Oh, that we might all dwell on the earth of Bookish, the place the key to getting forward is just being very well-read: a meritocracy of gold leaf and vellum. The potential of being stabbed with a hairpin or having your tea spiked with strychnine appears a good trade-off.
The sequence creator and co-writer Mark Gatiss additionally performs its titular star, Gabriel Guide, a heat, twinkly bookseller (some unashamed nominative determinism, that), who moonlights as a personal detective. Instead of Sherlock’s thoughts palace, Guide consults his thoughts library, pausing whereas the fast-flicking pages purr; the ring of a typewriter sounds when he has arrived at what he was searching for. Bookish will get round its Miss Marple drawback – there are solely so many murders an beginner detective can moderately occur to return throughout earlier than you begin to suspect that actually they are the frequent denominator – with, of all issues, a letter from Winston Churchill, which appears to allow Guide entry to no matter he rattling properly likes, together with police investigations.
He’s accompanied by his canine, Canine, and spouse, Trottie (Polly Walker), who runs the neighbouring wallpaper store – and sleeps within the bed room subsequent door. Although the pair are deeply dedicated companions in life and sleuthing, it is a lavender marriage – Trottie offering cowl for her husband’s homosexuality. This secret brings a seriousness and melancholy to in any other case frothy proceedings.
It’s 1946: smoke nonetheless hangs over the bombed-out capital, and the troubled and misplaced wander its streets. One such determine is Jack (Connor Finch), newly launched from Whitechapel Jail, who’s summoned by an unexplained letter to work at Guide’s. One other is the impish Nora (Buket Komur), an orphan who aspires to write down detective fiction, alongside for the experience. The thriller of why the Books have come to absorb Jack weaves across the six-part sequence’s standalone circumstances (every of which runs over two episodes), as does what precisely Guide did to earn his door-opening letter from the previous PM. After which there are Guide’s clandestine chats with an eye-patched Tim McInnerny on a bench overlooking parliament. In contrast, the bread-and-butter murders come to really feel virtually incidental.
All that is acquainted floor for Gatiss, the co-creator of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and although he’s free of literary supply materials to hew to, Bookish stays archly referential to its crowded style. The homicide weapons in Guide’s first case are Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl respectively: prussic acid and a joint of beef. A cat-and-mouse chase is performed out in larger-than-life shadows, placing me in thoughts of Basil Rathbone. There are red-herring clues and bumbling bobbies, false confessions and casts of characters gathered in drawing rooms for the massive reveal. Guide notices particulars the police don’t, and the digicam helpfully factors them out: a coin gleams within the grime of a plague pit, an island in a movie of mud reveals a lacking figurine. Although Bookish is ready in London, it has a village-green really feel, its key gamers dwelling on the identical road, the butcher, the chemist, the cobbler. It wouldn’t have stunned me within the slightest if it turned out Reverend Inexperienced had dunnit within the kitchen with a candlestick. Including to this homely nostalgia are wartime references to ration books and whistle-blowing coppers and powdered egg.
After which there may be Guide himself, who’s the form of man who bakes his personal ginger snaps and says issues like “heavens to Betsy” and “with out tea I’m merely reconstituted mud”. He quotes Tolstoy and Keats, Wilde and Mackay, to nonplussed interlocutors. He’s a grammar pedant: inside the first 5 minutes he has identified that the apostrophe in his store signage is in fairly the suitable place, thanks. The subsequent minute he’s telling Nora her suggestion that plague-infested our bodies have been as soon as used as weapons of organic warfare is nowhere close to as terrible as her use of a break up infinitive.
Tagging alongside at a police interview, Guide hits a reception bell each time the suspect wanders into cliché. “Pay attention, I do know my rights.” Ding! “You possibly can’t stick something on me.” Ding! “I wouldn’t damage a fly.” Ding! Ding! Ding! Watching Bookish, I might have achieved the identical. But for all that it edges into the predictable and the twee, it’s simply forgiven. You get the sense that Gatiss is aware of precisely what he’s doing, and is having somewhat plenty of enjoyable doing it – and who can begrudge him that?
Bookish
U & Alibi
[See also: Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters is TV without bite]