Doctor Who: The BBC Books #74 – Prime Time by Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#33

Prime Time

By Mike Tucker

I’ve read this one before, years ago along with all the other Mike Tucker/Robert Perry books. I liked how they all followed on from each other; it felt like finally getting Season 27. (Someone should tell this guy about the New Adventures…)

I wasn’t very impressed with Prime Time back then. I felt that it was a trad exercise and little more. And look, it certainly is that first thing: the central conceit is that the Doctor and Ace end up on a cruel television show broadcast to a fairly apathetic audience. Vengeance On Varos says hi! Revisiting it now though, I found enough odd little touches to mark this one out as, at the very least, Mike Tucker’s trad exercise.

For starters, the landscape of television has changed since Vengeance On Varos. Although there is a TV show in this dedicated to violence, there’s an altogether more psychological nastiness on display too — a sort of dark half of Jerry Springer that breaks people down with awful revelations. The kind of all-pervasive telly culture in Prime Time is also more insidious than Philip Martin’s all-out Orwellian nightmare: people on Blinni-Gaar aren’t forced by violence to watch TV all the time, they were just tempted into it, and now they’re trapped. There are TVs everywhere. Tucker can’t possibly have known this, but the sense of this planet’s citizens being unable to go two minutes without goggling at the box is eerily recognisable now as mobile phone addiction, especially when we see them at dinner. I wish it was a wild stretch of the imagination.

There’s also a meta quality to Prime Time that heightens its ideas. As well as breaking the book into TV “Parts” (pretty standard stuff there) Tucker throws in a trailer, a pre-titles sequence, a tag scene and even commercials. Even better, the story engages with the Doctor and Ace as famous people in-universe: they are desirable targets for a TV show because their exploits have been noticed. Yes, this is a cheeky excuse for Tucker to make reference to stories such as Storm Warning (and in a thrilling bit of intertextuality, The Genocide Machine — Big Finish is canon!), but why not? It makes sense that events in Doctor Who are commented upon afterwards, and it makes a virtue of Tucker’s (and Perry’s) potted history. It’s continuity, sure, but used in a way that you don’t see often.

This is also a neat excuse for the Seventh Doctor to get out-played for a change. His success has led to fame, and that contributes to his being on the back foot for a lot of this: the villains have plenty of evidence and footage to work with, therefore they can predict his behaviour. Hoist by his own petard, for once. Of course it helps that there are two insidious forces at work here, both particularly on the ball — that spells bad luck for the Doctor, however clever he is. Before you start wondering though if Tucker has mischaracterised the fella in the question mark pullover (as if), he pulls a few brilliant switcheroos near the end, having thoroughly re-affixed his manipulator’s hat. The fake-out involving the TARDIS made me hoot.

There’s continuity to spare elsewhere — of course there is, it’s Tucker. (No offence.) For instance, the Master’s in this. At first that feels a bit like token key-jangling for the fans, as the character seems unusually minimised, being manipulated by the same evil TV show as the Doctor. But Tucker manages to use this as a fake-out to then reintroduce the real, meaner Master later on, allowing the reader to get the initial “oh here we go” eyeroll over with first. (The real one has also been manipulated, but it’s a bit easier to see why.) There are some good scenes with the Doctor and the Master(s), the former earnestly wondering if he can trust the latter again, and considering whether a new body and an end to the cheetah virus might finally balance him out. You can probably guess how likely that is in reality, but to be fair, so can the Doctor. For a minute there they somewhat believably work together.

Ace gets a lot of the book’s hard knocks. While the Doctor is trapped in the Master’s disfigured TARDIS (that setting is an amusing bit of convergent evolution after Campaign and Heart Of TARDIS) and on the run from predators, Ace gets stuck with the Jerry Springer equivalent: paraded in front of gleeful unquestioning viewers, she is shown images of her distressed elderly mother, stirring up a familiar source of mental anguish. Then she’s shown her own gravestone. All of this serves to make her into a frayed nerve by the book’s end, almost executing several of the people responsible. And there I was thinking Tucker could have gone further with the TV satire. (He probably still could, to be fair: with the exception of Gatti, Ace’s friend who doesn’t even watch TV, we don’t spend time with any viewers on or outside of Blinni-Gaar.)

