Maid Marian and her Merry Men Series 3 (Tony Robinson, Mark Billingham and David Lloyd on 'creative writing'). He attended the King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys in nearby King's Heath, and lived in that general area "right the way through university" while attending the nearby University of Birmingham. 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. Billingham's detective character Inspector Tom Thorne first appeared in his 2001 debut novel Sleepyhead. 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 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. citation needed] The two were bound and gagged in their hotel room by a trio of masked men who robbed them.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? 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. She has survived a stroke, deliberately induced by a skilful manipulation of pressure points on the head and neck. 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". 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.

Sky1's Thorne adaptation started broadcasting in October 2010, with actor David Morrissey starring as Tom Thorne. 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 . He also cites the big ending, and "pullback and reveal", whereby the audience or reader is led along a specific path and lulled into thinking that they can guess the twist, before "boom! The trio announced in 2018 that they were working on a stage production of Maid Marian and her Merry Men.I. Tom Thorne discovers the horrifying truth; it isn’t Alison who is the mistake, it’s the three women already dead. In 2001, Billingham's first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in the UK by Little, Brown and Company. 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. 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.

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. As his interests moved towards crime fiction, he set an early novel (the unpublished The Mechanic) in his native Birmingham.The final three episodes were an adaptation of Scaredy Cat, and guest-starred Canadian actress Sandra Oh. In the mid-1980s he moved to London as a "jobbing actor", taking minor roles in episodes of TV shows Dempsey and Makepeace, Juliet Bravo, Boon, and The Bill. It's not a cliché – It's part and parcel of the genre – cowboys have six-guns, horses and stetsons and detectives have [a] past. The first three episodes were an adaptation of Sleepyhead and were directed by Stephen Hopkins ( 24, Californication, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers).