Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #111 – Tempest by Christopher Bulis

The New Adventures
#9
Tempest
By Christopher Bulis

Few writers are quite as ubiquitous in Doctor Who fiction as Christopher Bulis, who by this point had written for all but two of the Doctors for Virgin Publishing. (One of the “not”s was Paul McGann and that was probably just because Virgin lost the license. Bulis later rectified this at BBC Books.) It is fitting, then, or at least unsurprising that he should have a crack at the Bernice Summerfield range as well.

Tempest is a murder mystery on a train. So far, blah: it’s fair to say we’ve been there and done that in pop culture. Hell, this range of books has already plundered Agatha Christie for Ship Of Fools. Sometimes though, it’s how you do it, and Tempest… is also not the great brain-teaser of the century as far as murder mysteries go. Bugger. (Let’s just say it employs the old gambit of leaving an obvious suspect completely unremarked upon for some reason. I cheered smugly when I was right.)

There are other marks against it. Bulis has somewhat of a tin ear for names in this, with the action centring around a priceless statue called the Drell Imnulate (just reading it on the page makes my tongue twist), characters such as Lankril, Tralbet the Narg and briefly two completely unrelated people called Lin and Lyn.

Worse though, on a general level, is Bernice. She just doesn’t seem as witty as usual. I can’t help rating these books on how well they’ve captured her voice — it’s one of the only constants of the range — and with inner monologues as, ah, pithy as “The more I learn the more I realise I don’t have to look outside my own species to find behavioural quirks quite as strange as those of any alien society,” I’m unlikely to exceed 3 Paul Cornells out of a possible 5, am I?

And yet: after a while I realised I was haring through this at a good speed. Though I held a pretty firm suspicion throughout over whodunit, I was enjoying the process of uncovering it and how it was dun. Last — and best — of all? It’s bloody Bernice, who is good in this, actually, Mr Judgy Where-Are-My-Quips.

First off, we see Bernice in her element delivering a lecture to laughter and applause. Showing, not telling! Hooray! She’s a guest speaker in need of funds. (“It will be a novel sensation to be solvent for a while.” Wouldn’t you know it, the cushy status quo from Mean Streets hasn’t held up.) As far as she knows she hasn’t been tasked with finding an ancient artefact or even solving a mystery for once, she’s just here to do her job and the plot happens to her while she’s on the way home. I’ve moaned before about the level of contrivance needed to get her into plots sans TARDIS, and it’s nice to make it feel natural once in a while. (Of course it turns out her involvement is not a coincidence, but that reveal didn’t bother me. She manages to avoid being further ensnared, and hence keep her agency, just by getting drunk at the right time. So that’s a character foible becoming critical to the plot. Nice!)

Her (arguable) lack of spark could be attributed to the fact that she’s knackered, and quite simply not interested in cleaning up a mess she didn’t cause. Whatever the reason in-continuity (and outside continuity apparently Bulis wanted to write a very all-ages-accessible Bernice, which in practical terms meant fewer rude jokes, so that’s that mystery solved), the result is a more weathered but I think, not unbelievable Bernice Summerfield. She’s done this sort of thing before, literally: “If you’re volunteering to take charge, be my guest. I’ve played detective before and believe me it’s harder than it looks.” (I think that’s above being called lampshading: if you’re stuck with repetition in a series, say so, as long as you can build on it.) Whether she likes it or not, she fits the role of investigator and hero, and the other characters seem to insist on it.

And why shouldn’t they? I’m probably projecting here – from the book’s general reputation it’s clear I’m quite generous about it too – but I like to think that’s just something characters pick up when they spend enough time with the Doctor. Bernice just seems like the one who’ll sort it out. She fits the mould of responsibility, particularly in a Doctor-ish moment where she consoles the survivors of a fight that, unlike the raiders who just attacked, their own lost lives were given for something that actually mattered. But she’s still not, and can’t be, the Doctor, hence joining in when a gun battle ensues and helping to engineer a fatal crash for some attackers. When we finally get to the accusing parlour scene, it doesn’t feel like a re-run of Ship Of Fools — firstly because this book isn’t so thoroughly arch about it, but mainly because she’s invested in this one, as mucked in as anyone else on this very unfortunate train.

Which is, by the way, another good thing about Tempest. The setting is both claustrophobic, rarely straying beyond the high speed train (which lets us focus on the plot and the characters), and interestingly sci-fi-ish, with the thoroughly inhospitable and weird planet frequently visible (and a frequent hindrance) just beyond the windows. The planet was the original impetus for the book, but I think it’s a smart move to keep it as an incredible thing we only get glimpses of. (You could come back to it and do more with it if you were so inclined, but I’m guessing they didn’t as Bulis didn’t return.) It’s a good way to keep the ho-hum setup from seeming too ho-hum while maintaining the essential “yeah but then what happens” of a murder mystery. That said, don’t panic, there’s plenty of action as well.

