BBC legend's new detective series branded 'best yet' as it gets 5 stars from critics

Actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss, is best known for being behind the award-winning BBC series Sherlock, and he clearly cannot get enough of detective fiction, with series two of Bookish now streaming.

At a screening for the opening episode, which stars Mark as bookshop owner Gabriel Book and Line of Duty actress Polly Walker as his wife Trottie Book, a producer claimed critics have already given the series "five stars".

This series is set in post-war London, with Gabriel-better known as Book-running a second-hand book shop in Archangel Lane by day and solving the strangest local crimes by night. While Book is happily married to his childhood best friend, he's a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was illegal. In this series, the husband and wife duo take in a young man named Jack (Connor Finch) to give the jailbird a second chance.

Jack proves to be a worthy assistant to Book, helping with murder investigations and running the book shop. However, it soon becomes clear that the character has a complex past, and his appointment was not as it first appeared.

Mark told Express.co.uk at a preview event for the series: "I always wanted to be a detective, I love the genre and I put together a wish list of what I'd like to do - and the setting is very particular.

"Post-war London is an extraordinary time. It's the most radical government we've ever had. The world is totally smashed up, full of drifters and people not able to be themselves.

"People have been massively liberated by the war, particularly women, and I also wanted them to be a gay man in a marriage. So it was a strange shopping list of things to put together."

Polly added of her character, Trottie: "I think she's a very independent woman. I think it's a loving marriage, but it's obviously not a conventional one. She has her own sort of variances, and everybody's okay with that."

The stars could not give away too many details about the new series, but they teased the best episode yet airs later on in the series.

In a four-star review for i, Gerald Gilbert said: "Sherlock fans may have been disappointed by Gatiss's recent statement that he had no interest in revisiting the much-loved BBC series, but here at least is the next best thing."

Bookish is now airing on U&Alibi.