Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #74 – Who Killed Kennedy by James Stevens and David Bishop

NB: Since its original release, Who Killed Kennedy has been somewhat rewritten by David Bishop as he wasn’t happy with the ending.  It’s kindly available for free here, along with generous author’s notes.  I got the original book before I knew all that, however, so I might as well read that first.  I’ll give the new version a look at some point.

Who Killed Kennedy

By James Stevens and David Bishop

I suspect most Doctor Who fans have a love-hate thing with continuity.  It’s nice to be reminded of something from long ago, and done well it can put the present into context.  (There’s a lot to be said for emotional continuity in particular, since life revolves around that.)  But you can have too much of a nice thing, and this one quickly becomes just a meaningless pat on the back.  Hey look, it’s that thing from Doctor Who!  Both you and I recognise it!  Aren’t we experts!  Well, sure, but you’re here to make something new, not win a quiz.  That’s the feeling I often get from reference-fests, the absolute bottom rung of fiction based on a famous property.

Who Killed Kennedy is full of continuity.  It’s practically made of it.  We’re talking an absolutely obsessed, all-aboard-the-continuity-train trek through Doctor Who history: the more of it you recognise, the better.  But this is no lazy remembrance.  20 years before Love And Monsters, David Bishop (and uh, James Stevens – wink) gave us a view from the trenches of aliens running amok on Earth.  As with that underrated episode, it’s a bloody good idea.

Doctor Who being the plot-driven monster-of-the-week show it is (or we can hope, was?), not a lot of effort was made to show real life and how it was affected by monsters and aliens.  The decision to maroon the Doctor on Earth necessitated all the threats hitting us at home, which made for some compelling scary stuff; Jon Pertwee famously thought that was how you made good Doctor Who, and many agreed.  The problem is that a bizarre number of invasions and disasters had to happen in quick succession.  Well, you’d notice, wouldn’t you?  You can’t write everything off as a gas leak or a mass hallucination.  London had already endured mass panic in The War Machines, The Web Of Fear and The Invasion before we even got here, but there was a degree of safety in zooming off to other times and places afterwards, and betting the audience wasn’t keeping score.  The Pertwee era changed that.

Who Killed Kennedy puts a journalist in that time – dated sensibly around when those episodes were transmitted, because who needs the UNIT Dating headache.  He gradually joins the dots between these monstrous threats, the shadowy UNIT organisation and a series of agents called the Doctor.  The book makes the quite valid point that while all this is (to us) clearly a struggle between good and evil, it would look like a terrifying mess to anyone else.  The political climate gets steadily and understandably worse, as the government is obviously failing to repel these seemingly random attacks and various efforts at world peace have gone awry.  (Because nothing says “high stakes” like “Generically-Named World Peace Conference.”)  UNIT are doing their bit, but in secret, and with no qualms about rebuffing any investigations into the truth.  Again this is for obvious reasons, but how would that look?  Probably less like Doctor Who and more like The X-Files.  James Stevens is understandably dubious about what’s really going on.

For all my complaints about continuity for the sake of it, there’s a thrill to recognising one disaster after another, and even more so when Bishop cleverly sneaks his character into the stories themselves: Stevens is the bloke on the phone in Spearhead From Space, and even has a bit part in The Mind Of Evil!  We get to revisit those events, not just by lingering on the consequences – such as the political fallout from the plague in Doctor Who And The Silurians – but by meeting the participants.  Stevens interviews some characters from Inferno, meets Liz Shaw after her time with the Doctor, and most pointedly gets to know Dodo, still suffering from her breakdown in The War Machines.  Who Killed Kennedy lingers on consequences in a way you just don’t expect in Doctor Who, which is a pretty unassailable excuse for reminding us about all these old episodes.

The picture it builds is the sort of thing you’d get on a conspiracy nut’s wall: random pictures and scraps of information, sprawled over a huge map and connected by string.  But it makes admirable sense.  You realise The War Machines and The Faceless Ones happened on the same day – so two Doctors were running about at the same time.  The Seventh Doctor’s ruckus in Remembrance Of The Daleks is what led to UNIT happening in the first place.  The leftover technology from The Invasion is what led to Britain making such waves in space in The Ambassadors Of Death.  The peace conference in The Day Of The Daleks was even more necessary after the disasters in The Mind Of Evil, and so on.  It’s compelling stuff, forcing a coincidental string of plots happening by necessity into a coherent shape.  It’s difficult not to feel for Stevens as he stays firmly on the side of UNIT-mandated ignorance.

Of course as impressive as it is, there are limits to what this story can achieve.  At best, Stevens will inevitably learn that UNIT meant well after all, and will probably end up keeping their secrets for them.  That happens – along with him encountering the Doctor, albeit mostly via the phone.  But more antagonism is needed, so we have C19: an even shadowier bunch who give UNIT a worse name, and make Stevens’ life a hell.  It’s difficult to be sure where one ends and the other begins, what with UNIT’s need for secrecy, and David Bishop plays on that uncertainty for much of the book.  (I must admit it’s a bit disappointing that we need to invent an even more sinister back-drop for UNIT who can then take the fall, when the impetus of the book is surely how UNIT and the Doctor looked to a real person at that time.  But as above, I can see why it was done.)

Stevens tells the whole thing in first person, “unashamedly” as per the preface.  It’s a satisfyingly immediate style you don’t see a lot of in Doctor Who fiction (and licensed fiction in general, I’ll bet), and it helps make the world feel more coherent and believable.  All the same, Stevens is not an especially likeable or compelling guy.  He gets married for a green card / to spite his girlfriend’s well-to-do father, cheerfully cheats on her, and then generally prefers his job to everything else.  His personal motto is “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”, which gives some indication as to the level of wit in the prose.  Unashamedly nasty C19 thugs say things like “We’re going to have to take care of you – permanently”.  A supportive character lamely finishes their thought with: “Good luck, Mr Stevens.  You’re going to need it!”  Escaping from the very same corrupt institution he’s been trying to track down, The Glasshouse, Stevens returns with a host of TV cameras and is somehow surprised that the place is now completely empty – having apparently never seen a spy movie before.  And shortly before the love of his life is murdered, she poignantly tells him she has some important news, but she’ll tell him later; can it be any surprise at all that she’s a) pregnant and b) dead before she can tell him?  It’s a pulpy, noiry read with Stevens standing in for any number of down-on-their-luck, don’t-give-a-damn PIs with a crummy office, who ultimately you like (if at all) in spite of themselves.  There are few recurring characters and there isn’t much room for character development, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the book is a bit blunt in its approach to people.

