Mark Gatiss & Ian Hallard

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Mark Gatiss (born 17 October 1966) is an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. He is best known as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen alongside Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, and has both written for and acted in the TV series Doctor Who and Sherlock. He is openly gay and was featured on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential gay people in the UK in 2010 and 2011. Since 2008, he is in a civil partnership with actor Ian Hallard, and has a Labrador Retriever called Bunsen. He once built a Victorian laboratory in their West London home, as the fulfilment of another childhood dream.

Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, England, where he grew up opposite the Edwardian psychiatric hospital where both his parents worked. His childhood passions included watching Doctor Who and Hammer Horror films on television, reading Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Wells, and collecting fossils. All of these interests have fuelled his creative work as an adult.

He attended Heighington CE Primary School and Woodham Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe; at the latter, he was two years ahead of Paul Magrs, who would also go on to write Doctor Who fiction.

Following his childhood interest in Doctor Who, Gatiss's early writing was devoted to the series. His earliest published fiction was a sequence of novels in Virgin Publishing's New Adventures series of Doctor Who stories, beginning with Nightshade in 1992. In these works, Gatiss tried to correct the problems which had led to the show's decline in the late 1980s.


Mark Gatiss is an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. He is best known as member of The League of Gentlemen alongside Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson, and has both written for and acted in the TV series Doctor Who and Sherlock. He is openly gay and was featured on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential gay people in the UK in 2010 and 2011. Since 2008, he is in a civil partnership with actor Ian Hallard, and has a Labrador Retriever called Bunsen.







The first television scripts he wrote were for a BBV video series called P.R.O.B.E., four low budget, short Doctor Who spin-off films which were on video. Although the films featured the ex-Doctors Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker and Peter Davison, they have not been reissued on DVD. Gatiss said in a 2004 interview that he would not authorise their re-release as regarded them as having been a learning exercise.

His other early contributions to the Doctor Who franchise included four novels, two audio plays for BBV and two audio plays for Big Finish Productions.

Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Gatiss has written four episodes for the 2005-revived BBC television series Doctor Who. His first "The Unquiet Dead" was only the third episode of the revived series in 2005; the second, "The Idiot's Lantern", aired the following year in the second series. After a sabbatical from the third series (in which he acted rather than wrote for), and his submitted script for the fourth series, involving Nazis and the British Museum, remaining unmade, he eventually returned to the programme in 2010, writing "Victory of the Daleks" for the fifth series, and "Night Terrors" for the sixth.

Gatiss has written two episodes of Sherlock, a modern Sherlock Holmes series co-produced by himself and Steven Moffat. The unaired pilot was shot in January 2009 and a full series was commissioned, eventually airing a three-episode series in August 2010 (including Gatiss's episode The Great Game). A second series (featuring Gatiss's second contribution The Hounds of Baskerville) aired in January 2012.

Gatiss wrote and performed the comedy sketches The Web of Caves, The Kidnappers and The Pitch of Fear for the BBC's "Doctor Who Night" in 1999 with Little Britain's David Walliams, and played the Master in the Doctor Who Unbound play Sympathy for the Devil under the name "Sam Kisgart", a pseudonym he later used for a column in Doctor Who Magazine.

Gatiss wrote a biography of the film director James Whale. His first non-Doctor Who novel, The Vesuvius Club, was published in 2004, for which he was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer in the 2006 British Book Awards. A follow-up, The Devil in Amber, was released on 6 November 2006. It transports the main character, Lucifer Box, from the Edwardian era in the first book to the roaring Twenties/Thirties. A third and final Lucifer Box novel, Black Butterfly, was published on 3 November 2008 by Simon & Schuster.

Gatiss also wrote, co-produced and appeared in Crooked House, a ghost story that was broadcast on BBC Four during Christmas 2008.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Gatiss

Further Readings:

The Vesuvius Club: A Bit of Fluff by Mark Gatiss
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK (March 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743276000
ISBN-13: 978-0743276009
Amazon: The Vesuvius Club: Graphic Edition (Lucifer Box 1)
Amazon Kindle: The Vesuvius Club: Graphic Edition (Lucifer Box 1)

Mark Gatiss' cult creation, Lucifer Box, as you've never seen him before—in a new graphic-novel edition of his first adventure! On it's first publication, Mark Gatiss' The Vesuvius Club was critically acclaimed as an inspired cult creation. Now you are invited, more intimately, into the world of Lucifer Box, as his first adventure plays out in this graphic-novel edition. Here, Lucifer Box—the greatest portraitist of the Edwardian age and England's most dashing secret agent—investigates a series of bizarre disappearances and plunges headlong into low life and high society. Who is killing Britain's most prominent vulcanologists? What secrets lie beyond the grave? See him…Confront the purple undead. Instruct the mysterious and beguiling Bella Pok. Disguise himself with a false mustache. Face an ominous evil in the depths of a volcano. And come to grips with his new manservant, Charlie Jackpot. A fiendishly unputdownable treat for "the discerning mature reader."

More Spotlights at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Lists/Gay Novels