There’s somewhat of a theme here about people’s true natures. The Doctor’s heroism leads to a lot of trouble for him and Ace; Ace’s mistrust of her mother is inevitably questioned, and her violent tendencies are severely tested; the Master is still battling his animalistic tendencies (although does he really mind those?) and he must briefly ally himself with the Doctor, bringing out the old question of whether there’s still a friendship underneath; the Zzinbriizi are a race of jackals that have been granted intelligence by the Fleshsmiths, and they’re constantly struggling to maintain it; diminished TV guy Greg Ashby is converted into a monster, again by the Fleshsmiths (we’ll get to them), and now he’s battling to stay remotely human; prominent TV personality and old flame of Greg’s, Rennie Trasker, now does morally bankrupt work for Channel 400, which she eventually comes to question.

I say “somewhat of a theme” because apart from that the book is essentially all incident. There’s not much to unpack and I didn’t make a lot of notes: Tucker is here to move the plot along and if possible, ick the reader out a bit. Being a monsters guy, his imagination gets right to work there, providing us with the slavering Zzinbriizi and the revolting Fleshsmiths. (The latter charmingly depicted on the cover.) Here we have a sort of organic equivalent of the Cybermen, crossed with Star Trek’s Vidiians: ruined by their planet’s atmosphere, they capture other life-forms and use those materials to stay alive. This gives them an impressive aptitude for manipulating living things, as well as an upsetting larder of captured beings and animals. This fact disgusts the Doctor so much that he has no qualms about killing them all at the end. No need for “do I have the right” this week.

The Fleshsmiths and the satirical Channel 400 both make for compelling antagonists, but it would be fair to say that the combination is a bit random. Still, it’s amusing that both are secretly planning to screw over the other — which also applies to the Master, another villain in the mix. Perhaps the unexpected combination is part of why the Doctor is so discombobulated at first. And perhaps that’s being generous — but hey ho, it works.

Once you’re past all the rock-em-sock-em action Tucker turns out to have an ace up his sleeve. (Sorry.) I dimly remembered from reading this years ago that Ace dies in the book. That’s not quite accurate. (Although thinking so made the climax a lot more exciting!) The Doctor is made aware of impending doom for his young protege, and he is determined to investigate and prevent it — even to the bizarre extent of secretly digging up and lugging around her coffin. This is quite bold in terms of that potted continuity unique to Tucker and Perry. It’s a plot gauntlet-throw that demands to be resolved — and it would be, almost two years later in the duo’s next book, Loving The Alien. It’s a nice little button on the Seventh Doctor’s duty of care for Ace, which he knows he has let lapse during these events. (See, that awful TV show dressing her down.) It’s also a nudge away from the somewhat “safe” continuity of Past Doctors, which ironically is just the sort of thing you could point to as a consequence of Interference, a state of affairs that BBC Books had by now done away with.

It’s hard to rate this as Mike Tucker’s first solo novel because, now that you mention it, I don’t know what was Perry and what was Tucker before. It’s tempting to point to the weirder bits of Matrix as being Perry, since there’s little of that here. Regardless, Prime Time is a solid fleshing out (ahem) of its central idea. The writing is often good, with some neat descriptions like “The planet Scrantek hung in the wastes of the Brago Nebula, black and ugly, like an inkblot on a masterpiece.” Tucker’s familiarity with the era is beyond question, and he’s good at layering that in, such as this jolly moment during the Doctor’s TV interview: “[He] suddenly reached into his pocket. ‘Of course it’s not all just about saving the universe. I am quite musical.’ Ace buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh, no.’” There are occasional limits to his descriptive powers — too many references to fingers “dancing” over controls, a popular crutch for TARDIS scenes — and there’s a lot of that short scene writing I hate. However, in a world completely obsessed with TV, that’s almost appropriate. All told this is solid, suitably icky stuff, with a decent bit of promise for next time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #49 – Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#23

Storm Harvest

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

The latest effort from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker opens with a dedication to Mark Morris: “for making us find a title without ‘deep’ or ‘blue’ in it.” This is rather apt as their book has some things in common with Deep Blue. Storm Harvest is another grisly, but otherwise traditional-as-all-heck monster mash. It’s another one that features bloodthirsty creatures from the deep. It’s another one that I read and enjoyed when it was first published and — happily — it’s another one that has more or less held up.

