration books and whistle-blowing coppers and powdered egg.
And then there is Book himself, who is the sort of man who bakes his own ginger snaps and says things like “heavens to Betsy” and “without tea I am merely reconstituted dust”. He quotes Tolstoy and Keats, Wilde and Mackay, to nonplussed interlocutors. He is a grammar pedant: within the first five minutes he has pointed out that the apostrophe in his shop signage is in quite the right place, thank you. The next minute he is telling Nora her suggestion that plague-infested bodies were once used as weapons of biological warfare is nowhere near as awful as her use of a split infinitive.
Tagging along at a police interview, Book hits a reception bell every time the suspect wanders into cliché. “Listen, I know my rights.” Ding! “You can’t stick anything on me.” Ding! “I wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Ding! Ding! Ding! Watching Bookish, I could have done the same. Yet for all that it edges into the predictable and the twee, it is easily forgiven. You get the sense that Gatiss knows exactly what he’s doing, and is having rather a lot of fun doing it – and who can begrudge him that?
Bookish
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This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working