You may feel that your cosy crime dance card is full. You’ve done all the Richard Osmans, polished off Ludwig and that new Timothy Spall one, Death Valley, not as bleak as it sounds, and of course there’s Father Brown to fall back on when you are ill and Agatha Raisin when you need cheering up. You’re good.
But … as with a delicious box of chocolates, which is to say any box of chocolates, there’s always room for one more, isn’t there? And here it is, your next flavoursome nugget of absolute delight – Bookish. This six-part detective drama was created by Mark Gatiss, written by Matthew Sweet and stars the former as Gabriel Book, a secondhand bookseller in postwar London. He carries a mysterious “letter from Churchill” as a result of his equally mysterious service in the war and this allows him to lend a hand with any passing police investigation that catches his eye. Think of him as a legitimised semi-Sherlock if you wish.
In the opening double bill, Slightly Foxed – the perfect and inevitable pun under the circumstances – the eye-catching investigation involves a plague pit uncovered at a bombsite, the apparent suicide of a local chemist via prussic acid and a lavish strewing of clues (at least one of which Book finds almost too obvious, which makes it another kind of clue altogether) and complications (missing morphine, a bloodied head but no broken skin, on top of a poisoning? Rum, old boy, altogether rum). Possible suspects include the pharmacist’s semi-estranged daughter and her spiv boyfriend, the erstwhile ARP warden, Rosie Cavaliero’s char lady (called Mrs Dredge to give us some Dickensian undertones to enjoy) and there are red herrings (and jade figurines) and period detail along the way.
The latter ranges from the pleasingly traditional (whistleblowing bobbies, meat as a luxury item, the prevalence of powdered egg), through to the still more pleasingly niche (Georgette Heyer fandom and Book’s refusal to indulge it) and on to the more difficult aspects of life in 1946 England: orphaned children making the best of new circumstances, the sweeping away of old certainties as the shellshocked population waits to see if something better or worse will rise from the rubble, the pride and sorrow attached to war heroes and those who had to care for the injured ones when they came home. Bookish delivers a ripping yarn, yes, but grief and melancholy undercut it at many turns.
Alongside the self-contained plot, we have the slower burn of what precisely is going on in Book’s life. He is married to Trottie (Polly Walker) and they clearly love each other dearly but sleep apart. They have recruited a young man to help in the shop while Gabriel sleuths. Jack (Connor Finch) is an orphan with no memories of his mother and only a single picture of his father, fresh out of a two-year stint in prison for his part as the getaway driver in a smash-and-grab raid in Mayfair. There are signs that the Books have taken him under their wing for motives other than altruism. There are also (God, Walker remains such a magnificent danger) signs that Mrs Book may have a taste for younger men which, if they come to fruition, will require a subcategory of cosy crime to be hastily instituted so we’ll need to keep an eye on that.
I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to say that one gently unspooling thread of Bookish is an exploration of Book’s life as a necessarily closeted gay man. It adds to the sense of sorrow that infuses the series and gives it heft, and warms the edges of Book as a character and of Gatiss – customarily quite a closed and chilly actor – to a valuable degree.
There are a few tricky moments – I’m not sure I buy an opportunistic theft by a man who just happens to be carrying around a jade chess set, or why he would leave a piece behind as an entirely unconvincing substitute for a stolen figurine. I feel, too, that we could do with finding some way other than battles about apostrophe placement to demonstrate a character’s intellectual superiority. But overall Bookish is a fine piece of entertainment – meticulously worked, beautifully paced and decidedly moreish. (It was commissioned for a second series before the first began.) It has enough spikiness to stop it being formulaic but enough love for the genre to keep it comforting. A joy.
Bookish is on U&Alibi