We’re following on directly from Matrix, so it’s understandable that the Doctor and Ace are in dire need of a holiday. They pick the ocean world of Coralee, which unbeknownst to them is not having its best summer ever. Ships are sinking without warning. A strange creature has been sighted around the colony’s control centre. A spaceship lurks nearby and its crew are itching to come and cause trouble and before long, everyone on Coralee will be at risk from the Krill — ravenous monsters that make the Daleks seem open to negotiations. Oh, and they’re due for a hurricane.

There’s bags of grisly incident to be getting on with. One area that distinguishes it however from Mark Morris’s latest is the characterisation. Perry & Tucker wrote their own potted Season 27 within the Past Doctor Adventures, with all their books following on from each other and several even having started life as scripts. That added continuity between novels means that we don’t have so much of the disposability that comes with a storytelling chocolate box like the PDAs. We can — hooray! — pick up on some of the trauma from earlier books.

But only some. There are references to how guilty the Doctor feels about almost murdering Ace before, and to what he almost became in that book. Ace, in turn, has a bit of mental processing to do about all this. We politely sidestep the possibility that he was the one actually committing the Ripper murders, which I suppose means that he definitively wasn’t; meanwhile, I couldn’t see any mention of the murder definitely committed by Ace, which seems to me like money on the table. Why write things like that and then drop them?

Her main drive in the novel is to support the Doctor and “to prove to [him] that he could rely on her.” She even gives him a pep talk, although she later has a brief unconvincing wobble with “Once again the Time Lord had arrived and taken control of people’s lives” before flipping back the other way because, somewhat implausibly, she believes she’s manipulating people too. I wonder if she’s just compartmentalising her feelings the way the Doctor does with necessary evils: when things get dangerous he creates “a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy [the Krill].” Could Ace be parking her concerns because she feels sorry for his struggles in Matrix, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt? (Let’s call that one headcanon, shall we? These books might be ersatz New Adventures in terms of when the stories take place, but that’s about as far as the parallel goes. Storm Harvest, while we’re on the subject, lacks the vintage NA weirdness of Matrix, being a lot more in line with their earlier gore-fest Illegal Alien.)

It’s tempting to say this is an interesting one for the Doctor. Still reeling from his identity crisis in Matrix, he’s immediately placed into danger here, but he has that moment of consideration (or at least compartmentalisation) for the Krill, and when he’s in the middle of a humans-vs-(not Krill) aliens uprising he’s forced to not pick sides, watching various humans die as a result. He escapes certain death by the skin of his teeth at least twice. Overall, he somewhat lacks his usual power and self-assurance, and because these books are a series within a series, it’s at least possible that they are Doing A Thing.

There’s some decent characterisation in the supporting cast, mostly in the (I use the term loosely) Malcolm Hulke-ian sense that members of a group or a species can act in individual ways. The aforementioned spaceship is controlled by the Cythosi, a group of hulking marauders who use humans as slaves and want to use the Krill as a biological weapon. Their leader Mottrack is as unpleasant as you could imagine, but second in command Bisoncawl has some layers, rejecting cruelty against the slaves and having an appreciation for art. The slaves are on the brink of a revolution but there are different views held within that, some (like Peck) being absolutely bloodthirsty and others (like Bavril) being more interested in a measured peace. One critical character is an undercover Cythosi, losing his physical shape and his mind flipping between one species and another — his loyalties fluctuate too, throwing multiple plans into chaos. There are also “cetaceans”, aka sentient dolphins that travel over land in a mechanical apparatus: two friendly ones can be found on Coralee helping various parties, while another is aboard the Cythosi ship aiding their attack out of a passionate hatred for land dwellers. (If you think that sounds like the Selachians, you’re right, it does. Given that the original angry underwater guys return in the next PDA, I’m surprised that the editors didn’t call attention to the similarities.)

The characterisation has its downsides — namely, a few too many characters, perhaps to better facilitate the differences between them. (Not to mention, a body count.) There are two experts on all things Coralee, who go on separate undersea expeditions at the same time, each with their own cetacean on board; I got confused flipping between boats. There are two female authority figures, both with a weight of responsibility that is tested by tragedy. (Helpfully, they are friends.) And there is Rajiid, someone Ace meets and — hey, we’re all grown ups — sleeps with. I like that Ace has reached a point where she’s confident enough to hook up with someone on her travels, but Rajiid really seems to be here just so her subplot (trying to retrieve a weapon that will stop the Krill) includes someone to talk to. I never learned anything substantive about Rajiid (or Greg, his partner in the boat tour business who until I checked just now I could swear was called Guy); Ace’s momentary consideration of inviting him about the TARDIS feels generous to say the least.