The mystery, which I’ve banged on about as being too simple, is at least more complicated in execution, with various red herrings and deliberate nefarious fake-outs. That process is fun, and the character relationships are fleshed out quite interestingly through the investigation. It all serves to get Bernice good and stuck into things, and make it feel as though these things can just happen to her, just as she can sort them out, quite naturally. Tempest isn’t especially bold or showy, but after multiple books where she felt like an afterthought in her own series, I can’t not appreciate that.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #110 – Mean Streets by Terrance Dicks

The New Adventures
#8
Mean Streets
By Terrance Dicks

Well, I wanted Bernice to get up to something different for a change, and here we are. There is no archeological dig in Mean Streets. After wittily griping about it in Ghost Devices, Bernice is now actually committing to her work on Dellah: she’s reasonably important and living on book royalties, in no mood for adventures, thank you very much. It takes a visit from Chris Cwej – which unwittingly triggers a Hitchocockian murder plot – to coax her into visiting an old haunt to solve a mystery. No trowel required.

Honestly, I’m not sure if this is a legit character choice for her eight books in or if Terrance just didn’t look at what she had already been doing (pretty consistently) up to now, vis-à-vis quite happily going on adventures, thank you very much. Like how Chris turns up entirely motivated by the death of Roz and determined to honour his friend. Okay, but why now? Has he been trapped in amber since So Vile A Sin? (We know he hasn’t: he’s been in five New Adventures since then.)

The reason for the (arguable) reset is probably the subject matter. You’ll have noticed a theme in some of Terry’s NAs, with the Al Capone era being visited in Blood Harvest and the futuristic crime haven of Megacity appearing in Shakedown. He loves noir and he’s not afraid to sprinkle some cheese on it. Well, it makes sense to dust off Megacity if he wants another go. The prologue is set during Shakedown and Mean Streets is a sequel to that book’s B-plot (which we’re only hearing about now). It’s a tenuous setup, and a fair amount of contrivance is needed so that Chris only has to mention a “Project” and “Megacity” in earshot to get Bernice involved, but it brings us back to prose like “The place was so corrupt that everyone had something to hide.” Ahhh: you can hear that boozy jazz already.

All of which is fair enough if you love that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have a pretty low tolerance for it. (Half of two novels was plenty, thanks.) More significantly, it’s not as if Mean Streets adds anything to the realm of cheesy noir that Terrance Dicks – not to mention the stuff he’s riffing on – hasn’t already done. (Literally, when it comes to sending our heroes undercover as criminals. See Blood Harvest.) He even makes efforts to rein in the futuristic elements that would otherwise make this different from yer average Raymond Chandler pisstake. Sure, there are aliens everywhere and there’s a sci-fi plot, but then Bernice goes shopping (in Megacity, on another planet, in the future) at a still thriving branch of Nieman-Marcus. One of the many crime syndicates in Megacity is noted for having “clung to the old Mafia terminology.” (Of course it has.) A resident of Megacity still refers to drugging people as a “Mickey Finn.” It’s all just a bit too comfortably Earth-like. We get it, Megacity is like old Earth Chicago. It doesn’t have to be old Earth Chicago, albeit with hovercars.

Take Garshak. He was an interesting character in Shakedown: an Ogron who thanks to genetic modification is not only not a brute but a genius. That’s basically Rocket Raccoon! Loads you could do with that! Last time he was an amusingly high cultured police captain in a lawless town; this time, long since out of the job, he’s a private eye. Okay, fair enough. But he’s only a private eye because he came across some old Earth pop culture and thought, why not. Really? He can’t arrive at that idea without some nudge-wink connection to the materials Terry based this on? It makes him consciously part of the pastiche; worse, now he’s like an idea in search of a personality. Still, it gets us to chapters written in first person as Garshak investigates, but they’re not really elevated by the fact that he’s an Ogron with a high IQ and not Humphrey Bogart. The only really notable thing about him is that he tends to win all his fights. I’m not sure that’s more interesting, especially after a while.

It’s not as if I spent the book rolling my eyes and soldiering on. After all, it’s Terrance Dicks, so the prose clicks along like a metronome. But this is not his sparkling best. Terry’s famously concise powers of description are a little lacking here: Chris is “big”; Bernice is “medium-sized” (!); Roz, who only appears in the prologue but is mentioned a lot, is “dark” – several times on a page at one point. I know he’s just being expedient but after a while that last one starts to feel a bit, really? That’s her defining feature, if you had to pick one out of a hat, on an alien planet full of random animal-shaped whatevers? (And about them: there is a crime boss called Lucifer who happens to be a tall, horned chap with wings and a tail. His species is “Demoniac”; apparently the name came from lazy Earth people and it stuck. Lampshading the obviousness of an idea doesn’t elevate it above obviousness.)

