Behind the scenes of Bookish

14:43Antonia Quirke:I think one of the things that has been brought home to me is that these kind of stories do have rules. They're rules that sometimes seem to me to be, I thought were superficial, or I thought were things that should be broken. And actually, they're just not. I couldn't agree more. You know, it's almost a cliché, the scene of the writer being told, oh, you've got to make the murder happen before the credits. Yeah. But actually, you just do, don't you?

15:10Mark Gatiss:Yes, you do, because otherwise you're not laying out the rules for the audience.

15:18Matthew Sweet:Structural rules are one thing, but what about rules for writing itself? Do Matthew and Mark always, or ever, begin at the beginning?

15:28Antonia Quirke:Sometimes you think of the murder and the victim first. The thing about writing crime fiction is that you are allowed to travel backwards and alter things at the beginning. What I'm trying today is jumping to the end and doing that bit where everything is explained. It's like testing the argument. Now, none of this may appear in the finished work, but I am writing what is in effect a kind of summing up speech from the detective, explaining the reasoning, explaining why it must have happened this way. And then you have the other characters who can be there to kind of test these arguments. And if they're not working, if they're not convincing, you then have to go back and you have to make that evidence matter.

16:16Antonia Quirke:You have to tidy those things up. you have the opportunity to go back and fill those plot holes or make sure that the machine is working properly.

16:24Matthew Sweet:That's summing up or exposition speech that Matthew's working on there. When the detective unveils their reasoning to a gathered audience, it's a trope invented by the American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe in 1841 in The Murders of the Rue Morgue. It's possibly now everybody's favourite part of a detective story, and in the window of Book's bookshop is a bust of Edgar Allan Poe, a nod to the importance of this moment in a story, the moment where we all think, go on, wow us. Starting with that on the page sounds logical, doesn't it?

17:01Antonia Quirke:One of the trickiest parts of writing a show like this is the denouement, the explanation, finding enough for everybody to do in a scene like that where book has to dominate. It's got to be Book who has done most of the deductions and done most of the explaining. So one of the things that it's made me think was that, well, let's try and kind of break this up in some way so that the other regulars are not necessarily obliged to be there. Find them something else to do. Find them their own story to take through to the end so that they can run another part of the plot and bring that to a conclusion like the one I'm writing right now so you've got to make sure that all of those characters have something meaningful to pursue something that will give the audience something to to chew on give the actors something that will satisfy them as well I mean that's something that I'm always thinking of you know particularly now I know them all really well I think when you get this script I want you to be happy I want you to think oh I've got lots to do This is really interesting, not flicking through and thinking, well, where am I?

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19:45Matthew Sweet:You're listening to In the Studio from the BBC World Service with me, Antonia Quirk. And Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet as they work on their new series of bookish, the hit crime drama about a bookseller turned detective. Both Matthew and Mark were steeped in the plot rhythms of detective drama since childhood. such as the big showdown speech given by the detective at the end of the story and the gang of helpful friends that Matthew was talking about before, all those recurring characters with their idiosyncratic enthusiasms offering their assistance. Such elements are beloved clichés of the genre.

20:23Matthew Sweet:But in their own work, did they set out to welcome such clichés or to subvert?

20:30Mark Gatiss:You're partly just embracing them all, aren't you? I think because it's an unexpected setting and an underexplored one, it's sort of playing with those wartime cliches and trying to do something a bit different. So, for instance, Killer Nacht, which is the third story in series two. I just thought I'd love to do a big country house, Agatha Christie style. But what if it's set in post-war Germany? I've never seen that. People are also tuning in because they love that world. But if you can do it and do something different, sometimes just a different lick of paint, I think, sort of shifts something in it.

21:16Antonia Quirke:Clichés that I'd like to avoid.

21:21Antonia Quirke:I hope they're not all in there. I don't think we can do everybody is responsible, like Murder on the Orient Express. I think that's out of play, that conclusion.

21:34Antonia Quirke:You know, most of them are quite useful. I wouldn't want to banish any of them. I just think if you keep using them, then that's a problem. And I think also if you want to use something that's a trope and is kind of there in a lot of things for a good reason, you have to, in a way, handle it with a little bit of irony. I did try to put in a script a lot earlier than it normally comes the scene where everybody is gathered together and what I really wanted to do was have that produce the wrong conclusion which then had to be unpicked but actually it felt really weird it just felt like it was ending too soon I thought I was being terribly clever and actually it just didn't work

22:25Matthew Sweet:As audiences, we're well used to watching the detectives see what we cannot as they solve the case, scanning the actor's face as they engage their magical sixth, seventh, eighth sense. But there is a line here that Mark and Matthew are very conscious of not crossing.

22:44Antonia Quirke:One of the things that I think we're always very careful about is that Book doesn't have superhuman knowledge. He isn't Doctor Who. He isn't even Sherlock Holmes, who will suddenly reveal that they have this conveniently useful expertise they've never mentioned before. He does his homework. He doesn't just know it all anyway. I think that's vital.

