#35
The Banquo Legacy
By Andy Lane & Justin Richards
At last, we’re getting somewhere. After several books where the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion elude the Time Lords so successfully that you have to wonder if anyone’s even looking for them, The Banquo Legacy introduces the radical idea that the bad guys could put some effort into it.
All of which feels like a spoiler, and indeed I was quite worried that I’d ruined it for myself by listening to a podcast about an earlier book. (It’s been 20+ years, inevitably that sort of thing is a minefield.) But no, The Banquo Legacy makes it clear early on that a Time Lord presence has caused the TARDIS to land in 1898, so it follows that a Time Lord will be lurking nearby. See also the blurb, which straight up tells you that the Doctor is “desperate to uncover the Time Lord agent who has him trapped.” Frankly it would be amazing if you got to the big reveal near the end of the book and didn’t already know.
Too much foreknowledge is unlikely to hurt The Banquo Legacy, since it didn’t begin life as anything Time Lordy or arc-plotty anyway. It turns out that BBC Books had yet another gap to fill, with Rebecca Levene’s novel Freaks sadly disappearing due to work commitments. Enter Justin Richards who — somewhat typically for Justin Richards — had a completed novel just lying around. A non-Who murder mystery co-written years earlier with Andy Lane, it was an epistolary, intended to evoke Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. (Lane wrote one character, Richards the other.) As well as it being terribly nice to get their old manuscript onto shelves, it was simply more expedient to insert Doctor Who elements into this than to write a whole new thing from scratch — especially where Richards had just done so with Grave Matter.
It’s debatable how obvious all of this behind the scenes stuff is when reading the book. It’s not as if epistolaries are unheard of in Doctor Who — Lane’s All-Consuming Fire was a very good one. As that author notes on Pieces Of Eighth, the original book had Who-ey overtones simply because that stuff was baked into its authors; where it is overtly horror, it is arguably by way of things like The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. And Richards, ever the editor, does a convincing enough job of weaving not just the Doctor and co. into this, but the ongoing Time Lord plot as well. It is relevant that this particular murder plot has ensnared these particular characters at this particular point in the run.
While it’s a bit coincidental that we ended up here, it makes for a fun experiment to tell a Doctor Who story from someone else’s perspective, or multiple someone elses. It also allows for an unusual take* on a mystery plot, with one character seeking answers that the other possesses, one character’s scenes filling in gaps from the other’s, and action overlapping. (*I haven’t read any Agatha Christie. Forgive me.) It pays particular dividends about halfway through after a couple of murders in close succession, with the two narrators hurriedly jumping to and fro in a way that satisfyingly speeds up the pace.
There is a downside to this, however, in that the two narrators are not hugely dissimilar. This is awkward to note since it was apparently two separate authors writing them, but Inspector Ian Stratford (Lane) and lawyer John Hopkinson (Richards) are both upstanding chaps of more or less the same type. Neither sounds especially Victorian or egregiously different from one another; if there weren’t two different fonts at work I’d be unlikely to pick either one out of a paragraph.
There is a whiff of cop and criminal about them, Hopkinson having numerous secrets to impart, but — in an admittedly very “Victorian epistolary” way, see Dracula — they end up full of camaraderie anyway, united by chivalry and whatnot. Before long I was wishing that there were more perspectives in the mix. You could even sneak in the Time Lord agent as one of them, and drop hints that way. Agatha Christie did that sort of hide-in-plain-sight thing, or so I hear. (It bears repeating that this book was the work of two quite young writers, and All-Consuming Fire, for example, showed a more pronounced difference between its narrators some years later. Practice makes perfect.)
The murder mystery has enough horror elements to tickle a Whovian’s fancy. The main thrust is a psychic experiment in an old country house which immediately goes wrong, killing the scientist and raising the question of accident or murder. More deaths follow, along with disappearing and reappearing bodies, a gun-toting maniac and — heck, why not — the walking dead. Sprinkle in a fake-out death for the Doctor and the ongoing question of a Time Lord agent and you’re unlikely, all in all, to sit there wondering how this novel ever got stitched together in the edit.
