Mark Billingham

Mark Billingham was born in Solihull, West Midlands and grew up in Moseley, Birmingham. He attended the King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys grammar school in nearby King's Heath, and lived in that general area "right the way through university".[2][3]

After graduating with a degree in drama, he stayed in Birmingham and helped form a socialist theatre company (Bread & Circuses). Bread & Circuses toured with a number of shows in schools, colleges, arts centres and the street.[3] In the mid-1980s he moved from Birmingham to London as a "jobbing actor", taking minor roles in episodes of TV shows Dempsey and Makepeace, Juliet Bravo, Boon, and The Bill.[2][4] After finding himself playing a variety of "bad guy roles such as a soccer hooligan, drug addict, a nasty copper, a racist copper or a bent copper", he became somewhat disenchanted with acting, perceiving that the emphasis was not on talent, but on looks.[3]

Around 1987 he decided to pursue a career in comedy, in part because:

"[The] one great advantage of stand-up comedy [is that] nobody gives a stuff about what you look like – as long as you're funny, and if you can do it, and people laugh, then you'll get bookings."[3]

At the time, breaking into stand-up was not as difficult as it would later become, nor was there the modern infrastructure and chain businesses. Billingham cites his own route as a simple progression from 5-minute, unpaid "try-out" spots to (if one was deemed worthy) 10-, 20- and 30-minute paid slots.[3] As he stated, "within a year, you could be playing the Comedy Store".[3] Indeed, Billingham has headlined at the Comedy Store on many occasions, where he also appears regularly as a Master of Ceremonies.[3]

Despite feeling rather ambivalent towards "serious" roles, Billingham still found considerable success by merging his careers as actor and comic to work in comedy shows. He was the human face on the puppet-representation-of-celebrities series Spitting Image, and "the taller half" of top double act the "Tracy Brothers" with Mike Mole from Bread & Circuses days (now guitarist with British comedy punk band Punks Not Dad), appearing regularly on the radio version of The Mary Whitehouse Experience. In 1988, he was seen in the children's comedy series News at Twelve, in which the central character "broadcasts his own (imaginary) TV news bulletin every evening".[5]

Maid Marian and her Merry Men saw Billingham cast as Gary, a dim-but-lovable guard in the employ of the Sheriff of Nottingham, charged with keeping the peace (or causing the violence) in the village of Worksop, and hunting down Maid Marian (Kate Lonergan) and her band of "freedom fighters". As part of a double-act with Graeme (David Lloyd), Billingham was ostensibly one of the "baddies", but was nonetheless deeply sympathetic and well-liked.

After three successful award-winning series, both Billingham and Lloyd were helping creator-writer Robinson with plot and script ideas, both gaining co-writer credits on the first episode of series 4 – "Tunnel Vision". The episode produced spoofs of a number of cultural icons, including passing references to Sonic the Hedgehog and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as a Richard O'Brien stand-in named "Robin O'Hood" who in the episode leads Gary and Graeme through the Merry Men's version of The Crystal Maze.

Tony Robinson, David Lloyd and Mark Billingham (in particular) remain friends, after having worked so closely together for four-to-five years, and Robinson can be seen taking partial credit for Billingham's literary career on the DVD release of Maid Marian (Series 3), in which the three discuss writing, both for the series and in general.[6] The three announced in 2018 that they were working on a stage production of Maid Marian and her Merry Men.[7][8]

As he has stated in a number of interviews, Billingham treats comedy – and his stand-up in particular – and writing as parts of a whole, seeing the two as complementary, using as they do:

"..the same 'Tricks'... [in particular] a strong opening. When you do stand-up, you walk out on stage and you have a minute – 60 seconds to hook them or they'll start booing. A late show at the Comedy Store is not easy, ditto with a book. As a writer you again have the duty to deliver – a reader has not got time to say, I'll give him 50 pages as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better."[3]

He also cites the big ending, and "pullback and reveal", whereby the audience (readership) is led along a specific path and lulled into thinking that they can guess the twist, before: "boom! it hits them from over there." In comedy, he says, it is a punchline; in crime "something a whole lot darker... [but] essentially it's a similar kind of [misdirection] technique."[3]

It is no surprise then that Billingham turned his hand to writing comedy scripts for television, as well as continuing to act and appear in front of the camera at various points. He joined with David Lloyd to write episodes and act in the children's TV series Harry's Mad (based on the book by Dick King-Smith), and wrote and presented two series of BBC's What's That Noise?.[9] Between 1997 and 1998, he (and friend Peter Cocks) wrote and co-starred in Granada TV's Knight School, for which the two also produced a novelisation.