It’s perhaps fair to assume that people aren’t reading Storm Harvest for the characterisation. If they are then good, because there is some, but much more importantly: this is a novel where all involved were so excited about the monster that it was built and photographed for the cover. (The perks of commissioning a prop guru to write it!) I have no idea how the Krill might have been realised on screen, at least once you get past seeing the things; their sheer bloodthirsty frenzy would test a BBC budget as much as it would the censors. They work great in a novel though, initially as an unseen menace similar to the Sea Devils, then later as a relentless force that effectively puts any obstacle into a blender. They make for an excellent we’re-all-gonna-die level threat and there are some marvellous set pieces built around them, particularly a couple of tense submarine encounters and a horrible penny-drop moment involving an underwater tunnel.

I think Perry & Tucker realised that you can’t have all Krill all the time, however — they can’t be reasoned with so you either stop them, or you escape, or everybody’s dead and your story’s over. So we have some added machinations involving the Cythosi (an interesting but physically less clearly-defined menace) and the Dreekans (four arms and uh, not many other characteristics — look, the Krill are great). The plot is neatly worked out so that it makes sense we’re spinning more plates than just “look out, Krill”, but it must be said that if there is a weapon that will kill only Krill then potential modification of said weapon to kill whoever you like seems far more useful than the Krill themselves.

Ah well. Perry & Tucker moderate the Krill and thus leave room for suspense, as a threat like that means you always know what’s at stake. The setting makes for a very appealing base under siege: the colony is one of the rare pieces of land on this ocean world, making it uniquely vulnerable to aquatic attack. Scenes of them literally battening down the hatches in anticipation of a Krill attack and/or a hurricane practically ooze atmosphere, and made me wish there was an audiobook version of this with sound effects. The various ebbs and flows of violence are generally well apportioned; the authors do a good job of pulling back before the various onslaughts become monotonous, and — in figures like Ace and Holly — they make the chaos feel personal. It only occasionally goes a bit too far, such as a ritual killing that mostly just serves to thin the character roster and depress Ace.

Storm Harvest is unashamedly a giddy monstrous onslaught, and if you have the slightest inclination towards that sort of thing then you’ll want to batten down the hatches and ride it out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #33 – Matrix by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#16
Matrix
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

This one’s quite ambitious for a Past Doctor Adventure. That’s not to denigrate the ones we’ve had so far — if anything, I’ve found them consistently more enjoyable and better at embracing their format than the Eighth Doctor books. It’s just that the kind of characterisation you get in Matrix feels more appropriate for characters that are the “main” ones in your range, rather than rotating guests of the week. Which I suppose is another way of saying that Matrix reminded me of the New Adventures.

Perhaps that’s not surprising as Tucker and Perry (or in this case, Perry and Tucker — is that significant?) are so far the only BBC writers working in that period after the TV series ended. Similarities will suggest themselves. Their earlier Illegal Alien covered similarly familiar ground after so many other writers had spent time in that sandbox.

The familiarity isn’t quite so literal this time, although for a few reasons Matrix does end up recalling Nigel Robinson’s Birthright. (Another Doctor-lite story set against Victorian squalor with a malcontent Time Lord pulling the strings.) It’s the general sense of weirdness I’m talking about.

We open with a mysterious hooded figure in an unknown location being all ominous. (Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!) He sends a clay fish monster after the Doctor and Ace. It finds them already in odd moods, the Doctor feeling so out of sorts that he expects Ace to leave him at any moment. (Ooh, moody! What does that remind me of…) When the fish guy assassin doesn’t work out, mysterious hooded guy communicates through the TARDIS before seemingly blowing it up, except that was only a vision (weird visions, you say?), followed by a nightmare hallucination of dead soldiers who are all actually Ace. (Guilt about what the Doctor has done to Ace? Interesting…) Around this point the Doctor removes the TARDIS telepathic circuit, fearing it was helping the malign presence.

All of this is in the first 30 pages, by the way, and we’re not done with the setup yet. Next there’s a stopover in 1963 (hey, the 35th anniversary was coming up) where it appears that history is out of whack: there’s no longer a TARDIS in Totter’s Lane, but London does have marauding evil spirits, packs of youths with blades strapped to their fingers and an armed curfew. Initially seeking to leave Ace with his earlier self (don’t even get me started) the Doctor miraculously bumps into Ian and Barbara, who helpfully fill in some blanks. It seems there were now more than five murders by Jack the Ripper, to which Britain responded somewhat excessively thanks to a vaguely-defined spectre hanging over them ever since. The Doctor decides to go back and sort this out.

