Bookish, U&Alibi review - sleuthing and skulduggery in a bomb-battered London

As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.

The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily battered London street, Archangel Lane. From the look of it you’d suspect it may have been filmed in somewhere like York or Canterbury but in fact it was Namur, in Belgium, a country which supplied several more Bookish locations.

It’s 1946, and the demoralising aura of the recently-ended hostilities hangs heavily over the action. There’s a sense that the old order has been blown to pieces while it’s still unclear what’s going to come next, so in that respect Book’s is a kind of refuge from encroaching chaos, even if Gabriel’s enigmatic cataloguing system is impenetrable to anyone but him.

The first minor mystery is why Book decides to give a job to Jack (Connor Finch, pictured above with Gatiss), a former jailbird from Whitechapel, who he hires without any kind of interview or assessment of his aptitude for the job. Revelation, however, will be vouchsafed to those who wait. A larger conundrum is the issue of who Gabriel Book really is. He seems to have many of the attributes of a TV sleuth, and is evidently well acquainted with the local police, personified by Inspector Bliss (Elliot Levey). Bliss occupies that familiar role in crime dramas of being notionally in command, but always a couple of steps behind whichever unfeasibly gifted amateur gives the show its title. Book fends off questions about his own role, though keeps telling people he has a “letter from Churchill” which he never shows to anybody.

Bookish’s format is to tell each of its stories over two episodes. The first pair, Slightly Foxed, involves a “plague pit” full of human remains, unearthed by a Luftwaffe bomb, in which a miscreant had sought to hide the remains of a more recent victim. Meanwhile we have a chemist who apparently killed himself with prussic acid, a coin from 1665 which is a little too shiny to be true, a stolen jade elephant, conflict over a will, and the devastating deployment of a smidgeon of powdered egg to point the finger at the perpetrator.

Ingenious stuff, though perhaps a little too cute. Also, Gatiss plays Book with a faint cleverer-than-thou smirk which can become just a tiny bit irksome. But the second story, Deadly Nitrates, is much more engaging. This is a visit to the post-war British film industry, in which writer/director Jesse Mackendrick (Luke Norris) is shooting a thing called Lovelorn in London. It stars ageing doyenne of British cinema Sandra Dare (a skilful turn from Joely Richardson, pictured above with Gatiss and Polly Walker) and her much younger on-and-offscreen lover Stewart Howard (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), and the production is being stalked by an unknown predator who bumps off a cast-member with some poisoned chocolates. Gatiss uses the story as a device for examining the fickleness of fame, every actor’s terror of growing old, and the way an industry based on selling gold-tinted dreams to its audience can reduce its practitioners to neurotic shadows of themselves as they scrabble to stay relevant and revered. He sticks the boot into the press, too, via the vampiric figure of film gossip-columnist Nerina Bean (Amanda Drew).

One senses that Gatiss has injected a little more of his real self into this one, and it’s all the better for it. He also starts to raise the veil over Book’s marriage to his wife Trottie (an excellent Polly Walker). There have already been clues that this is a slightly unconventional arrangement (they sleep in separate bedrooms, for a start), and the enigma of Jack’s recruitment starts to be revealed...

• All 6 episodes of Bookish are available on U&Alibi

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