Mark Billingham

Mark Philip David Billingham (born 2 July 1961) is an English novelist whose series of "Tom Thorne" crime novels are best-sellers in that particular genre. He is also a television screenwriter and has become a familiar face as an actor and comic.

Early years

Mark Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire and grew up in Moseley, Birmingham. He attended the King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys grammar school in nearby King's Heath, and lived in that general area "right the way through university". After graduating with a degree in drama, he stayed in Birmingham and helped form a socialist theatre company (Bread & Circuses). Bread & Circuses toured with a number of shows in schools, colleges, arts centres and the street. In the mid-1980s he moved from Birmingham to London as a "jobbing actor", taking minor roles in episodes of TV shows Dempsey and Makepeace, Juliet Bravo, Boon, and The Bill. After finding himself 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 became somewhat disenchanted with acting, perceiving that the emphasis was not on talent, but on looks.