Sky1's Thorne adaptation started broadcasting in October 2010, with actor David Morrissey starring as Tom Thorne. Billingham’s flawless plotting and the steadily increasing sense of fear combine to make this one of the best debut novels of the year.

Thorne must find a man whose agenda is terrifyingly unique, and Alison, the one person who holds the key to the killer’s identity, is unable to tell anybody. The trio announced in 2018 that they were working on a stage production of Maid Marian and her Merry Men. It entered the Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller list and became the biggest selling debut novel of that Summer. The biggest problem for me is the convenient reveal and connection to Thornes' problem from years ago.A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night. As his interests moved towards crime fiction, he set an early novel (the unpublished The Mechanic) in his native Birmingham. In 2001, Billingham's first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in the UK by Little, Brown and Company. He and David Lloyd wrote and acted 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? For the killer is smart, and he’s getting his kicks out of toying with Thorne as much as he is pursuing his sick fantasy .

I almost died': Crime Novelist Mark Billingham talks to Ali Karim of Shots: The Crime and Mystery Magazine Archived 30 January 2008 at the Wayback Machine. 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. The final three episodes were an adaptation of Scaredy Cat, and guest-starred Canadian actress Sandra Oh. 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). What's That Noise (which he wrote and presented) won the 1995 Royal Television Society award for "Best Entertainment Programme", [9] while Knight School was nominated for the RTS's "Best Children's Drama" award two years running.Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city - New York or Paris or Sydney - but he felt instinctively that London was . Starting with a local newspaper, he progressed to providing reviews and interviews for SHOTS, and then to magazines, including Time Out, where he interviewed Michael Connelly and others. Around 1987 he decided to pursue a career in comedy, stating:"[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. Ultimately he abandoned the unfinished novel and the comic-crime genre to focus on another book that would become Sleepyhead.