#2
The Murder Game
By Steve Lyons
Back when the New Adventures were new, fans used to debate the different kinds of book you’d get. One kind was trad: books that felt like photocopied scripts, lovingly familiar but a bit staid. And the other kind was rad: books that felt like someone took all of the drugs and was, at best, dimly aware that Doctor Who used to be a TV show. The Missing Adventures, by virtue of slotting between existing episodes, skewed more trad. Of course they did. And now we’re getting into their successors, the Past Doctor Adventures, I’ve got to wonder how much variety they’re going to have viz trad and rad.
Well, The Murder Game is trad. Very, very trad. It’s as trad as the annual Christmas luncheon held by Sir Henry Tradwell, head of Traditional Studies at Tradition University, a hereditary post that has now been held by ten successive generations of Tradwells. It’s really rather trad, is what I’m hinting at.
Is that a problem? Well, it depends on the reader. Obviously there is a market for stories that feel like gently reheated stories you’ve already heard, or a good chunk of Doctor Who just wouldn’t be there. But when it comes to investing hours and hours in a novel, it’s not really what I’m after.
We begin in the TARDIS – which straight away feels like a throwback to ye olden times, forgoing the novelistic setting of the scene that usually comes before treating us to yer actual Doctor and companions. (At least it spares us a moody and incomprehensible prologue which is often standard in Novel Who.) From here it’s a hop, skip and a jump to a distress signal, a seemingly empty space station, a gaggle of characters who are mistakenly expecting our heroes to turn up, and then a murder mystery game that – don’t tell anyone – might involve a few actual murders before very long. All of which is a bit, oh no, that script fell through, what else have you got that’s ready to go?
Some of this is undeniably fun, with the Doctor in particular relishing the opportunity to put on a costume – his character is “Miss Lucy Buxom” and all that entails – but the Agatha Christie-esque sequence of events that follows still feels like the oldest of plots, and without a veneer of metaness or even Romance Of Crime-ish comment to set it apart. Some people are not who they seem, even when they are not in costume, but they all have that unmistakeable stink of Look, We Need The Numbers So There’s Enough Of Them To Kill Off. I occasionally mixed up my Daphnes and my Dorothys; it seems so inevitable just from the setting that they’ll each have secrets that it’s more surprising when they don’t.
Not much happens in the first half – or rather, so much happens in the second half that my memories have now been taped over. (We’ll get to it.) But anyway, murders are happening for real, and all of this has something to do with the Selachians: aquatic space monsters with a chip on their shoulder. The Doctor and co must find what they’re after before they arrive and ramp up the killing. Red herrings abound, and Ben seems to find himself knocked unconscious quite often. This presages one of the novel’s recurring habits, never-ending jeopardy, with a sudden bout of oblivion lurking behind every corner. It gets a bit silly, but one of its other habits – the announcement of a death, but you’ll have to wait a few pages to find out whose it was – works very well at ratcheting tension.
Eventually it’s time to pay off this Selachian thing, and it’s worth debating whether the long wait was better than giving them a dramatic entrance sooner. Characters mention this murderous species quite a bit, but I kept imagining all this on screen and thinking, well show them, then! When they arrive they don’t disappoint: sharks (or are they dolphins?) so fed up with persecution from land dwellers that they’ve gone to war with everybody, they travel about in water suits with aggressive shark artwork painted on for effect. There’s certainly a hint of Chelonian about them, with the shark replacing the rather more anachronistic tortoise, but their commitment to kill-kill-kill is certainly to be reckoned with.
By the time they arrive on the space station/hotel it has been knocked out of orbit and is inexorably falling towards Earth, and that’s the pace in a nutshell, suddenly ramping up towards imminent heat death. The Selachians want a weapon that was smuggled aboard the station and will kill until they get it. The weapon could doom thousands so the Doctor and co must keep it from them, all while not perishing in Earth’s atmosphere. On top of that the weapon is finally deployed – an algorithm that will use anything mechanical or computerised to kill its target – which leads to Ben evading some very holistic assassination attempts over and over again.
This stuff is quite exciting, and from a quick glance at reviews the last stretch seems to be the agreed upon Favourite Bit. However, there does come a point where constant (and it does become constant) peril gets a bit tiresome, like continually hopping between frying pans and fires. It’s exciting incident with nothing underpinning it; yes, the Selachians are terrible and the weapon (though decidedly wacky) is a big problem, but it’s just a bottomless bag of cliffhangers after a while.
The characterisation is very good, though there’s not a huge amount to dive into with the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly at this time in the series. Ben yearns to be back at sea, and has conflicting feelings of friendship or-possibly-something-more for Polly. Polly feels similarly, but gets slightly shoved down in the mix with all these other characters milling about. The Doctor is fiercely himself, offering up beguiling smiles, outraged outbursts, childish panic and sudden ingenuity. His frustration at being in the company of murderers, and not wanting to encourage any more deaths, believably underscores his Troughton-ish antics. And Lyons makes this the point where he canonically decides that a sonic screwdriver would be a neat idea, if you like that sort of thing.
The Murder Game falls somewhere between a tried and tested 60s episode and a wet Sunday afternoon with Big Finish. It really is very authentic – I kept picturing the lights glaring off the studio floor – but then I kept waiting for it to be funnier, remembering that Steve Lyons was the Conundrum guy. To be fair there are funny flourishes, like the murder mystery game (not enough is made of that), and some oblique Whovian references like “Nobody would end up as cinders floating around in Spain if he could help it,” or – triple nerd points for this one – “He burst into a song, about business being business and always aiming to please.” But I’d hesitate to call it a comedy.
There’s just nothing at all under the surface – and for what it’s worth, barely anything I can say about it. The Murder Game executes its plot very efficiently and gets the voices just right, and I appreciate all of that. Perhaps that ought to be enough, but something is missing here that left me wading all too slowly through its pages.
5/10
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