Mark Gatiss: The man with the golden pun

Ugg boots and woolly jumpers are the order of the day on a BBC4 location shoot in autumn, but no one told me. Better dressed for Soho than a muddy field in Surrey, I am squelching my way towards a huddle of trucks and catering caravans. The production assistant looks in concern down at my spattered red shoes. In the distance, waving vigorously, is a a figure wound around with a long stripey scarf. This week Mark Gatiss is not so much the author of the Lucifer Box thrillers as the executive producer of Crooked House, a three-part ghostly drama for Christmas, and he's under pressure.

Gatiss bounds over, scarf flying, almost unrecognisable with a stubbly ginger beard. and leads me through a gap in the yew hedge, through a brick Tudor courtyard and round to the front entrance of an ancient, half-timbered manor house. On a stone seat by the gnarled oak door sits a skeleton. "Star of the show," he quips. Crooked House , written by Gatiss, stars Julian Rhind-Tutt, Daniela Denby-Ashe and Jean Marsh, with Gatiss as the character who links the three stories.

The League of Gentleman star is not in actor mode today, though. We settle down at a picnic table on the grass, with lukewarm styrofoam cups of tea. Filming is taking place in one of the rooms on the first floor, and an assistant is shushing everyone who walks across the gravel. Birds tweet. The silence is centuries deep. Then suddenly a great big jet roars over, deafening us.

What do you do when that happens? I ask. "Just wait and do the take again," he shrugs. I was expecting a brilliant technical fix, but he shakes his head. "This side of the house is very bad. Weirdly, the other side is a lot better. This is the flight path to Heathrow. It's a shame because this house is used a lot and it's a big problem." He plugs in one of the earpieces dangling round his neck: "I'll just see what they're doing. Hmm... silence!"

I'm here to discuss Black Butterfly, the latest and quite possibly the last Lucifer Box novel. The first of these brilliant pastiches, The Vesuvius Club, saw society portrait painter and secret agent Box cut a swathe through Edwardian London in Buchaneering style. The Devil in Amber saw Box tackle Olympus Mons, a sinister British fascist party leader in the run up to the war, parodying Dennis Wheatley along the way. Now it's post war, and Gatiss has caught up to early Ian Fleming with a dash of Graham Greene – but good God, how old does that make Box?

"He's somewhere between 25 and 35 in the first book. He could just about be... 78. I've never done precise dates." It has to be said that bisexual Box still has very good legs and undiminished pulling power, as he battles the fiendish A.C.R.O.N.I.M. – the Anarcho-Criminial Retinue Of Nihilists, Incendiarists and Murderers – and romps his way to Istanbul on the trail of a villain with the alluring name of Kingdom Kum.

Taking Box into the era of James Bond and Graham Greene is, he says, "like getting a different set of clothes to play with. It's a different style; a starker style. The world is very different: it's austerity Britain. Exactly the appeal of the Bond books is that in austerity Britain you got snapshots of Istanbul and Jamaica, all those fabulous places you couldn't go to yourself. I had great fun re-reading all the Bond books for the first time since I was a teenager."

He didn't just travel in his imagination, either. "I was in Istanbul two years ago when I was filming in Romania. We went for a long weekend. It was the most wonderful place. Part of that definitely was that we were in Romania, and going to Istanbul was like bathing in sunlight; it was so exciting and colourful – everything Romania wasn't. Then I was filming in Morocco earlier in the year, when I was just doing the last touches of the novel. There were lots of souks, so I used to go every morning before we started filming and just sit in the souk with a black coffee and write down lots of details."

Jamaica, another exotic destination inextricably associated with Fleming and Bond, didn't fare so well. "I've been to Jamaica, which is a horrible place: grim, homophobic. I found the island... just everything you worry about in terms of druggy and threatening. Talking to people who've lived there for 20 years and their best friend's just been shot. It's getting really bad and piratical again. But it was good for atmosphere."

It turns out we have both been to Firefly – "strange place" – Noel Coward's beautiful mountaintop home. We have even stayed in the same hotel, Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, though Gatiss wasn't as blissed out as I was by the idyllic setting. "It's a funny place, a sort of Fifties relic. There's no TV!" he says with horror. "You're completely cut off. You just lie and soak it up. Then after about five minutes you think, Jesus, there's no TV!"

In Black Butterfly he uses what we'll delicately call the N-word. Only once; and the point is made. "That's pure Fleming," he says quickly. Live and Let Die – oh my God, you have to take a deep breath to read it. Even at his most enlightened... Felix Lighter says things like 'One day these blacks are going to take over the world. They're that good!' It's a sort of warning shot, you know? But there's lots of stuff like that, that I think you have to embrace. Just as with The Devil in Amber: there's lots of casual racism and casual anti-semitism in the 1930s and you can't ignore it – it's part of the fabric. I felt I'd been very clever because in Dr No there are half-Chinese, half-Jamaicans called Chegroes. When I came up with the character of Kingdom Kum, I thought maybe he could be half-Japanese, half-Jamaican – a Japanegro. I thought, that's a Flemingism! Then I found out that is actually a term." He turns round. "Is everything all right? Have you got the tongue?" he asks one of the crew who is lingering by the table.

"It's on its way. Simon found a parade of butchers," is the enigmatic reply. We go in to the house to see what's going on. "Notice how it's even colder in here than it is outside," Gatiss remarks.

In the great hall, hung with hunting trophies and creepy family portraits, I am introduced to Ian, Gatiss's partner of nine years, who is an extraordinary sight: not just because he is very good-looking but also because he is wearing full Tudor gear of slashed doublet and bright scarlet hose. A ghostly bride is being made up at the refectory table, and the sound man is watching a scene being filmed upstairs on his monitor. "There's a wasp in the room!" he says testily.

As the same scene plays out over and over again ("Felix! Felix? Aaaargh!"), I ask Gatiss if it's the end for his geriatric crime-solver. I do hope not.

"No, this is it," he grins, then relents. "We might go back in time. There are lots of good gaps: there's obviously a much younger Box, in the 1890s; there's a First World War slot, there's a Second World War slot. There's all kinds of good things, really. But it won't be for a while, no." Then there's an anguished cry of "Where's Mark?" and he bounds up the creaking oak staircase and disappears.