He is, however, clearly less enamoured by scriptwriting than by novel-writing, noting that:

"I can write a six part TV series and put my heart and soul into crafting it, and when it's done, it's jumped upon by a dozen people and torn to pieces and rewritten and messed about. Of those dozen people, perhaps two are qualified to do that."[3]

In 2002, he was "in the middle of writing a screenplay for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and about to write a screenplay for a cult children's show," an original sci-fi drama for the BBC, but his prime consideration turned to writing novels.[3][9]

In 2001, Billingham's first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in the UK by Little, Brown and Company. He is a self-confessed fan of crime fiction, "as well as a really serious collector"[3] and has alleged that the expense of collecting books inspired him to get into interviewing and reviewing books, partly for the complimentary copies. Starting with a local newspaper, he progressed to providing reviews and interviews for SHOTS, and then to magazines, including Time Out, where he found himself interviewing people such as Michael Connelly, talking and learning from other writers.[3]

Billingham became the first crime writer to win the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award twice when his novel Death Message won in 2009,[10] against strong opposition including Reginald Hill, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Lee Child.

Billingham created Detective Inspector Tom Thorne for his 2001 debut novel Sleepyhead, where a case of "Locked-In syndrome" reveals the dark depths of a twisted mind, as adept at toying with the DI as with the victims.[11] This central character has since featured in the vast majority of his works, except In the Dark, released in August 2008, Rush of Blood, released in August 2012, and Die of Shame (May 2016), in which Thorne has only very minor roles. The author writes that, "if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves" and, as such, has imbued Thorne with a lot of his personal characteristics. The two share a birthday, a locale (London) and musical interests (a "love of country music both alt and cheesy" – although Billingham implies that it is Thorne's fictional musical tastes that have grown on the author).[3][12]

In talking about the creation and development of his central character, Billingham notes the difficulty and worry involved in trying to create a personality different from those in other existing, familiar and popular works:

[You] worry that you will be entering that world of the strange cliche-ed cop, but you soon realise that you have to get comfortable in that world. You think "Hang on, some of the clichés are part of that territory". It would like writing a Western and going "Oh no I've given him a horse! What a terrible cliché!" It's not a cliché – It's part and parcel of the genre – cowboys have six-guns, horses and stetsons and detectives have [a] past... problems [and] flaws, because if they don't, then there is nothing to read about.[3]

Billingham's own website says that the underlying determination of Tom Thorne's character was that he would evolve as the series progressed, and remain unpredictable. While noting that many authors compile "thick dossiers" and "complex biographies" about their characters, noting every quirk and minor detail, Billingham shies away from such minutiae, calling it "limiting"—preferring instead to discover something anew about his own hero with each book, and to pass that novelty on to the reader:

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on, because the reader certainly will.[13]

Thorne's internal continuity is important to his author—it is important that the events in his past affect who is in the present, although this very aspect of his character causes Billingham great difficulty in describing him without giving away plot twists. Suffice to say that "[h]e works on the Metropolitan Police Murder Squad [and at] the time of the first book, he is forty-one years old".[14] Thorne's surname comes from fellow Comedy Store stand-up Paul Thorne, and the (sur)names of other comics and comedians are liberally peppered throughout the series.[15]

Sleepyhead was released in August 2001, and made it onto the Sunday Times "Top Ten Bestseller" list, becoming "the biggest selling debut novel of that Summer".[11] In December 2009 it was listed as one of the 100 novels that shaped the decade and was chosen as one of the titles for World Book Night in 2011.

Sky1's Thorne adaptation started broadcasting in October 2010, with acclaimed actor David Morrissey starring as Tom Thorne. The first three episodes were an adaptation of Sleepyhead and were directed by Stephen Hopkins (24, Californication, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers). The final three episodes were an adaptation of Scaredy Cat, and guest-starred Canadian actress Sandra Oh (of Grey's Anatomy).

His standalone novel In The Dark was adapted as a miniseries of the same name by the BBC in 2017. An adaptation of another standalone novel, Rush of Blood, is currently being developed for US television.[24]

In-between writing, acting and stand-up, Billingham finds time to support Wolverhampton Wanderers, although his protagonist Thorne supports Tottenham Hotspur.[14]

Billingham has recently collaborated on a musical project called The Other Half with My Darling Clementine, reading an original story alongside a soundtrack by the Americana band.

In September 2015 Billingham and co-host Michael Carlson released the six-part podcast The Crime Vault Live,[29] with the last episode released in January 2016.

Billingham currently hosts UKTV's crime podcast A Stab in the Dark.[30] Each episode includes a discussion on a particular theme from crime fiction and crime drama, and has featured guests including David Morrissey, Val McDermid, Michael Connelly and Ann Cleeves.

Mark lives in North London with his wife Claire and their two children.

• Knight School (with Peter Cocks) (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), ISBN 0-340-74338-7

• Official website
• Official US website
• Mark Billingham at Little, Brown & Company
• The Other Half Show website
• Mark Billingham's top ten detectives, at The Guardian
• Mark Billingham's profile at The Comedy Store
• Interview with Mark Billingham in Shots Ezine August 2012
• Mark Billingham at IMDb
• The story behind The Bones Beneath - Online Essay by Mark Billingham, at Upcoming4.me