Comedy, suspense and the grotesque

The three stories contained in Matthew Sweet’s Bookish (Quercus, £20; Tablet price £18) are all beautifully crafted murder mysteries. I have not yet seen the TV series (scripted by Mark Gatiss) on which they are based, but they are much more than the “book of the series”. This is proper writing, and the detective, a bookseller called Book, with a dog called Dog, will, I hope, appear in volume after volume. The setting is post-war London. A man called Jack is released from prison, and offered a job in a second-hand bookshop. At first you think that this is simply because the Books, the tweedy bibliophile and his powerful wife, Trottie, who runs the wallpaper shop next door, are lefty idealists, but as the stories unfold, and we discover more about the Books, and about Jack, you realise there is a deeply romantic motivation for the job offer.

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