As to the plot, because there must ultimately be one besides a long trip down Continuity Lane, of course it has something to do with the assassination of Kennedy.  The book opens with a highly evocative “What If?” about Kennedy having survived his day in Dallas, and the subsequent rise in world tensions leading to Armageddon.  Who Killed Kennedy eventually boils away to whether or not Stevens believes Kennedy should die to preserve history.  But I don’t think enough work goes into this portion of the story, and Bishop seemed to agree, as it’s the main reason for re-jigging it later.  Like the later Red Dwarf episode, Tikka To Ride, this story hinges on Kennedy’s death being a necessary part of human history, but the book spends so long (entertainingly) piecing together Doctor Who history that this is more or less presented as fact and left at that.  Stevens, of course, knows this stuff inside and out, and even writes a book on it during these events, but we are mostly left out of the loop.  It just seems conspicuous next to the rest of the story.  Case in point, before he goes on his fateful voyage Stevens is so run down that he is ready to take his own life.  Immediately after coming back, he goes right back to holding the revolver to his head.

Even worse is the Master’s plan to reverse all this, which is circuitous and vague even for him.  The Doctor speculates that it’s intended to disrupt his own personal history – since we all know Doctor Who began the day after Kennedy was shot.  But would that really affect Ian and Barbara’s decision to drop by Totters Lane, and the Doctor’s flight from Earth?  (Is it a meta reference to the assassination’s effect on TV scheduling at the time?)  What, otherwise, would the Master have to gain from this, unless he’s able to view another version of history and decided he likes that one better?  Isn’t the whole thing more like the Monk’s MO than his?  The enterprise ultimately plays out like an attempt to make James Stevens conflicted and miserable.  The Master, cheerfully monologuing from afar, hasn’t seemed this petty since he tried to disrupt the Magna Carta for teh lolz.  (This also doesn’t really tie up with the Master’s next TV episode, where the Doctor drops in on his supposed prison.  Yes, the Master has secretly been coming and going at his leisure, but the Doctor clearly doesn’t know that yet.  And his casual insistence over a phone-call that Stevens pop back in time and stop the Master – because for some reason he can’t? – is also weirdly incongruous.  “Cheers, James.  Also, can you get milk?  Sorry I can’t do it, only I’ve got a thing.”)

It still just about holds together, especially with the evocative revelation at the very end.  (Note that the title is a statement, not a question.)  But despite ongoing hints about C19, the alternate-future preface and Kennedy’s death affecting James’ entire life (occurring on his 18^th birthday), it still comes out of left-field.  Ditto, if I’m honest, the Dodo thing.  Who Killed Kennedy is so infamous for what happens to Dodo, as is The Man In The Velvet Mask, I knew about it decades before reading it and knowing nothing else about the book.  Oh, you thought Dodo getting a non-lethal space-STD was bad?  Well, we’re going for broke this time.  She gets murdered, incidentally while pregnant.  And that’s just the bit everybody remembers.  Following The War Machines, Dodo had an even bigger breakdown and wound up with massive memory loss – she doesn’t remember the Doctor and her travels seem like dreams.  She didn’t have anywhere to live and wound up in a cruel mental “hospital” run by the Master.  She was almost raped by an orderly, inadvertently killed him, then wound up destitute.  Her only ray of hope was a chance meeting with James Stevens, whom she feels she can help with information, but it’s unclear how much of that is the Master’s doolally plan.  Either way she gets the most ignominious death of a Doctor Who companion, with the possible exception of Bret Vyon, but even that gave future writers something to work with.

Hey, I get it.  Nobody liked Dodo.  The character as originally written gave us nothing to invest in, and demonstrably little for Jackie Lane to work with.  But it’s just plain poor taste to go after a character like that, especially in subsequent books.  Making life worse for someone you know the audience will side against is a much too easy goal, and it’s the sort of fannish impulse Who Killed Kennedy otherwise (arguably) rises above.  There’s also an uncomfortably sexist air about gleefully doing all this to a young woman.  Yes, it raises the stakes, but the book seems more lurid for going down that route.

So I don’t love all the choices it makes.  There are plenty of moments that work really well, like the gradual descent of a random UNIT officer into mental distress and insanity; another little real world consequence you wouldn’t consider when watching, say, Terror Of The Autons.  I’d say the subversive stuff that works about Who Killed Kennedy largely outweighs the nastily obvious talking point, and the somewhat tacked-on plot.  It’s a strange and interesting companion piece to Doctor Who’s time on Earth, and the sort of experiment licensed fiction could do with more of.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #73 – The Eye Of The Giant by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#21

The Eye Of The Giant

By Christopher Bulis

I’ll say this for Christopher Bulis: he’s not afraid to try different things.  From the horse’s mouth, in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, he liked to write for different Doctors in case Virgin’s editors got “bored” with him.  Naturally he became a recurring nuisance for the Missing Adventures, and he’s been largely successful, not just at tackling different eras of the show but at making an interesting go of each book.

I loved the pace and the escalation of Shadowmind, and the moral oddness of its “monsters”.  I really enjoyed the colour and the cattiness of State Of Change.  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an exception, for me at least, in that it tried to make something new by just putting different clichés next to each other, but it was at least a different kind of First Doctor story.  The Eye Of The Giant is the first Bulis book to really focus on the era details, producing something that feels not only like it could have come from Season Seven, but is a necessary piece of the series that somehow went missing.  (A missing... something or other.)  It is also, for me at least, Bulis back on form.

But maybe not right away.  After a largely forgettable prologue that handles a space battle about as generically as possible, we plunge into a 1930s adventure that feels so like King Kong that Bulis must reference it and make the whole expedition a response to it.  A group of filmmakers (surprisingly enough!) arrive on a mysterious island full of giant monsters.  What are the odds?  The somewhat shaky start continues as he introduces far too many characters in too short a time – including a movie producer, his saintly daughter, his fading actress / second wife, plus sundry crewmen and film personnel.  Things get more interesting as the story ping-pongs back to Pertwee-era UNIT, where the Doctor finds a lump of extremely radioactive rock that, in conjunction with his old Time Space Visualiser, forms a gateway into the past.  If you think the Doctor using a dangerous method to travel in space and time (since his TARDIS isn’t working) sounds a lot like Inferno, then you and Liz would get along fine: “Doctor, you nearly got stranded in that parallel universe the console took you to, remember?”  Well gee, I think he might!  The ultra-subtle writing includes, need you ask, a description of the Doctor’s “shock of white hair”.

