Great Lost Albums (With: David Quantick, Stav Sherez and Martyn Waites)
2014
About Mark Billingham
Mark Billingham is an English crime novelist, born in Solihull on 2 July 1961, best known for the Tom Thorne series about a London detective, which began with “Sleepyhead” in 2001. He has also written four standalone thrillers and the Declan Miller series, and he worked as an actor, television writer and stand-up comedian before turning to fiction.
Billingham grew up in Moseley, Birmingham, and graduated in drama from the University of Birmingham in 1983. He helped to form a touring theatre company, Bread & Circuses, then moved to London as a jobbing actor, with small parts in “Juliet Bravo”, “Boon” and “The Bill”. Around 1987 he moved into stand-up comedy and went on to headline at the Comedy Store. He played Gary, one of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s guards, in the children’s series “Maid Marian and Her Merry Men”, and with Peter Cocks he wrote and appeared in “Knight School”.
“Sleepyhead” reached the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list and introduced Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, to whom Billingham gave his own birthday, his London home and his love of country music. A robbery in 1997, in which Billingham and Cocks were tied up in a Manchester hotel room by masked men, fed into the second Thorne novel, “Scaredy Cat”. The series now runs to nineteen novels, the most recent being “What the Night Brings” (2025). Thorne also has minor roles in the standalone novels “In the Dark”, “Rush of Blood” and “Die of Shame”.
Sky One screened “Thorne” in 2010, with David Morrissey in the title role, adapting “Sleepyhead” and “Scaredy Cat”. The BBC series “In the Dark” (2017) was based on the novels “In the Dark” and “Time of Death”.
Billingham has twice won the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, for “Lazybones” and “Death Message”. He won the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library in 2022 and was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger, for a lifetime’s contribution to crime writing, in 2026.
In 2023 he began a new series with “The Last Dance”, featuring Detective Sergeant Declan Miller. “The Wrong Hands” followed in 2024 and the third Miller book, “The Shadow Step”, was published in July 2026. Billingham lives in London with his wife and two children, and plays in the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime novelists that also includes Val McDermid and Chris Brookmyre.