Bernice doesn’t come out of this brilliantly. I’ve got my issues with the setup – I think you could have her snap back to academia after those earlier books but this feels more like introducing a fake norm – but through the rest of the book, she doesn’t quite click like she usually does. She’s often a step behind Chris, such as not being able to guess how criminals at large could get to you in prison; worse, when they’re both posing as crime lords and a guy arrives who previously met Chris as an Adjudicator, Bernice says “Why does it matter if he knows who you are?” Gee, maybe because it would blow his cover? She normally has more imagination than that.

She at least enjoys herself posing as the “Dragon Lady,” complete with killer laser-lipstick, but plot-wise the whole “blend in” schtick is a bit of a dead end, and only serves to delay the meaning of the “Project” until the last fifth of the book – which does little to keep up the stakes earlier on. In terms of usefulness, she does get to storm into the proverbial accusing parlour at the end, but not because she has a particular stake in this: it’s because “as an academic, she was used to lecturing people.” Oh. (You would think Chris would want that job since it’s his quest, but I should probably just shut up and be grateful when Bernice has something to do.)

Her dialogue seems a little muted as well, which is a pity as it’s often the best thing about her, but that’s a common malaise in Mean Streets. Funny lines are all too often punctuated with exclamation marks, making characters sound like they’re in the Famous Five. It seems rather gauche for Bernice my-middle-name-might-as-well-be-Sarcasm Summerfield. It’s positively bizarre when Garshak does it.

I’ve done almost nothing but complain about Mean Streets, but I didn’t hate it. It’s as cheerily readable as anything by Terry, and the whole pastiche bit will be some folks’ bread and butter. I just found the story itself so thunderingly uninteresting and irrelevant to Benny that all I’m left with for a review is the ways in which it didn’t take advantage of this range of books so much as force them into a comfortable shape that the author likes.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #109 – Ghost Devices by Simon Bucher-Jones

The New Adventures
#7
Ghost Devices
By Simon Bucher-Jones

When I review books one of the main things I turn to for help (apart from the pool of Doctor Who trivia taking up brain space which perhaps should have gone towards useful everyday skills, but hey ho) is what the author did last time. Ghost Devices sees the return of Simon Bucher-Jones. His debut The Death Of Art didn’t quite work for me. I didn’t hate it; in fact I enjoyed many of its facets and ideas. The whole thing though could be described as a bit of a mood that I couldn’t get into. Therefore – no offence to any passing Bucher-Joneses – I’d be lying if I said I cracked open Ghost Devices with a giddy sense of optimism.

Well, that was then. Fast forward to now and it turns out Ghost Devices is much more my kind of thing. Hooray!

The prologue features a sentient factory questioning its lot. Neurotic robots are a bit of a cheat code to get me to enjoy things, so that made a good first impression. And then once again we’re dabbling in The Also People: a logical extension of “neurotic robots”, as well as a perennial fan favourite and increasingly the Rosetta Stone for Bernice-novel world-building. Who could object? (Although, sidebar: let’s see some non-Aaronovitch reference points as well, shall we?)

The plot concerns ancient machines of death with varying levels of sentience that try to commit their usual murders, genocides etc but end up squirting condiments or performing magic shows instead. This makes for a delightfully offbeat intergalactic crisis, but it has made certain warlords understandably upset. The head of a crime family is keen to start the heads rolling by visiting the homeworld of the Vo’lach – the ancient death-machine builders – while Vo’lach agents are keen to monitor the situation and keep any visitors at bay. Both parties hide in plain sight once an archaeological expedition crosses their path.

And speaking of Bernice: she is hired by an agent of God (as in the big computer one) to go on an expedition with the promise that a duplicate will write her next book for her. The perpetually late post-grad agrees, despite somewhat meta misgivings: “I know my life seems to be falling into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing, but just occasionally I do need to do some real work.” (Put a pin in that for later.)

The expedition is to Canopusi IV, more specifically The Spire: a gargantuan tower of mysterious origin that is worshipped by the somewhat primitive, if seemingly agreeable natives. The Spire is made of “futurite,” a crystal with temporal properties, and the structure sends back information from the future. (Bits of futurite also litter the nearby desert, which is a mystery for later.) Bernice can’t believe her luck in getting onto this expedition. Professor Fellows, who is leading it, cannot believe his bad luck for exactly the same reason: “Bernice ‘Jonah’ Summerfield. The woman had been a jinx on so many offworld field trips, that it had got to be something of a joke.”