Sure enough, the Doctor and Liz end up in the ’30s.  And it’s worth pointing out what a pleasure it is to have these two characters together.  Liz was gone too soon – fortunately Caroline John seemed not to bear a grudge – and her brand of scientific rapport with the Doctor isn’t something we get a lot of.  (Of course, that’s why she went away.)  There are many moments in this where the two of them discuss a problem on almost equal terms.  When it comes to the action and derring-do that make up much of the Doctor’s life, Liz is playful, and almost scornful of it in a way no other companion would be: “Isn’t escaping the sort of Boy’s Own thing you do in circumstances like this?”  Season Seven didn’t keep the Doctor and his new friend together all that much, having him in a coma, negotiating with Silurians underground, going into space or getting lost in a parallel universe.  An argument could be, and probably was made that two such similar intellects cancel each other out.  So it’s a rare treat to have the two of them mucking in, investigating and surviving dangers in their slightly more thoughtful Doctor-and-Liz way.

Their involvement isn’t quite as much barging into the middle of things as usual, and they become more like supporting characters in an Arthur Conan Doyle adventure novel.  (Which is also to say that the ’30s characters, although entertainingly written, are staunchly archetypal.)  I loved The Lost World, so the mysterious trek around Salutua, encountering various giant creatures and odd aliens, added up to a fun read for me.  The Doctor and Liz inevitably fall out of favour with their new friends, but oddly not when they announce they’re from the future.  (A weird move from the Doctor, but then he’s quite big on being honest.)  There are ulterior motives for the film crew’s mission, which have the slight feeling of being improvised in places, and soon the Doctor and Liz are locked up.  But their captors feel terrible and, uh, let them out again?

The Eye Of The Giant has an interesting take on villainy: for the most part, there isn’t any.  The giant animals and insects are just going about their business; when a few of them are inevitably killed for sport or out of panic, I couldn’t help rooting for the creatures.  What appears to be the “villain”, who has his own reasons for wanting a closer look at the island, has basically positive reasons for unlocking an alien power.  (It’s also bitterness for his own past mistakes, so yeah, he’ll probably turn out to be a megalomaniac eventually.)  When somebody else puts it to use, it’s purely for selfish reasons due to their litany of hang-ups and neuroses, but the world they could create with these powers – more or less as a side effect of their ego and what the alien wanted in the first place – would be mostly peaceful, even quite advanced.  Said character is petty and especially bitter towards the film producer’s daughter for being too nice, and not noticeably hating her back.  In one eyebrow-raising moment, she thinks “just once like to see her break down and admit what she felt about being crippled.”  But she’s not a stereotypically evil person, just a broken and bitter one.  Which is much more interesting.

And then we have the aliens.  A long ago feud over a theft has left the titular giant waiting underground; weird, jelly-like aliens are trying to kill him.  His stolen cargo is what caused the gigantic creatures on the island… and none of that is a plan to destroy the Earth, which is a refreshing change.  Brokk, the giant, is an opportunist: he’ll destroy those who get in his way, but he’d sooner just get out of here.  The Semquess have every right to want their stuff back.  Humanity is just in the middle.  It feels weirdly incidental, which is a different sort of scale for Doctor Who.

And yet, Bulis still manages to rope the whole world into trouble, simply by sending the Doctor and Liz back to take part in the story.  Ghostly hallucinations keep appearing in the present, of buildings and people that shouldn’t exist.  It’s pretty obvious that time travel is the cause of this, but this is a very creative use of that plot device, making sport of it in a way that Doctor Who didn’t often dare.  What should be a barmy contrivance – I mean, the Time Space Visualiser?! – ends up being vital.  And it gives Bulis plenty of excuses to keep his story going: just when you think it’s a simple case of trying to survive the island and solve the mystery, it turns out the island is due to explode any minute, and the Brigadier must warn the Doctor somehow!  Then when they sort it all out and get back home, time has changed, and they must avoid being erased from existence!  And then when they must go back and put things back how they should be, even that doesn’t seem to work, and then…

It’s probably worth mentioning the book is nearly 320 pages long.  And you can see how.  But in a funny way, the plot’s sprawling nature – not limited to pretty much forgetting about the giant insects halfway through – only makes it feel more like Season Seven.  The Silurians, The Ambassadors Of Death and especially Inferno had ideas that tallied with what they were about, but still seemed suspiciously added-in-later.  (Looking at you, Primords.  And well, that whole parallel universe thing, really.)  By the time The Eye Of The Giant got to its third climax, I could spot boredom on the horizon, but Bulis keeps things rollicking sufficiently that I didn’t mind.

My favourite thing about it is, bizarrely enough, the continuity: this feels not so much like an awkward repeat of Inferno, featuring another disappearing Doctor and parallel Earth, but an answer to it.  (Ambassadors sort of does that for Silurians, now that you mention it.)  The Brigadier isn’t having any of that again, so it’s (improbably!) him operating the gateway just to make sure they’re all right, with the help of Osgood, best known for another Doctor Who story where his entire mission is to prevent a thing from blowing up.  The Brigadier happily sends Yates through to get the Doctor and Liz back, and when they refuse because they have work to do, he’s ready to wait and send more help.  He has faith in the Doctor, and at the end, even insists he gets the TARDIS working so he has a less dangerous method of getting about!  With the stealthy introduction of Sergeant Yates – not, to my surprise, promoted to Captain at any point, unless I missed it? – the whole thing feels like a transition from the grim military tone of Season Seven to the UNIT Family of Season Eight.  There’s a jolly feeling of “Here we go again”, and everyone knowing how to work with one another, and cope with all this danger and weirdness.

You’re definitely in jolly romp territory with this one.  It’s slight.  But The Eye Of The Giant manages a few interesting character moments anyway, like Nancy’s inherent lack of empathy, and the Doctor’s surprisingly matter-of-fact view that if some people aren’t meant to survive these events, it may be up to him to ensure that’s how it goes.  (Fortunately he doesn’t have to test his theory.)  The for-the-most-part lack of obvious villainy is a delight, and even though it sometimes feels like it’s hitting the Reset button, I enjoyed the story’s nearly bottomless reserve of jeopardy.  Bulis gets the most out of his Pertwee one-shot, and you’re likely to have a good time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #72 – Death And Diplomacy by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#49

Death And Diplomacy

By Dave Stone

Death And Diplomacy.  At last.

This is sort of a big deal for me: possibly my first ever Doctor Who novel.  It looks well loved, but sadly it isn’t; I just have vague memories of looking at it and wondering who those people were on the cover.  (I sure as hell knew who they weren’t.)  I remember almost nothing about the prose or how far I got, other than simply not recognising it as Doctor Who and thus losing interest.  It seemed “adult” in some unsavoury ways.  (Which of course it’s supposed to be, but young Doctor Who fans are still going to pick it up, aren’t they?)  As to the book’s rough state, I can only assume it has gone off.

