Bookish Volume II, by Matthew Sweet

Harold Terence Sneed is found in his parlour in Borough, stabbed through the ribs. The irony is that he’d just conducted a seance; one of those present at that attempt to reach the spirit world is the cause of Sneed now passing on.

Maxie Kleinmann is an elderly tailor on Jermyn Street who claims to have killed the man found dead on his shop floor, with a single punch to the throat. And when Gabriel Book takes Jack Blunt to Germany to trace the death of a man very close to them both, there are soon more murders…

I’ve not yet seen the second series of Bookish, of which this is a novelisation, but the book is a delight. I noted of the first volume that it provides some clues to when Book’s adventures are set which we don’t glean from the TV episodes. Here, the three cases all take place in the autumn of 1946, the second story — Dead Man’s Whistle — between 23 October (p. 125) and 8 November (p. 201), and the last one, Killer Nacht, on and around 6 December. Indeed, the first case, Memento Mori, takes place soon after the end of the last series (in September), as there are newspaper headlines about it.

As before, the book is bookended by a brief glimpse of the future, two years on from last time, with a letter from Book in Los Angeles to Nora dated 13 February 1964 and her reply from the following day — meaning that, away from the fog and cold of London, he missed The Edge of Destruction go out.

There are a number of Doctor Who references in the book — Sneed is named after the undertaker in Gatiss’s first Doctor Who episode, and there’s an appearance by Luigi Rossini (Lew Russell) and his circus from Terror of the Autons, and a Chinese fowling piece.

In fact, the book is chock full of references — to books, to real crimes and odd bits of history such as the sad death of Eleanor Marx (the doctor who attended her, and lived just round the corner, was the dad of Ernest Shackleton). I should dearly love footnotes, and a reading list.

I’ve seen the series described as cosy crime, and can see it being just the thing for Sunday evenings in the Call the Midwife slot. There’s a steely edge to some of this stuff, and a pathos which Mark Gatiss has always been so good at. The last episode, in particular, ends with some real tension on the heartstrings — and leaves me baying to know more.

But I note that one of the regular characters is not mentioned in correspondence from 1964. Is that a clue about what’s to come?