A novelisation! How retro.
Ain’t it? They’re some of the first books I read, in those distant days before streaming, before DVD, before VHS. Hull Central Library furnished me with dozens of the things. Big hardbacks and laminated paperbacks, based on TV shows that I loved and never really expected to see again, unless they were re-edited as Christmas treats or the cricket coverage was rained off. Doctor Who books, obviously. And Blake’s 7. But I also remember Dick Barton and the Great Tobacco Conspiracy, the novelisation of a short-lived ITV remake of a radio show old enough to have been received on the wireless in Archangel Lane. Dick Barton is an exact contemporary of Book. Perhaps we could do a crossover episode in which they have a torrid affair.
How do six Bookish TV episodes become one Bookish book?
I didn’t want to do a potato print of the screenplay. Nor did I want to change it so much that it would rob viewers of moments they have enjoyed on the screen and want to experience again in prose. I also wanted to create an imagined history for the book in your hands, to explain its existence.
So who is the imagined author?
Nora. It had to be her. Gabriel Book is too discreet to write up his own cases. But Nora is a student of crime and detective fiction. She loves all the gory details and she is a great fan of the Penguin crime novels in the green wrappers, which are available – second hand, of course – on the shelves of Book’s books. So I’m asking you to imagine that it’s the 1960s, and Nora is now a successful writer of thrillers - and the stories inside the book are early works based on the experiences she had with Book, Jack, Trottie and Inspector Bliss 20 years before. Perhaps after the credits of the final ever TV episode of Bookish we can cut to a bookshop – not Foyle’s, obviously – where Nora is signing a stack of novels that are all based on the cases we’ve spent years watching on the telly.
Two of the stories in the first series of Bookish overlap with your non-fiction.
It’s not a coincidence. Mark had read Shepperton Babylon, which is my account of the British film industry, and The West End Front, which is a history of London’s grand hotels during the Second World War, so when we were writing the first series he asked me to draw on these. So that explains the landscapes of Deadly Nitrate and Such Devoted Sisters. Both books were based on interviews with survivors of those worlds – grand hotel cocktail waiters, internees at Ascot racecourse, film stars old enough to have been in silents, all gone now. So if you know those books you’ll be able to see the real-life events I took as starting points for the stories. And lots of the little details, too – there really was a bar beneath the Ritz where one of the regulars brought his Max Factor in a gas mask box. They nicknamed it “The Pink Sink” but we couldn’t use in the show because it’s apparently the name of a real business. So it became “The Fruit Cellar”.
Is truth stranger than fiction?
If you draw on truth to make fiction, it adds authenticity but gives you other problems to chew over. For instance, the real-life Zog sisters who are the models for Rujihe, Nafije and Senije in Such Devoted Sisters were much more outlandish than the fictional characters who share their names. The real ones went around in white military uniforms and carried guns and looked like something out of a musical comedy. If we’d put them on screen as they were in life you’d be expecting them to go into a number.
What other characters were inspired by real people?
Nerina Shute in Deadly Nitrate is based on an extraordinary woman who I got to know late in her life. She was the studio gossip columnist of Film Weekly between 1928 and 1932, and she was one of the greatest film journalists that this country has ever produced. And the rudest. Nerina Shute. She spent her childhood in Hollywood in its very earliest days where her mother invested a lot of money in a gold mine that turned out not to contain any gold. So when Nerina was nineteen she came back to England and wrote a novel called Another Man’s Poison that delighted Rebecca West. “Miss Shute writes not so much badly as barbarously, as if she had never read anything but a magazine, never seen any picture but a moving one, never heard any music except in restaurants.” That comment became a character note in the script, and you’ll find those words in this book. When the Express gave Nerina a column, they called her “the girl with the barbarous touch”. Massive spoiler coming, so avert your eyes if necessary: Nerina Bean sneaks onto the set at Ladyhurst studios disguised as a postman. Nerina Shute once snook on to the set at Elstree disguised as a rabbi.
What next for Bookish on screen and on page?
As I write this, the second series is in production. We had our readthrough this week, with all the gang back together. Mark very wisely thought that we should linger in 1946 a little longer – we don’t want to rush forward in time too quickly – not when the Big Freeze of 1947 is on the horizon. So expect three new cases to solve, big new developments for Trottie and the quest to uncover the mystery of what happened to Felix – the man whose life means so much to both Jack and Book. As for the page, that obviously depends on Nora.