I wasn’t the only fragile young fanboy who felt squicked out by the New Adventures, although I doubt many others picked the 49th in the series to start off, and a Dave Stone at that.  Any road, it was a bewildering first impression that put me off them almost for good.  I was young and I was wrong.  I like a lot of relatively weird books now that I wouldn’t have countenanced back then, including Dave Stone’s marmite debut.  (And, y’know, lots of stuff that isn’t Doctor Who.)  Finally, Death And Diplomacy has a fighting chance.  So what the hell is it?

In young me’s defence, it’s weird.  The book opens with a wordy author’s note about the nature of trilogies, then a series of quotes including something in untranslated Italian, a paradox loop and a Woody Allen sex joke.  After a complicated introduction to a galactic stand-off involving three alien races and some gigantic god monsters, we catch up with Bernice – naked in a blob of alien cow dung on an unknown world.  (Actually, I remember that bit...)  Then Chris and Roz show up, also nude but on a different planet.  The Doctor is alone in the TARDIS – clothes in tact, thank the maker – utterly puzzled and with an invitation to a galactic peace conference.  It’s all suitably irreverent.

The characters are as much in the dark as we are, which is quite handy for any befuddled readers.  But before long, Death And Diplomacy settles down into something quite easy to follow.  (This may be why it tries so hard to make a weird first impression, what with it following the infamous Sky Pirates!)  The gist is as follows: the Doctor is at the peace conference thanks to a mysterious invite.  (If you’re about say “Hang on, didn’t we just do that in The Empire Of Glass?”, Dave Stone has it covered.  Got to wonder if he was a bit miffed when Andy Lane submitted his book, though.)  Bernice is alone on a nearby world until she bumps into the only human for parsecs, Jason Kane.  Together they make their way to the conference, rightly assuming that’s where the Doctor will be and learning much about each other en route.  Roz and Chris are in virtually the same situation – without all the funny business – but they end up joining the local military, and they’re soon on the very planet the three races are fighting over.  And that, plotly speaking, is it for the most part.  After all these years, I anticipated a bit more outrage.  A headache, at least.

As is often the case with New Adventures, there’s a certain variety that comes with having to chop between different settings.  Dave Stone balances it better than some: by all means jump between places and people, but at least keep the chapters focusing on one thing at a time!  It’s jauntily paced, and there’s a lot of fun in putting the Doctor in the role of a mediator (which now that you mention it, he didn’t actually do in The Empire Of Glass), particularly when one of the leaders tries to spy on him using tiny insect cameras and finds the Time Lord staring through one right at him, before arriving at his door with a handful of broken cameras and an invitation to talk.  The three leaders are somewhat archetypal – a schemer, a no-nonsense warrior woman, a muscular soldier – but they have an interesting journey as they come to recognise the worth of their subordinates, themselves and each other.  There’s a recurring joke where members of each race turn out to be spies for one of the others, or double agents, and no one can remember who started where.  That all helps the general theme of breaking down divisions and recognising a real problem that could unite them – like those pesky giant “gods”.  The Doctor makes numerous references to no longer being the Machiavellian game-player, and he recognises someone doing just that.  I’m not sure I believe he’ll change his ways, although change is obviously afoot in the New Adventures; nonetheless, I like that he simply gets on with his mission, making no bones about wanting the best possible solution, banging the leaders’ heads together if necessary.

Of course this isn’t the main event: Bernice meets Jason Kane, who in the years since Death And Diplomacy has become an important and frequent footnote in Bernice’s story.  (Not to mention, in Big Finish, a substitute for the Doctor in a few book adaptations.)  No amount of spoiler-avoidance can save me knowing he won’t be here forever, so I was a bit dubious about the character.  And… that hasn’t entirely gone away.

Jason is snarky, funny, easily irritated and as prolific an alien debaucher as Captain Kirk.  (Just kidding: Captain Kirk’s reputation was significantly blown out of proportion.)  In the time honoured rom-com tradition, he and Bernice mostly get on each other’s nerves, until a significant moment when they share their family tragedies.  Rom-coms are a pretty good template for the speed of romance in this.  One book doesn’t seem like a long time to me, but love stories generally have to get on with it as fast possible; as I previously rationalised about Love And War, Ace fell for Jan mostly because she lives her life at TARDIS speeds, and any stability or contact must be grabbed as quickly as possible.  Bernice’s relationship with the Doctor had a more mature starting point than Ace’s, she’s always seen him a little more clearly.  She hasn’t needed him around in order to grow as a person, or not as much as Ace did, so it’s only natural she’d think about other things she could do with her life, and other people she could spend it with.  She’s enough of a veteran to begrudge almost the whole thing anyway, right up to the wedding proposal.  Which, okay, that is bloody quick, isn’t it?

They have a degree of chemistry, quite literally as Stone gets into probably the most detailed sex scenes in the New Adventures (so far), and some of my uncertainty is just the damn impossible to shift knowledge of what’s to come.  Plus, the crucial moment when Bernice and Jason acknowledge their feelings is the work of a third party – a comedy villain, sick of observing the two of them clumsily building bridges and so espousing the obvious to shut them up.  I’m not a fan of characterisation being parroted back at the characters, and even though this is pretty funny, it’s standing in for such a crucial moment that it felt a little like cheating.

Stone is a good author for Bernice – referred to throughout as Benny, even when using her middle name, which just looks wrong – being always on the lookout for a funny bit of dialogue.  Bernice taketh no nonsense, or prisoners here: “A twinge of conscience had her wondering uneasily if the driver would freeze to death despite his fur, but that hadn’t stopped her from cutting down the leather jacket and trews to roughly her size, with the serrated knife that the driver had held to her throat.”  And obviously the banter with Jason is combative and fun: “‘Renaissance man, me.  You may kiss my ring.’  He held out a sardonic hand.  ‘And you can kiss mine, sunshine,’ said Benny.  ‘I see the spirit of the music halls is not yet dead,’ said Jason.”  There’s a charming sense of panic about Bernice in this, as she realises she really-probably-definitely-maybe is actually going to commit to somebody.  I’m excited to read about the big day in Happy Endings – like I have a choice – and for where Bernice will go after this.  Which I know will not include all the remaining Doctor Who New Adventures.  (Boo!  A pox on thee!)