And, well, this is entirely fair, isn’t it? We’ve all heard the clever-clever argument that the Doctor turning up somewhere in the TARDIS is a trigger for certain doom, but that’s just wrong, like blaming firemen for fires. Canonically he goes where he’s needed – often not the place he intended. The doom was already happening! Bernice Summerfield doesn’t (or doesn’t always) have that in-built excuse, so the fact that she keeps turning up at dig sites that become bomb sites is worthy of comment. This week God has asked nicely for her help, which might as well be the TARDIS picking a location out of a hat, but unless she’s going to start working for The People on the regular that’s a narrative sticking plaster. And anyway, Fellows and his colleagues don’t know about that.

All of this hints at a narrative question that I’m happy to see articulated, even if there’s no answer yet: can you really get away with dropping Benny into an archaeological dig-of-doom in every book? Does she do anything else? Isn’t her academic life ticking along as well? (Now unpin that thought from earlier: even Bernice has noticed the level of contrivance in her life.) What else, in other words, can these books do? At least Doctor Who can swap out its star wars for historicals, or just give the interstellar megalomaniacs a time out. Bernice finds herself increasingly in a rut, which is undoubtedly bags of fun to be in but is a bit tricky for sustaining a series.

Lots to ponder then. Ghost Devices doesn’t, of course, push us to the next stage (in my ignorance I still hope there is one), but it does some interesting things with Bernice. She is again (!) not quite the protagonist, more of a team player, with Fellows leading a strand of story at the Spire once Benny and others head off to find the Vo’lach (who, multitaskers they, also built the Spire). With the added context of Fellows (see “Jonah”) it seems less of a wrench not revolving it all around her. She is only one component of these expeditions, and it would threaten suspension of disbelief to always position her so. Bernice, in this one, consequently feels like a scruffy little variable you’re delighted to cut back to. Like the larger meta questions, this lack of focus feels like it’s either going to be solved or I’ll just have to get used to it, but this time the mix works.

Bucher-Jones writes Bernice very well generally, which isn’t always a given. There’s the essential wit: “‘It’s the wider implications I’m worried about. I just don’t see why anyone would use poison.’ Bernice hesitated. ‘If I said to kill him, would I be hot or cold?’” There’s the way she jumps at anything resembling pop culture: “‘It’s me, I am the Air Vent itself, not some hunky rescuer in a torn vest trapped with his wife, who needs a vital operation, in the bowels of a nuclear reactor captured by terrorists in the path of a runaway Continental Siege Engine.’ ‘You saw Die Hardest?’” There are the little meta series-of-adventures nods, as already mentioned: “Well, it’s just that you seem a liberal, educated, benevolent sort of Priest-King, not at all a raging fanatic.” He also nails that aspect of moulding the prose around her, sometimes giving Dave Stone a run for his funny-long-sentence money: “Staggering back from a pub in the students’ quarter, at twelve bells past closing time, the bells being measures of spirits, not of chronology, Professor Bernice Summerfield hadn’t expected to find an angel waiting on the stairs.”

But apart from all the funny stuff there’s grit too. God’s offer of a pseudo-you doing her homework has its appeal of course, but it also sends her into a mild existential crisis. (Do you really need her if you can outsource like that? Ah, the joys of AI!) The Spire gives her a vision of the future that seemingly includes murder, about which she anguishes – until a moment of crisis when she fulfils it because circumstances demand it, and she accepts the cost. (There is an out for this shortly afterwards, but you can’t unring that bell, can you?) At times she wonders how Chris or Roz would handle the situation. And when she saves the day in the end, which incidentally she can only do by wilfully endangering a friend, she may have fundamentally damaged the universe. Existential crises are here again! Things weigh on Bernice in a way that they do not seem to – within earshot of the reader anyway – for the Doctor. Highlighting those differences, like funny robots and air vents with opinions, is my jam.

There’s so much to like. Any hang-ups? Well, yes: there’s a little stylistic quirk carried over from The Death Of Art, although that was far from the first New Adventure to use it, but for me it’s a biggie. You guessed it: short sections. Cut, cut, cut goes the action across the page. And I’ll give it this: we are often cutting around the same scene. But the effect on me is the same. My attention span just can’t take it. Ask me to restart, as a paragraph break does, and I might take the opportunity to go and do something else. It’s an interruption. And it’s generally not the same scene. This is a stylistic choice and not everyone will be bothered by it. (You might even find it improves a book. Quick cutting is after all pretty standard when the action mounts towards the end.) But it made Ghost Devices a somewhat long, stuttery experience for me, despite its merits.

Apart from that it’s very funny and gently puzzling, most of the time in a good way. (At one point a time paradox unravels in far greater detail than I’m used to, which was cool and broadly easy to follow. But then, for example, a lingering plot point is answered by Bernice on Page 206 as if it was entirely obvious, which it wasn’t – perhaps a bit of editorial lampshading there? Still, it made me laugh.)

It’s refreshing to revisit an author and find myself on their wavelength this time around. I hope for more pleasant surprises in the range.

7/10