Mark Gatiss Talks New U&alibi Show Bookish To Yahoo! News

Turning A New Page In Detective Fiction

Bookish is a new detective show starring Mark Gatiss on U&Alibi and here’s a few snippets from Gatiss talking to Yahoo! News about it…

Bookish is the culmination of his love of crime stories: “I’m a great student of the genre. I’ve always loved murder mysteries, obviously Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, but also a lot of the others I read as a teenager — Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham, and lots and lots. I just love them, and I’ve always wanted to be one…So I sort of had this idea in this form for about eight years, but it’s a sort of synthesis of all of the bits I love, really.”

For him, Agatha Christie is still hard to beat in terms of writing crime stories and coming up with plots:”Excuse my French, it’s f***ing hard…They are beasts. The reason that Christie is still preeminent is that her plots are amazing, and everyone bow down to her.

“There is an amazing letter in her archive from Graham Greene, who wrote to her asking to buy plots off her because he couldn’t think of any, and she just dashed them off. There are short story plots of hers which would sustain a novel, and it’s just amazing, really, some of the cleverest twists and variations of a theme, you never know.

“So they are difficult, and the big problems, the biggest challenges, are motive… but mostly it’s clues, you have to lay clues that are not too obvious and not too obscure. One of the rules is you have to play fair with the audience; they have to be able to somehow piece it together, and that is the other problem, which is how your detective does it.

“Every detective has a thing, and the thing for Book is the bookshop. It is a sort of analogue computer; it’s all there somewhere, and he has so many obscure references that somehow he can kind of piece it together. He’s a bit of Sherlock Holmes, a bit of intuition. A line I was very proud of is, he says, ‘you can read a lot of things as well as books’. I thought that’s kind of the ethos of the series.”

The show which he created also tackles a lot of important issues too:

“The setting is very crucial. I love this period; it’s very under-examined. I love the films of the period hugely, it’s the best decade of British film, I think.

“What I wanted was to create something in the flavour of The Lady Vanishes or a great film — which if you haven’t seen I really recommend — called Green for Danger with Alistair Sim, which is set during the war and is a very clever murder mystery with a central eccentric detective. It’s my perfect film, really.

“Plus, the idea that he was a gay man in a lavender marriage, and that would be a way of talking about now.”

Gatiss goes on: “I saw a discussion on TV a couple of years ago with a wide age range of gay people and they started talking about decriminalisation and the two youngest ones looked a little uncomfortable, and eventually the interviewer was saying ‘what is it?’ And one of them said: ‘Oh, I didn’t know it had ever been illegal,’ and your heart just drops.

“But weirdly, that is the great triumph of the gay rights movement; it’s an extraordinary thing, and it is like fighting any battle — the real success comes when you don’t have to think about it. But at the same time, you want people to acknowledge it or know about it because it’s crucial. And also now it could be undone like that, and it’s all around the world.”

Read the full interview here

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/bookish-crime-drama-mark-gatiss-interview-112317491.html