As for Roz and Chris, at one point it’s noted that they have been “simply discarded at random and forgotten about”, and… yup.  It’s not their novel – not many of them are.  Stone still does his best to make it count, facing Roz with the slavery of the Czhanos race and using it to highlight her own feelings of racial superiority.  Chris, as usual, is more of an adorable extra.  “‘I’m not sure I like this, Roz,’ he said as she arrived.  ‘I keep thinking the trees are going to grow friendly cartoon faces.’  ‘I’d have thought you’d be in your element,’ said Roz.  ‘Maybe if we hang on long enough we can find some happy lovely fluffy bunnies for you to be friends with.’”  There’s an amusing revelation when a species of cuddly little aliens turn out to be megalomaniacs, and their cartoonish world is actually a façade, but I seem to be waiting in vain for a similar kind of reversal to occur with Chris.

Chris is as Chris does, I suppose, and Dave Stone is similarly guilt-free about making this book fun wherever possible.  He indulges in lots of silly asides (although not quite with the determination of Sky Pirates!, which had a fully-formed silliness that set it apart from most New Adventures), happily tossing in references to Alien, Blazing Saddles and… er, Pinky And The Brain.  (Just kidding, I love Pinky And The Brain.)  The ridiculous villains are a good excuse for all that, though they come into it pretty late, and they’re perhaps a little too silly for some of the ideas he throws into the mix – like their brutal method for controlling people, and the fact that they’ve orchestrated unimaginable conflict for somewhat petty reasons.  The book isn’t too concerned with anything, what with its measured pace, and the odd preoccupation the text has with looking ahead; it’s always saying that people reflected on such-and-such actions “later on”, thus tacitly reminding us that they will survive to do so.  Given Dave Stone’s very deliberate writing style – owing lots to Pratchett, Adams and no doubt some less obvious sources – the book isn’t as polished as it could be, with a number of typos and missing words piling up towards the end.  (When New Adventures have that problem, it’s usually at the back end of the book.)  It’s still very funny, with only the occasional comedic swing and a miss, like a reference to “porking away like a paraplegic butcher”.  (Hey, you knew you were getting marmite.)  For good measure, the very last line is a hilarious dig at Love And War that’s almost worth the whole courtship.

For all its wacky touches, Death And Diplomacy is more slight than its predecessor, in what is certainly a very loose trilogy if it is one at all.  Misunderstandings form an important part of the story, if you want to try to find some Jane Austen-ness besides the title.  Otherwise it operates in the loose clothes of a standard Doctor Who adventure, with a peace conference getting hijacked and a race (or three) needing Doctorly liberation.  With its overtones of change – for the way the Doctor goes about his business, and obviously Bernice’s future – it’s novel to look at a familiar kind of story and draw the focus in new ways.  These books should evolve, especially approaching the 50 mark.  Death And Diplomacy does that, though it never strays too far from just being a bit of a laugh.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #71 – The English Way Of Death by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#20

The English Way Of Death

By Gareth Roberts

Gareth Roberts returns, and he is unlikely to leave until you agree that Season 17 was actually pretty good.  And that you’re sorry for what you said about The Creature From The Pit.

The English Way Of Death is his second Missing Adventure with the Fourth Doctor and Romana, the era when Douglas Adams was on staff and a trip to Paris scored the show’s highest ratings yet.  It was all good fun, apart from some unfortunate production values and maybe a little too much Adamsian snark – not to mention not getting the finale they wanted, and having to make The Horns Of Nimon instead.  As with his last MA, The English Way Of Death reminds you how indomitable this Doctor / companion combo was, as well as highlighting Roberts’ knack for the era and comic writing in general.  No wonder Big Finish adapted these books.

I heard both plays before reading the books, and I thought this was the lesser of the two.  It had a less action-packed plot and a general Wodehousian sameness in its characters.  There is also a little too much crossover between the stories, as both feature a disembodied villain-of-the-week with a silly sci-fi name.  (This time it’s Zodaal-the-zombie-creating-gas-of-doom, rather than Xais-the-super-power-granting-death-mask.)  But perhaps I’d look down on The Romance Of Crime for that if I’d heard them the other way around.

Anyway, whereas The Romance Of Crime begs to be performed, The English Way Of Death is maybe better off in print.  It’s absolutely entrenched in P.G. Wodehouse (and so, by proxy, Douglas Adams), being set in 1930s England and featuring a host of high society caricatures.  They seem to benefit from having their pompous and silly opinions wittering on in prose, as opposed to just being a bunch of pompous and silly (and so pretty two dimensional) characters in a play.

The prose is an absolute shindig from start to finish.  Roberts lives for characters that find each other irritating, which can simply make you hate them all; Tragedy Day and Zamper could have detonated their casts for all I cared, and The Romance Of Crime forgot to include anybody sympathetic.  But the irritation in English Way Of Death is primarily… well, English.  And it’s delightful.  We open on a misanthropic biscuit magnate (!) being forced to share a train journey with an eccentric buffoon, and this is full of witty snipes about the buffoon resembling a squirrel, and how the self-important Stackhouse wishes he’d taken the car to Nutchurch only it had “chosen the same moment as him to break down”.  Buckets of personality are poured into the (obviously doomed) Stackhouse, who can’t help following the bizarre Percival Closed across a beach, leading him to a spooky beach-hut.  The TARDIS-ey incongruity of said hut is left snazzily unsaid, and it leads to an arresting shock, as a weird green haze takes over Stackhouse’s body.  Closed, for reasons of plot, puts a lot of effort into seeming like a quaint Englishman, allowing Roberts to go nuts.  (We can obviously thank Ford Prefect for the name.)

Later we have a socially inept novelist/widow trying to ensnare a tedious Colonel – both of whom want to win the other over while neither is remotely impressed by the match.  Felicia Chater is a wonderfully pathetic creature, certain she can steer the conversation back to herself by leaving open her Tibetan exercise book, and wearily observing that “it was … so much more convenient to be married.  It means there is always somebody in the house for one to complain to.”  (I also loved the line “After a year spent in mourning – an unutterable bore but form was form…”)  The Colonel’s character pivots on his being an old bore, but a moment where he falls instantly for Romana made me hoot: “The Colonel knew he could never forget her.  His heart had melted into a sticky, pumping ball of goo.  As he watched her slender, boyish, betrousered figure heading off along the pavement the securities of his character, 58 years in the making, crumbled.”

Up against all the whimsical flippancy is the now possessed Stackhouse, who along with his zombified underlings shows a crassly hilarious disregard for passing as human.  I mean he is not trying at all.  They shamble, they rot, they clamour for brains; when a dangerous new contact asks if he’d like a drink, he says “I have no need of liquid sustenance.”  The contrast between high society and B-movie is amusing – getting in there well before Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, which I can’t countenance touching with a bargepole until I’ve actually read Austen – but it wears thin before very long.  (As does, I presume, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.)

