Mark Billingham

Mark Philip David Billingham (born 2 July 1961) is an English actor, comedian, novelist and television screenwriter. He is known for the "Tom Thorne" crime novel series.

Early life Billingham was born on 2 July 1961 in Solihull, West Midlands and grew up in Moseley, Birmingham. He attended King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys in nearby King's Heath, and lived in that general area in his youth, until attending the nearby University of Birmingham, where he graduated from the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts in 1983.

Comedy and acting After graduating with a degree in drama from the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, he helped form a socialist theatre company, Bread & Circuses, in Birmingham. Bread & Circuses toured with shows in schools, colleges, arts centres and the street. After 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 claimed that he had become disenchanted with acting and that the emphasis was not on talent, but on looks.

Maid Marian and Her Merry Men

In Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, Billingham played Gary, a dim-but-lovable guard in the employ of the Sheriff of Nottingham (Tony Robinson), as part of a double-act with Graeme (David Lloyd).

After three award-winning series, Billingham and Lloyd helped creator-writer Robinson with plot and script ideas and gained co-writer credits on the first episode of series 4, "Tunnel Vision".

Robinson, Lloyd and Billingham remain friends, and Robinson is partially credited for Billingham's literary career on the DVD release of Maid Marian (Series 3), in which the three discuss writing for the series and in general. The trio announced in 2018 that they were working on a stage production of Maid Marian and Her Merry Men.

Writing From an early age, Billingham wrote often "funny" stories for popularity and enjoyment. As his interests moved towards crime fiction, he set an early novel (the unpublished The Mechanic) in his native Birmingham. Inspired by the comic-crime work of Carl Hiaasen and other authors, he attempted to use his experience as a stand-up comedian and crime fan to write a similarly comic novel. Between 1997 and 1998, he and friend Peter Cocks wrote and co-starred in Granada TV's Knight School, for which they also produced a novelisation. He claims to be less interested in scriptwriting than novel writing. and then to magazines, including Time Out, where he interviewed Michael Connelly and others. against Reginald Hill, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Lee Child.

Tom Thorne Billingham's detective character Inspector Tom Thorne first appeared in his 2001 debut novel Sleepyhead. The character has since appeared in the majority of his works, except In the Dark, Rush of Blood, and Die of Shame (May 2016), in which Thorne has minor roles. Billingham claims to have imbued Thorne with many of his own characteristics, such as a birthday, a locale (London), and a "love of country music both alt and cheesy".

In talking about the creation and development of Thorne, Billingham details his difficulty in trying to create a character different from those in other, 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 past... problems [and] flaws, because if they don't, then there is nothing to read about. 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.

Billingham offers the first chapter of each Tom Thorne book on his website.

In 1997, Billingham and his writing partner Peter Cocks were kidnapped and held hostage in a Manchester hotel room. The two were bound and gagged in their hotel room by three masked men who robbed them. Billingham recalls being terrified by the audacity of the criminals, and later used the event as inspiration for his second Thorne novel, Scaredy Cat.

The general theme of Scaredy Cat is really the power of fear, and that fear is a very powerful weapon, and if you are prepared to instil it, you have a very powerful weapon that is every bit as dangerous as a gun or a knife. Also what happened to me in that hotel room fed directly into a sub-plot in Scaredy Cat with some very nasty crimes carried out in hotel rooms.

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

Billingham hosts UKTV's crime podcast A Stab in the Dark. 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.

Awards and nominations

Television What's That Noise (which he wrote and presented) won the 1995 Royal Television Society award for "Best Entertainment Programme", Lifeless (2005) was nominated for BCA "Crime Thriller of the Year" Award in 2006.

Billingham's novel Lazybones won the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2004 and he won the same award in 2009 for his novel Death Message. In 2011, Billingham was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame.

Billingham was shortlisted for the 2015 Dagger in the Library UK Crime Writers' Association award for an author's body of work in British libraries. He was shortlisted again in 2019 and won the award in 2022.

In 2021, at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, he was awarded the Theakston's Old Peculier Award for Outstanding Contribution to the genre; an award previously presented to Colin Dexter, PD James, Val McDermid, Lee Child and Michael Connelly among others.

In 2026, Billingham was awarded the Diamond Dagger by the Crime Writers Association. This is the most prestigious award the CWA can give and is awarded for a lifetime's contribution to crime fiction.

Personal life Billingham lives in North London with his wife Claire and their two children. He supports Wolverhampton Wanderers.