23:04Mark Gatiss:I mean, we did the same with Sherlock in the sense of de-supermanning him, but even more so with Book, that it's not interesting if he knows it all. What is helpful is that something rings a bell. This is a meat and potatoes job. The sergeant and I are perfectly capable. Who found him? Charwon. Hey, that dredge. Good you shook up, she is. Dredge? That rings a little bell. She'd been doing the hard cut for donkeys. Ding dong.

23:34Matthew Sweet:Book isn't a superman or a mind reader. But I have to say, he does have his moments. In one episode, he wordlessly intuits that someone has been to prison because they briefly reach for a spoon to eat their dinner. I'd say that that is Sherlock Holmes-ish. But how to fresh mint a red herring? Is that as improbable or unpleasant as it sounds?

24:00Mark Gatiss:Fundamentally, as a murder mystery, that's the sweat and blood of it, is like, how was it done? also why was it done motive I think is a very under examined thing and so therefore what in terms of red herrings what you're trying to do always is play fair I remember that happening in

24:19Antonia Quirke:in Sherlock actually I remember finding you a book of like cases from an old French police detective and it had this one about uh somebody being poisoned by poison put in the claws of a

24:33Mark Gatiss:It wasn't the method I used for the thing, but it was the inspiration for it. Yes, it was red herring in the whole thing. Also, sometimes people brilliantly see things which aren't there, and then you go, yes, that was meant to be. That was a distraction. It does happen, doesn't it?

24:52Antonia Quirke:I didn't intend that at all, but I'm glad you've seen it. Though it works on us too, I think. We have found ourselves looking at episodes and thinking, hang on, maybe they did do it. And we know there's nothing in the scene to indicate guilt. It's just something in an actor's performance.

25:09Mark Gatiss:One thing I was very taken by when we did the screenings last year of the first story, it's really good to sit with a group of other people. You do see it through different eyes. And that's why maybe sometimes people change their minds about who the killer is. You often read interviews with crime writers and they say, I changed my mind about the killer halfway through. And you'd sort of think, well, how could that be? But it's surprisingly easy, especially if you're giving people multiple motives. You can actually go, well, I think their motive's better. I'm going to shift it onto them.

25:44Matthew Sweet:Naturally, Bookish has its own literary spin-off written by Matthew.

25:50Antonia Quirke:A taxi was dropping off a fare nearby. Book hailed it, knowing that it would be impossible to prevent Mrs Dredge from joining their party. Rain was coming on and her house was an easy stop between Borough and Archangel Lane. In any case, he felt sorry for her.

26:13Antonia Quirke:You can hide things within the frame of an image. You know, you can hide a suspect at the back of a shot. It's much harder to do that on the page. And really, I've discovered that the answer to this is you have to produce a kind of tableau. You're hiding something. in a field of incidental detail. So that means that the book itself has to be always full of interest, but some of them are there just to hide the things that I don't want you to see. The cab moved on. Did you ever locate that autopsy report on her boy? asked Trotty. Accidental overdose, said Book. Though there was something else in it that was very interesting.

26:56Antonia Quirke:His fingers were splashed with ink.

27:03Matthew Sweet:The second book is released in the middle of August 2026, just as Series 2 of Bookish is broadcast, and work has already started on Series 3. Archangel Lane and all related conundrums are never far from their thoughts.

27:19Mark Gatiss:The problem of making a series out of anything... If you pick up an Agatha Christie for a holiday, Poirot is in Egypt on holiday. he solves a murder. If you start making it a series, what does Poirot do all day? Why is he always on holiday? Et cetera. And partly you have to accept there are more murders than there would be in real life. But you've also just got to think about the progression of it all. And we want a big ticket thing which will actually be exciting and interesting visually and thematically that sort of binds it all together.

27:59Matthew Sweet:Let's return to Matthew and Mark on the way to the studio in Belgium. You know that if the cab kept on driving, they could keep on talking all the way to the Netherlands and far beyond, a perpetual pearling stream back and forth, delighting in the world they've created. Bookish is a wistful place. There's yearning here, but it's impish, very clever, full of obscure scientific and historical facts about anything from movie-making to séances. At times, it's even sweetly joyful, leaving war behind when possible and daring to imagine what might come next. It's not the past that matters, says Inspector Poirot in Death on the Nile, but the future.

28:47Antonia Quirke:Those areas of specialist knowledge are interesting, aren't they? Because I think Book has to have quite a few of those. but I think in a way there's a list that has to be maintained that shouldn't get too long. The thing is that he's somebody who does his homework.

29:03Mark Gatiss:Yes, and I think that's also perfectly believable that it stops it from being this rather dreary super brain which isn't actually a very interesting place to be. We're at the studio, Mark. We are, we are pulling in. Say what you see. It's a Nepp Studios. It's an industrial estate in Belgium, halfway between Brussels and Antwerp.

29:28Matthew Sweet:You've been listening to Matthew Sweet and Mark Gatiss, the creators of Bookish, on the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service, with me, Antonia Quirk.