Neatly joining the two very different worlds we have the Season 17 crew, whom we know Gareth Roberts can write with aplomb.  Their easy, sniping relationship is there in spades.  Romana on the Doctor’s overdue library books: “Oh yes, I’m sure there’ll be a great clamour for Febrile Diseases and Swine Judging For Beginners.”  And on their length of stay in the one place the Black Guardian is most likely to look for them: “‘After all, we’re only going to be staying a few hours, aren’t we, Doctor?’  The Doctor waved his hand effusively.  ‘Oh, minutes.’”  When looking for one another, both assume the other might have fallen down a hole, and after Romana makes a fatal error of judgement regarding Zodaal’s trustworthiness, the Doctor makes frequent light of her momentary uselessness.  There’s probably an argument to be made that theycre too combative here, but this might depend on which exact bit of the era you want captured: Tom and Lalla in love or Tom and Lalla wanting to push each other off a cliff.

Both are written sublimely by themselves.  The Doctor has that inimitable Tom Baker ability to make zero concessions for mere mortals, casually namedropping famous historical chums and scientific jargon and suddenly asking random strangers questions of deadly importance.  (Also spouting delightful rubbish: “‘Mrs Felicia Chater.  Widowed, in brackets.’  The Doctor sprang from his chair.  ‘How interesting.  I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in brackets.’”)  Romana strides around having virtually no need of the Doctor – except for those moments where a vital judgement call is needed and, I suppose, the Doctor just has more experience.  She rebuffs any romantic interest from the Colonel and has a low tolerance for just the sort of people she’s likely to meet in this book: “Deciding that anybody that couldn’t manage to open their front door was unlikely to pose an intergalactic threat, Romana shrugged and advanced.”  But even K9 seems to have his sass on this week, for instance throwing back the Doctor’s embarrassed accusation of going for unauthorised walkies with “Charge of wandering refuted.”  (Asking quite a lot of unnecessary questions later, he gets a deserved “Oh, shut up, K9” from the Doctor.)

There’s a lot of comedic potential and Roberts gets the most out of it, but you still need a plot to go with it.  He provides one, arguable similarity to The Romance Of Crime notwithstanding, but there isn’t much to it.  Stackhouse/Zodaal wants to destroy the world and thus enable his escape.  The Doctor and Romana, whilst investigating some time-travel malfeasance surrounding Percival Closed, need to put a stop to that.  Zodaal murders people and works on his doom-bringing machines in the meantime, while a wild card associate, Julia Orlostro, weighs up her own schemes.  There are some excellent dramatic highs (neatly fashioned in the old end-of-episode style), but there comes a point where Closed observes that he is facing “Another address, another frantic race through the streets with the Doctor at the wheel, another confrontation with the forces of evil.”  And, yeah; as is often the case with fourth wall pokery, just shrugging and saying “Hey, what can ya do?” doesn’t fix any of the problems.  Plot-wise The English Way Of Death runs in place from around the halfway point, and when you spend enough time with him, it’s apparent that Stackhouse/Zodaal isn’t going to win any Mr Interesting competitions.  (Also his Blow Up The World Machine takes its damn time.)  The kneejerk amusement of a bunch of ravenous zombies groaning through Jeeves & Wooster does eventually give way to wondering why a bunch of husks sharing the same mind are arguing with each other, and why brains are of any particular use to them.  In the end, it’s all a bit candyfloss.

It’s even more of a pastiche than The Romance Of Crime, going hell for leather with one particular setting and style.  The result is an often divine read, which at times made me think – yes!  This is how you do a Missing Adventure!  It’s just right for the era, and it’s a story well suited to a book!  But The English Way Of Death isn’t exactly shy about its lack of depth, and while depth isn’t a huge prerequisite for a comedy, it helps to sustain a novel.  Provided you like Wodehouse riffs, Roberts should just about keep the comedic bubble from bursting.  It’s just less of a fun rush by the time you’re finished.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #70 – SLEEPY by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#48

SLEEPY

By Kate Orman

Misleading title much?  Kate Orman’s third book, SLEEPY, moves at roughly the speed of a rollercoaster in freefall.  I’m a quick reader at the best of times – it helps with marathons – and I had to deliberately slow down to appreciate this one.  That should probably bother me more, but after the lengthy exercise in self-dentistry that was The Man In The Velvet Mask I’m not about to look a gift horse in the proverbial.

It probably goes without saying that we skip the bit where the TARDIS lands and the characters get involved – that’s needless faff by most New Adventures’ standards, and Kate Orman is having none of it.  The first chapter (there isn’t a prologue – pinch me) immediately has the Doctor psychically bewildered and confusing reality with a dream-state.  This is excitingly disorientating, with snippets of the real world to make it clear how much this is distressing Bernice, Roz and Chris; that note of warmth is especially welcome after Warchild, or Andrew Cartmel Refuses To Play With Anybody Else: Part 3.  It’s a sock-you-in-the-jaw way to open the proceedings, which involve a young colony world suffering an outbreak of psychic powers.  The whole crisis feels somewhat lived-in before we even arrive, with divisions among the colonists and “powers” being received in different ways, and Orman’s absolute crusade to eliminate dead air means that by Chapter 3 the Doctor co. already have a pretty good idea whose fault the whole thing is.  I don’t think a New Adventure has rollicked this determinedly since Exodus.

It would be fair to say it’s plot-driven, then, which makes SLEEPY a step up – in my estimation – from Orman’s earlier books.  That’s not to deride The Left-Handed Hummingbird or Set Piece, as they’re both great works of character development, or at least really good character stories.  (And if you want to compare them, I think character’s more important anyway.)  I just felt that Hummingbird’s complicated structure made it less exciting, and Set Piece concluded a character arc beautifully using some pretty standard monsters.  SLEEPY has an interesting problem (the psychic outbreak), interesting characters (including a significant number of Artificial Intelligences), interesting bits (including a quick recce thirty years into the past, told out of sequence) and best of all, hardly any villains.  Which is a natty way to get around something that didn’t exactly light up the author’s previous books.

You need antagonists, and you get them: in paranoid sci-fi style, someone is either benefiting from the outbreak or will otherwise want it covered up, so a quartet of psychic operatives arrive to quarantine the colony.  Orman makes clever use of first person with these characters, and gives them little lived-in quirks like the fact that their leader (White) has never actually made eye contact with the others.  Nonetheless, despite White’s almost default villainy as he faces off against the Doctor, it’s apparent even to him that there is a larger game at play: anyone involved in the incident is likely to be expunged by the next team the Company sends, including him.  White has an odd journey as he goes from powerful and in charge to utterly dejected and broken, largely because the Doctor has won over his team.