(We’re nearly done with the setup.) On arrival, the Doctor loses his mind and tries to kill Ace. Tossing the telepathic circuit, the two then separate, Ace to find some degree of safety and the Doctor — now amnesiac — to hopefully find himself. But it’s a particularly nasty Victorian London they find themselves in, and it won’t be pleasant for either of them.

And that’s Matrix, or at least the majority of it: a saunter through a dreary and dangerous city with murder in the air. The bonkers list of events that got us to that point feels like a fever dream once you’re actually past it, which in its way also reminds me of the New Adventures. They often swerved into wonky, slightly overreaching oddness in character and setting, especially in the early days where you were more likely to bring up character beats from TV episodes, which of course Perry and Tucker also love doing. It’s all a little bit messy in that “we haven’t quite figured this out” way.

The pace slows considerably once we’re into the story proper, although the authors keep it moving superficially with the use of short chapters and frequent scene changes. (I think I’ve made my feelings clear on this type of pacing: my attention span no-likey.) Ace has a fairly terrible time, ending up in a circus against her will because of an apparent relapse of the cheetah people virus from Survival. (Ooh, TV continuity! See also London 1963 = Remembrance Of The Daleks, creepy Victorian dresses = Ghost Light, circuses = The Greatest Show In The Galaxy. There are also a couple of Time And The Rani and Paradise Towers refs for the true collectors.) Probably the best stuff here is Ace’s growing camaraderie with Peter, a browbeaten young man working for the dreadful ringmaster Malacroix, along with the freaks and circus acts. Nevertheless, Ace’s animalism never comes under particular scrutiny beyond a surface aversion to behaviour like that — the authors more than once revisit the Survival line “if we fight like animals, we die like animals” and that seems to be the extent of it. Ace committing an actual murder is swept aside in the book’s closing pages; if we were back in the New Adventures there’d be a chance to pick up on that later on, but as it is we’ll have to hope Perry and Tucker find it interesting enough to revisit next time around. (Given the Doctor’s loosey-goosey reassurance that neither of them was in their right mind at all this week, I doubt it.)

As for the Doctor, who in many ways this book is about — well, is it, though? The villain is intensely invested in the Doctor and determined to break him, but after his upsetting swerve into potential homicide (with an honourable mention to his very odd mood at the start) the Doctor practically exits the story, the telepathic circuit seemingly taking on the role of the cricket ball in Human Nature and keeping his Doctorness tantalisingly out of reach. (As in that novel, a secondary character here becomes fascinated with the Time Lord totem. You’ve got to assume Perry and Tucker read that one, right?) Instead we’re in the occasional company of “Johnny,” who is taken in by Joseph Liebermann, a kindly Jewish man of indeterminate age who knows a thing or two about regret. (He thinks Johnny is the Ripper, feels sorry for him and takes him in anyway.) Plenty of hints are dropped that Liebermann is more than he seems, and certainly older than any human, including in interludes sprinkled through the book. It’s a nice idea but I never really saw the relevance. He mostly just keeps “Johnny” out of harm’s way until, due to sheer circumstance, the circuit finds its way back to him and the Doctor is finally back in.

Unlike Human Nature, which to be fair isn’t much of a parallel to Matrix beyond a few loose plot points, the Doctor hasn’t learned much or grown in the intervening time. He just didn’t do the ending yet, and then he did. Which brings us to there not being a lot of actual story here. Atmosphere, certainly: try setting a story in Ripper-era London and not having sickly fog seep through the pages. But I was mostly waiting around for Johnny to get his groove back. Ace, for her part, seemingly does the same. She has no real plan here except to kill time; she doesn’t, and perhaps needn’t fully reckon with the idea that the Doctor might be off his rocker for good. (To be fair, she’s right to have faith, but that’s only obvious to us because we know he’s the main character in a series — in a previous-continuity story, at that.) The only person here consciously moving things along is the bad guy, and even he’s taking his time.

