'Bookish' Recap: Episode 1

Bookish airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the following episode. 
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At Book’s in London, you can find both secondhand books and a proprietor named Gabriel Book – as well as a dog named Dog. But Gabriel doesn’t just sell books: he also helps the police in investigations, even if the police themselves aren’t always too happy about his assistance. This little “hobby” of his means he needs some assistance himself – or so he tells a young man named Jack when he arrives at Book’s.

Jack has been sent by someone known to Gabriel, having recently left jail – not that he talks about it. He was expecting a factory job, not one at a bookshop, but he takes to the place quickly and is warmly welcomed by Gabriel and his wife, Trottie, even garnering a place to stay in the attic above their shops – Trottie sells wallpaper next door to Book's.

Gabriel also includes Jack as he and Trottie go to see why the police have been called to a nearby bomb site that has yet to be cleared from German air attacks during World War II. Baseheart, a former warden who still wears his helmet and has a searchlight mounted on his car, was clearing debris from the crater when he found a jumble of human bones. Being an amateur archaeologist, he wanted to investigate himself and so did not immediately report the discovery to the police.

The bones probably aren’t from victims of the bomb, as the street was scheduled for demolition and had already been cleared at the time of the raid. Furthermore, the bodies’ clothes wouldn’t have completely disintegrated in just two years. And there’s a coin on one body from 1665. Perhaps the bodies are from victims of the plague, disposed of in a mass burial.

The police’s Sergeant Morris resents Gabriel’s intrusion into investigations, but Gabriel has a special letter from Churchill as dispensation. He also did Inspector Bliss a favor during the war. Bliss is more amenable to Gabriel’s help, but even he is perplexed when Gabriel takes an interest in the apparent suicide of the chemist George Harkup, who was found dead in his rooms by his cleaning lady Mrs. Dredge. There was no note.

Gabriel has an encyclopedic memory that has engendered an idiosyncratic organizational system in his bookstore. He recalls from a decades-old newspaper article that Dredge once won an award, and knows exactly where to find the paper. When he invites Dredge over for tea, he is able to charm her with memories of her long-past triumph. She therefore opens up about her employer George, explaining that he and his daughter Merula became estranged after his wife died. George disapproved of Merula’s boyfriend Mickey Hall, a mechanic who also dealt in the black market. Dredge accuses Merula of wanting her father’s money.

Dredge cleaned George’s rooms once a week, she says, but had also visited the previous day to pick up bandages for her son, who was injured in the war. George was a habitual man, playing dominoes twice a week with various people, including Baseheart and the butcher Eric Wellbeloved.

Book doubts George’s death was a suicide, as he tells both Inspector Bliss and Trottie. George collected Chinese jade figures, and one is missing, replaced by a cheap chess piece, as evident from a dust spot. Dredge must be lying about how often she has cleaned recently. George also has a bump on the back of his head from a blow, but not from falling. And there’s blood on it, even though the strike didn’t break skin. Finally, why would a chemist with access to every kind of poison choose a particularly brutal one as a suicide agent?

After Merula identifies her father’s body, Inspector Bliss and Gabriel question her. She saw no reason that her father would die by suicide. Sure, he didn’t approve of Mickey, who has bad eyesight and so didn’t serve during the war, while George was a proud military man. And he thought Mickey, who sold cigarettes on the black market during the war, was stealing morphine. But that wouldn’t lead to suicide.

Merula is pregnant. She was hoping a grandchild could reconcile her father to her.

Back at Book’s, Jack is watching the shop – and researching the antique coin found amongst the skeletons at the bomb site, which Gabriel left with him, partly as a test to see if he would try to sell it. Jack is joined in the shop by the eager and morbid Nora, who works in her uncle’s Turkish restaurant across the street. She wants to write detective stories and is obsessed with murder. She prefers Book’s to the restaurant.

Nora is an orphan; her mother carried her outside to safety during a wartime air raid, then returned inside to save her father. The roof collapsed on them both. Jack is also an orphan, with only a photo of his father to tie him to his parents. Jack doesn’t want to share more of his story, however.

Gabriel and Trottie are also hiding things. They go out at night together, supposedly to the opera, leaving Jack with Dog – but they separate once they leave, with a mutual “Be careful.” And Gabriel has a meeting with a man in an eyepatch who wants him to do something “for old time’s sake,” even though Gabriel insists that he’s just a bookseller again. The man helped Gabriel find someone, and uses that favor to vaguely threaten Gabriel.

Gabriel and Trottie met while children in a hospital recovering from scarlet fever. Trottie saved a book Gabriel was reading from the incinerator after it was confiscated, and the pair made a pact to help each other out – and also read the book together.

George’s will has been found. Merula gets nothing, while Mrs. Dredge is a beneficiary.