More obvious villainy comes in the form of a (mad?) scientist, Madhanagopal, whom Bernice and Roz encounter when the Doctor sends them away to gather intel.  (In the past, because he has a… somewhat freer and easier relationship with time in this one?)  An undercover mission goes quickly awry and leads to some experimentation – par for the course when running the Doctor’s errands, I suppose – but this in itself helps their cause.  They also encounter GRUMPY, a computer with a human-ish mind, who sure enough sells them down the river rather than help them.  But that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of growth.  Madhanagopal isn’t a nice guy, but he’s keeping secrets from the Company, and it’s suggested we’ll hear more from him later.  Orman makes the whole vignette more interesting by telling it retrospectively.  Bernice, as ever, makes it more amusing.

There’s a general air of things seeming sinister which ultimately might not be.  The psychic outbreak has damaging effects, leading to at least one accidental death, and there’s the underlying problem that sufferers are drawn somewhere by a voice that seems to know them.  Your spider-sense should be tingling at this point: of course this is going to turn out to be some awful horror from the dawn of time, or else some new thing that wants control of the universe, unlimited rice pudding etc.  And Orman sees you coming: this ain’t what it looks like.  Disastrous events can ultimately be benign, ghostly voices can be friendly and bad people can change, or at the very least start over.  There were numerous points where SLEEPY reminded me pleasantly of The Also People, another book that seemed ready to deflect expectations.  That may also have something to do with its contained approach to plot, which in this case is not as “small” as The Also People, but is arguably as concise.

SLEEPY charges through its story, yet also fills it with character stuff.  Bernice is quietly preoccupied by the events of Just War; it’s not a showy subplot, but it informs her actions and it’s entirely believable that what happened would stick with her.  (Good continuity, have a biscuit.  Frankly you should go and read Just War if you haven’t.)  Roz is reminded of Ace’s place in the TARDIS when she goes looking for weapons, and occasionally ponders her future there.  Chris seems to have a harrowing time of it, keeping a secret from Roz that causes a brief rift in their friendship, and he’s the most affected by the only death in the book.  And then there’s the Doctor, who recalls a bet he made (with Death, or possibly the mad scientist from Original Sin?) to see if he can possibly save everybody, just once.  SLEEPY makes a damn good go of that: the psychic officers are not to be harmed unless absolutely necessary, the approaching warship is to be dealt with in a way that also saves its (dangerous) crew, the terrified colonists are somehow to be kept from harming each other and rescued as slyly as possible (including just bundling them into the TARDIS, because thank you, that is clearly the safest option!), and the Doctor seems genuinely troubled by the risk of danger to the AIs – which he helpfully installs with self-awareness.  (Or rather, more of it.)  I’ve often moaned about how grim and cruel these books can be, and I’d be mad not to applaud a book that does the opposite, and accentuates the positive.  It has that, too, in common with The Also People.  But it still has darkness, especially with its one accidental death and the Doctor’s pointed realisation that he cannot truly foresee everything.  (Unfortunately I know where this is going, though I don’t know how or why said awful thing is going to occur.)

The supporting characters are a little numerous and it must be said, something’s gotta give with a pace like this, and it’s them.  But I just about kept up with the doctor (whom the Doctor charmingly greets, seemingly every time, with “Doctor”) and his soon-to-be-wife, another young couple, the various other colonists, the psychic officers, the generally unfriendly Smith-Smith family and most notably Dot Smith-Smith, a deaf character whose communications (via translator drone and sign language) allow Orman to get creative again.  SLEEPY takes a thoughtful approach to deafness, especially in mixing it with telepathy; any knee-jerk assumption that any deaf person would love to hear voices is challenged head-on, as it’s noted that some people get along perfectly well without that sense and indeed, given a taste, would prefer to put the genie back in the bottle.  We get some sequences from Dot’s point of view, which allow us to join the (ahem) dots about what’s happening just as she might.  Along with some entertaining-rather-than-just-showy dream sequences, Bernice and Roz’s unhappy trip and numerous vignettes when the Doctor has dinner with White – which can be told either from his perspective, where he literally does all the talking, or from White’s as he wryly observes – Orman grabs every chance to make things more interesting.  It can still be a little tricky juggling all the names, especially when “Yellow”, “Turquoise” and “Black” get names too, but the whole thing trundles along with such heft that I generally got the right idea from context.

With his bet to keep everybody alive, SLEEPY feels like a challenge for the Doctor.  And possibly for Kate Orman.  Can you have an exciting story when the Doctor is mostly just stringing the “bad guys” along until the real ones show up – even if we don’t really meet the clean-up crew at the end?  Can you have high stakes if you get to the end and, now that you mention it, almost everybody lived?  Is it still exciting when it’s basically just, y’know, nice?  And can you make this many people feel like important characters, even if you don’t spend that much time with them individually?  Broadly, yes.  SLEEPY’s main failing is unfortunately part of its charm: it’s damn quick.  I would have enjoyed a more patient version that dwelled more on the characters, which makes me wish more authors had the Jim Mortimore itch to revisit old novels.  But I enjoyed it a lot as it is, executing a fairly easy-to-follow plot in idiosyncratic style.  I was charmed, and I’ll be reading it again some day.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #69 – The Man In The Velvet Mask by Daniel O'Mahony

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#19

The Man In The Velvet Mask

By Daniel O’Mahony

Aw.  This one made me all nostalgic.

Not for the Hartnell era, obviously, which the author seems technically aware of but has no real interest in evoking.  Or for my childhood when I first got this book, since I didn’t read it until now.  The Man In The Velvet Mask brought back more recent memories of Virgin books – specifically the ones I had to all but prise my eyelids open to finish.  It’s been a while since I had an honest to goodness ordeal in book-land, where just getting to the end feels like an achievement akin to slaying a Kaiju.  Still, I did it!  The city is safe again... for now.

I know it has its fans, but they’re the first to admit it’s a marmite book.  And it ain’t the author’s first.  Falls The Shadow, matter-of-factly referred to in the blurb as “mould-breaking” (O RLY?), also played fast and loose with things like plot, character and good taste.  It was a book uncomfortably keen on sadism, which makes it hilariously unsurprising that The Man In The Velvet Mask goes the whole hog and features the man for whom sadism is named.  I mean god forbid we psychoanalyse an author, but at this point I wouldn’t leave him alone with any small animals.