The villain in Matrix is clearly meant as a twist, so I’ll be a good sport and not say who it is. What I will say is that I think making it a twist hurts the book. This is a character you could do more with — this whole thing is a rematch so clearly the authors agree on that — and yet holding back who they are, and holding back any character recognition of who they are until that moment, doesn’t leave much room to work. What can you squeeze into forty or so pages? Doctor, it’s me, I still have my pre-existing grievance but this time I’ll definitely win? All that earlier wiffwaff involving spectres and clay monsters only becomes interesting once the novel puts a name to it — in particular, the identity of the villain’s gang opens a huge can of worms, the contents of which we’re simply not going to investigate. Spoilers in books have value, but this one might have been more effective if they had ripped (Rippered?) the plaster off, stuck the baddie on the cover and kept the Doctor in his right mind. Making it a little bit of a fair fight is surely more interesting than no fight.

The implication that the Doctor to some extent committed the Ripper murders is only marginally more tasteless than writing an SF reason for the murders in the first place, but in any case, thanks to the time crunch it’s as effectively meaningless as the murder Ace commits. Matrix has by this point already shown its quality at dispensing information, with a truly diabolical info dump about Ian and Barbara’s alternate history early on and some clunky exposition about Gallifreyan technology near the end — not to mention the crazy pacing of the first act. You can see the skeleton of a dark and disturbing story about who the Doctor is and who he could be, but the book’s choices simply don’t take us to the centre of that, instead ticking off creepy images and famous murders to speed-run a bit of atmosphere. Matrix is hardly terrible (it has that atmosphere after all) but it makes the sort of awkward missteps that a full series might later course correct. The Past Doctor Adventures simply don’t have that luxury.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #10 – Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#5
Illegal Alien
By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Daleks! No, wait, it’s the other one. Cybermen weren’t as elusive in print as the pepperpots, but it still feels like a coup for them to show up this early in BBC Books, and in the same month as the Daleks, no less.

Before we get to them, however, it’s worth saying that Illegal Alien is a bit of a milestone. The Seventh Doctor and Ace represented the show’s present when the New Adventures came along. Their stories were the direction Doctor Who was going in, to the extent that it could move without TV screens. Now they are part of its past, and we will only visit them on occasional jollies, handing them back afterwards like a couple of tuckered out grandkids. It’s a subtle change of context but, when you’re used to following the evolution of the strange little chap with the funny umbrella, it’s a noticeable one.

Now we’re getting the Doctor and Ace as they were on telly: thick as thieves and looking for trouble. Who better to write that than someone who worked on the show, and while we’re at it, co-wrote a non-fiction book about Ace with Sophie Aldred? So here comes effects guru Mike Tucker — along with Robert Perry — to bring back memories.

Illegal Alien does this literally and figuratively. It’s set during the Blitz, which is a good call from a character point of view since Ace is a tough Londoner with a keen eye for prejudice; in the shadow of the Nazis she soon has cause to remember her friend Manisha getting bombed out by racists. (See Ghost Light.) There are a few moments where she — not so subtly, it must be said — recalls recent history, for instance wondering how her grandmother is getting on. (See The Curse Of Fenric.) And of course, pitting Ace against another famous Doctor Who monster brings to mind the time she introduced a Dalek to a baseball bat. (See Remembrance Of The you-know-who.)

The Doctor is treading faintly familiar steps as well. He indulges an apparent interest in American culture — this time baseball rather than jazz, see The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis — in his breezy interactions with a black barman. (See Remembrance again.) Later, he dusts off his chess skills against the villain of the piece. (See Fenric again.) I’m not complaining about these reference points, by the way. It makes sense for someone versed in the era to steep their novel in it. The early New Adventures were all over this as well. Tucker and Perry are no slouches at capturing the characters’ voices in general, but all this era window-dressing undoubtedly helps.

Not that I would exactly call Illegal Alien a character piece. With its spooky Cybermen stalking around an easily identifiable, highly atmospheric setting, it’s trad as heck, and it tends never to be far away from its next action sequence. You’re thrown right into that with a bit of first person narration courtesy of Cody McBride, a down on his luck American PI in London. (Circa 1940, so very down on his luck, then.) McBride’s inner monologue might as well come with a boozy jazz accompaniment; at one point he recalls a girl back home named Dolores who, “if he’d asked, would have married him there and then.” After following a crashed spaceship he then thinks of the local law enforcement: “Of all the strange, glowing, flying-sphere-filled bomb craters in all the world, Mullen had to walk into [mine].” I don’t know if Terrance Dicks ever had the time or inclination to read other people’s Who novels, but he’d surely have enjoyed this one — partly because of Cody, partly because he also wrote a Seventh Doctor and Ace vs the Nazis book, but mostly because there are a couple of Cybermen in this disguised as gangsters. (Not a joke. The man would have stood up and applauded.)

