
11/07/2025
Gay scriptwriter and novelist Mark Gatiss appears on the front of several listings magazines this week, including Totally TV, the TV Times and The Radio Times, as he promotes a new serial coming to the crime drama channel Alibi. Not only has Gatiss written this new and exciting crime drama, but he's starring in it too, playing Mr Book, who is appropriately enough, the proprietor of an independent and second hand bookstore in post war London (around 1949). Armed with a special letter of commendation by the wartime leader Winston Churchill, Mr Book solves crimes which are outfoxing the police. Life is far from simple domestically either. Mr Book is in a marriage of convenience with a lesbian friend, allowing him to benefit from heterosexual cachet during a period when gay men were living through what one LGBTQIA+ historian labelled "Britain's experiment with heterosexual dictatorship". Gay relationships were illegal and the gay movement very underground. Wikipedia reports that the makers of the programme have had a second series commissioned even prior to the first one being transmitted.