That said, it’s not exactly groaning with plot. Once it is confirmed whodunit and what, for that matter, they dun, The Banquo Legacy becomes a slightly lumbering zombie vehicle, alternating between a really quite amazingly durable killer corpse and a single deranged woman with a gun. I wondered how this presented such an insurmountable problem for the Doctor and friends, but then Richards has done some homework to ensure that regeneration will not work in the vicinity of the house, so dead means dead. (A threat that perhaps loses some meaning in a story that features a zombie.)
The mystery itself is reasonably good, though it’s not without its loose ends. The book opens with a couple of century-old murders that, in the long run, Richards uses to inform the Time Lord plot. I was never clear on why there needed to be two murders in close succession, or why one of them seems distractingly to be the work of a vampire. We never circle back to the details. And the Doctor’s fake-out death leads to a very exciting reveal later on — clearly a nod to The Hound Of The Baskervilles — but his laying low/information gathering doesn’t end up being anything worth hanging around for. These sorts of things tend to suggest the ragged edges of one novel brushing up against another.
For more on that, take a look at Compassion. On the surface this is another neat little solve: there would have only been so much room in the book for new characters (the Doctor replaces one who would otherwise have been killed off), so what do you do with someone as complicated as a human TARDIS? Answer, amalgamate them with someone nearby, and thus create an identity crisis. It gives you an element of danger, not wanting Compassion to be identified to the Time Lord agent, and theoretically it gives Compassion some interesting stuff to work on as she juggles two selves. You can blame it all on chameleon circuits or something.
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Compassion has simply been subsumed by another, markedly less interesting character. Her inner Compassion-ness rarely rises to the surface, and when it does an occasional aloofness or a sarcastic “obviously” will have to do. There’s no especially dramatic conflict at work between the two characters, and no meaningful sense that one of them is diminishing. (It’s not even hugely clear what’s happening.) Yes, the situation has rendered her mortal, but the human being she inhabits was already mortal anyway. Which is certainly handy for the rewrite.
Knowing that she had to be shoe-horned into a pre-existing novel casts a suggestive pall over all this, but even if you don’t know that, where the previous EDA was The Space Age — which had Compassion mentally out-of-it for most of the story — this just looks like another author(s) not wanting to engage with Compassion. Given how many EDA writers would clearly rather dive out of a window than write for Sam Jones, it’s not as if they don’t have form. Honestly, I can see the legwork that has gone into justifying these choices, but the end result still bears an uncanny resemblance to just not knowing what to do with her. Again. It’s disappointing to still be in this position with so little time left.
The Doctor and Fitz are perhaps easier to handle, and sure enough both are creditably written/inserted, with Fitz throwing a very ill-advised (and very Fitz) German accent into a tense situation, then forgetting it; at all times he believably fails to convince. (Stratford notes that he is “about five sentences behind everyone else and struggling to keep up.” That’s him, Officer.) I suspect that the Doctor’s role may have been very loosely Doctorish even in Lane and Richards’ student days, but there’s enough of a whiff of Sherlock Holmes about him to maintain the murder mystery ethos and all at once keep it convincingly Who. He’s very commanding, when he isn’t being (perhaps a little too easily) terrorised.
At least we’re moving the whole Time Lord thing along. The mystery of who the Time Lord agent is, or I suppose if there even is one, might have seemed pretty obvious to me (see second paragraph) but it’s still exciting when the Doctor and [redacted] have a sudden stand-off with a shotgun, all pretence now dropped. It’s interesting to have someone reinforce the Time Lords’ morally suspect argument for capturing Compassion, and for a moment there it did feel like the stakes were higher because her TARDIS capabilities had gone away — even at the potential cost of the agent’s life, since they can’t regenerate either. I especially enjoyed the idea that Time Lord agents had been sprinkled all over the galaxy and are, understandably, running out of patience. (Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t the first we were hearing about it?) The stakes have certainly been raised — or at the very least, reintroduced — for the upcoming grand finale.
Looking at other reviews, I’m clearly less enamoured than most readers, but I didn’t have a bad time with The Banquo Legacy. The epistolary could be better but it’s still fun to read, especially where it’s so ghoulish, and hey, I’m only human — I like zombies too. (NB: I didn’t feel like this was a retread of Grave Matter. Mind you, this one came first.) It’s a good, if patchy example of rewriting something for a new brief, and it inevitably re-energises the EDAs — especially since all the other books have slept on the arc plot. The Time Lords aren’t the only ones tapping their watches.
6/10
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