There’s lots of goofy, meaty excitement to be had here, what with a confused Cyberman on the run committing random murders (and smearing itself with all the blood and gore — lovely) and Cybermats, converted from local wildlife, carrying out targeted killings. Combined with the unmistakeable squalor of Blitz London, the general ordure brings to mind The Bodysnatchers — and sure enough, Illegal Alien is another BBC Book that a younger me actually bothered to read in 1997, happily hooked by its horrors. Cybermen have a tendency to be very nasty in print, as Iceberg and Killing Ground showed over at Virgin, and they continue that trend here, not only with the berserk Cyber-Leader ripping apart vagrants, but in the perhaps inevitable scene delving into the awful transformation from human to machine. (Here, like Mark Morris with his Skarasen rampage, Tucker and Perry arguably go too far by introducing a converted baby.) While I think you could make the point and still rein it in a little, I nonetheless appreciate it when authors push the Cybermen to a place that Daleks don’t go. As perennial runners up of Doctor Who monsterdom, they could use that distinction.

Atmosphere, action, getting the era right… you can tell what I’m about to say, right? And yes, the odd one out here is plot. Because there’s not much that actually interests Cybermen, it’s perhaps hard to find labyrinthine ways to tell stories about them. Illegal Alien lands on a simple enough structure: some Cybermen wound up here more or less by accident, and some overzealous humans have tried to take advantage. (To their credit, they did surprisingly well in the Not Getting Converted department.) The bulk of the book comes down to finding out who is pulling what string, and what they want out of it. While that’s not uninteresting, in execution it perhaps belies a shortcoming with getting a writer who has hands on, very practical experience of making the programme: we very authentically capture the feeling of moving between half a dozen sets, over and over again, until enough has been revealed or it’s time for another cliffhanger. McBride spends about a quarter of it in a prison cell off screen, perhaps giving us the verisimilitude of an actor on holiday that week.

Eventually the story gets crazy and relocates to a Nazi stronghold on Jersey — which is good character fodder for Ace, obviously, but also low hanging fruit, commentary-on-the-evils-of-mankind-wise, especially coming so suddenly in the last act. It’s even more conspicuous when you remember that Virgin Publishing, as well as already producing the proverbial Really Good Seventh Doctor WW2 Book in Exodus, went and did it again in Just War, and they set that one in the Channel Islands. (Messrs Tucker and Perry can at least claim to have done “the Nazis get their hands on modern technology because of Ace” before Big Finish, but Steve Lyons — who has surely read this — would get more out of it when writing Colditz.)

Much of Illegal Alien seems to be about just understanding the assignment, and there really is something to be said for the characterisation of the Doctor in this, hewing closer to the calculating yet loveable presence he was before the New Adventures looked under the hood. At one point he charms the occupants of an air raid shelter by “conducting an off-key choir with a stick of rhubarb”; at another he (inevitably) turns out to have gamed his chess playing to achieve a secret result. That said, a moment where McBride correctly guesses at the Doctor’s inner darkness all in one go does not convince, and conversely I’m not sure I buy the Doctor’s obliviousness with the villain of the piece, needing to have the penny dropped for him by McBride. They’re going for a pretty obvious Moriarty thing here, and although the secret malefactor is not an unwelcome creation — wanting knowledge for its own sake and causing an Allies/Nazi Cyber-arms race to get there — they overdo the misdirecting wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly thing, making it seem rather unlikely that he’d actually be steeped in so much wrongdoing. Hey ho: I know he comes back in a Tucker/Perry sequel, which I also read years back. Maybe he’s a bona fide stinker there.

You get bang for your buck monster-wise, atmosphere-wise and this-feels-like-they-could-have-made-it-on-the-telly-(with heavy editing)-wise. But with all the memberberries I can’t help considering if other stories did some of these things better, and the wrench from a fairly bloody runaround to a sudden Nazi showdown left me feeling less than satisfied with it as a coherent whole. If you’re into what Illegal Alien has to offer after a chapter or two, though, you ought to enjoy following it between its bombed-out set pieces.

6/10