The villains of Falls The Shadow had some interesting aspects, their existence being a knock-on effect of the Doctor simply arriving in times and places, erasing what might have been.  But as characters they didn’t have a dimension between them.  They were sadists for a laugh – because well, sadism innit? – and that pervading sense of self-serving meanness hangs over The Man In The Velvet Mask.  It’s a visceral and ugly book, dwelling on typically icky (and narratively absent) dream sequences and delighting in Giger-esque settings, all of which is its own reward.  Once again, Daniel O’Mahony gives the impression that great care has gone into the prose, and any strikes with a red pen would be met with a snort of derision: “You just don’t get it, maaan!”  It’s just as fond of random violence as the abominable Strange England, but this author at least seems to perceive a pattern.  Lucky him.  All the deliberation and care in the world can’t animate an AWOL story.

Again with trying not to second guess the author; I don’t know how meticulously the plot was laid out before he wrote the book.  Shall we assume, very?  If so, it doesn’t come across that way.  Upon arriving in an obviously changed France of 1804 – the Doctor deduces this by stepping out of the TARDIS and reading a poster, how thrilling – the Doctor and Dodo go their separate ways and become embroiled in... the fact that it’s different, I guess, with a vague view to fixing it.  There’s no plan to speak of for almost the entire book, since there’s correspondingly little clarification on what has changed and what, besides the presumable need to make it all nice again, is at stake.  (When we finally do get the villain’s evil plan you can barely hear it over the bellow of Oh Well None Of This Will Have Happened Anyway.  Ditto the threat of a French/British conflict.  Who ruddy cares?)  Sheer bad luck places this book quite soon after Just War, which handled its own alternate history with wit, gravity and originality.  D’oh.

Lance Parkin was just all round better at this, jumping off from an easily recognisable historical fork in the road and grounding it with the experience of the regulars.  O’Mahony has the Doctor vaguely potter around the villain’s Bastille, wrestling with his own mortality which doesn’t exactly relate to the present crisis; meanwhile Dodo falls in with some (obviously weird and metaphysical) actors, and starts a relationship with one of them, occasionally getting so involved in the Marquis de Sade play they’re performing that she uses another name.  (Some of this echoes Managra, another book with a doolally view of history and an author eerily certain of his business.  Except Managra was fun to read.)  This is infamously the book where Dodo gets an STD, and it’s difficult to follow that with any meaningful analysis.  Yep, that happens.  What the freaking hell, dude.

The relationship behind said probably-meant-to-be-poignant sex keepsake isn’t strong enough to warrant such an odd water cooler moment.  (What the hell would be?  But even so.)  Dalville likes Dodo immediately and makes it clear he wants to corrupt her.  She is... fine with this?  And after losing her virginity (I got too much detail so here you go as well) she continues to buzz around him.  Problem: Dalville isn’t an interesting character.  None of the actors are, some of whom are aliens, or in a supernatural disguise, which only adds to the anonymous blah of the lot of them.  (The text describes them as “a parade of faces and false names” which gives the unnerving impression that they are meant to be a weird, colourless bunch of blah.)  Nor are the two or three murderous characters who flit through the story and kill the girl Dodo replaces in the acting company.  The Doctor fails to save her and then lies about it to Dalville; that either didn’t come up again or else I missed it.

Neither the Doctor nor Dodo is fully aware of what the other is up to, and both seem to osmose through the story in a sort of fugue state.  (Rather like the one I was in.)  You might at least find O’Mahony’s choice of characters interesting.  Nobody writes about Dodo, a companion who didn’t quite find an audience and was so far from beloved that she left the show off-screen, mid-adventure, and Jackie Lane has had seemingly no interest in touching the character with a barge pole since.  This book doesn’t especially like her either, highlighting her unspectacular looks (including, at one point, her flat chest, because this book is charming), and her need for attention so craven that she used to fake itching fits to get a few stares at her own birthday party.  Yeah, so glad she got a book to herself and Leela didn’t.

By separating her from the Doctor the lingering (and you would think, pressing) question of “Does he actually like this random person who once barged into the TARDIS” doesn’t come up much, although he does aptly observe that she is effectively Susan’s reflection “distorted in a rough mirror.”  Sure enough, the experience serves to highlight the fact that she will be leaving soon, not that she goes willingly so that’s all rather pointless, isn’t it?  Perhaps the cover artist should have given her a T-shirt: “I Starred In A Book And All I Got Was This Lousy Venereal Disease.”

The Doctor is somewhat more recognisable, although his hurtling towards his own regeneration, which is a little while off actually, is a bit too try-hard in terms of interesting characterisation.  Why is he so weak and feeble now, when the Doctor we see in the next TV story is if anything revitalised?  (I think O’Mahony missed a trick setting this after The Savages, in which some of the Doctor’s life force is stolen.  On my telly watch-through of the Hartnell era, including missing episodes, I thought this led serendipitously into his regeneration.  But it isn’t spelled out here.  Oh well.)  Interesting side-notes include a reference to the Doctor having one heart in his first incarnation, which probably explains an inconsistency somewhere; the second heart came with the regeneration, apparently!  Despite it all, O’Mahony’s Hartnell has the right measure of crotchety bluster and warmth, even when talking to a severed head on a spike or the Marquis de Sade.  But it’s a very small plus in context.

In amongst this vague dawdle through a generally unpleasant Paris, not punctuated with enough relatable characters for the incongruity of it all to matter a damn, is de Sade, a slithery relation of his called Minski and the titular man in a velvet mask.  I learned very little about de Sade here, but the trajectory of his story, and the identity of the masked man is all pretty obvious.  (Praise be that something here is.)  O’Mahony, as I’ve mentioned, tends to divert all power to the prose machine, so you’ve got tenses swapping (to denote being outside of regular time, which is at least explicable), bits in italics or brackets, gothic dream sequences and – need you ask! – a thoroughly weird prologue that combines much of the above.  There is a general self-consciousness about how weird it all is, which for me is just pointing at the window dressing.  I am here for story and meaningful character development.  At points my eyes rolled over the words as pleasurably as if they were laying tarmac, and more than once my brain revolted and I nodded off.  Like this review, it just goes on and on, (self?) flagellating.

There are moments where it attempts to lighten up.  The chapter headings are in an oddly chirpy mood throughout (see “Carry On Chopping”); it has some literary allusions, generally Shakespeare, which mostly reminded me of books I liked more that did that; and characters occasionally use jolly colloquialisms.  After all, you might argue, Donald Cotton wrote conspicuously dry dialogue (for the setting) in The Myth Makers.  Yeah, but that worked in context.  Lightness doesn’t suit The Man In The Velvet Mask at all.

I think it comes down to how you felt about Falls The Shadow.  If you couldn’t get enough of its changing imagery and peculiar horrors, you’re in luck.  Whereas if you struggled through its mostly incidental story and random violence, reading The Man In The Velvet Mask may be an exercise in punishment of which the Marquis de Sade would approve.

3/10