War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of Terrance’s books to be published in my lifetime, on 12 July 1976. The indicia says it was published simultaneously in Great Britain by Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd and Tandem Publishing Ltd, in hardback and paperback respectively.

I suspect the print runs were not huge. While first editions of Target’s Doctor Who paperbacks are relatively easy to come by and it is the hardbacks that are rare, I’ve only been able to find a hardback edition of War Drums of the Blackfoot. I’ve also spoken to collectors who’ve been at this for longer than me, and they haven’t traced a paperback either.

Perhaps there’s more going on in this than simply the number of copies printed. Readers may have tended to keep hold of their Doctor Who paperbacks, building up a collection, whereas the Mounties books were more readily discarded. Even if readers grew out of Doctor Who, those books could be passed on to school fetes, bring-and-buy sales and second-hand book stalls and shops, where a subsequent generation of fans — including me — eagerly gathered them up. Thus these books survived. 

It may even be that discarded Mounties paperbacks ended up on those stalls, and I didn’t notice — or care, because they weren’t Doctor Who. I don’t remember seeing them but might have barely spared them a glance as I looked for the good stuff. If so, I played a part in unsold, second-hand Mounties getting binned. Sorry, everyone.

Hardback editions survive, I think, because they were largely published for and bought by libraries, which tended to hold on to their books. My copy of War Drums of the Blackfoot was, says a stamp on the title page, “Discarded by Havering Library Service”. It’s in pretty good condition, the dust jacket largely intact except for what look like chew marks in one corner. It’s not well thumbed and dog eared like some of my well-loved Doctor Who books.

The brick red spine as on the other Mounties books — still evident here on the back and on a stripe on the spine once covered by a library sticker — has faded to pallid orange. The front and back covers haven’t faded. This is a book that spent considerable time on a bookshelf, not being opened and read.

While the Doctor Who books went through multiple reprints and new impressions, sometimes within months of first publication, the Mounties books have never been republished. Several people have responded to these posts of mine saying that, though they know Terrance’s Doctor Who books very well, they had no idea these existed.

Yet, as Terrance worked out the plot of War Drums of the Blackfoot, three months ahead of publication of the first book in the series, he was optimistic that the Mounties would do well, as we can see from his earliest surviving notes. Thrillingly, these notes also tell us a lot about his creative process.

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

(Later Books about — (1) Denbow and (2) Dubois) More role in this.

Fred Denbow and Henri Dubois were introduced in the first Mounties book, The Great March West, as colleagues and friends of hero Rob MacGregor. At this earliest stage of plotting the third book, Terrance wanted to build up their involvement so that they could each be the focus of further novels in the series.

His next notes are dated Thursday, 9 October, by which time Terrance had a title, “Wardrums [one word] of the Blackfoot”, and a basic structure, with a sentence summarising each of 10 chapters plus an epilogue to feature a final twist — much the same structure as the second novel, Massacre in the Hills. He also specified that the novel was to take place prior to 25 June 1876, the date of Custer’s notorious “last stand” — which surely meant he intended to include that key historical moment in a later book.

Over the next few days, Terrance developed each one-line summary into a paragraph per chapter, up to and including Chapter 7, each given a separate page of his spiral-bound notebook. On Tuesday, 14 October he added the note to himself that there should be, “Continuous conflict, tension, excitement, action. Hold back plot as much as possible.” 

He also calculated an approximate wordcount, based on an average 10 words per line, with 32 lines per page over 144 pages equalling 46,080 words. This is considerably more than the roughly 30,000 words Terrance produced for each Doctor Who novelisation at this time. But I don't think this greater wordcount meant he intended the Mounties books to be for older readers, not least because Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, written either side of this novel, are so grim and violent. 

Besides, the published version of War Drums of the Blackfoot isn’t as long as Terrance initially predicted. It comprises the usual 128 pages of an Allan Wingate / Target book of the time, whereas Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, at a slightly longer than usual 33,549 words, warranted 144 pages. (I’ll have more to say on wordcounts when I post about that novelisation, with data care of the dead useful Based on the Popular BBC Television Serial by Paul MC Smith.)

Anyway, having estimated wordcount, Terrance then stopped making notes and got on with bashing out a first, uncorrected draft. This was completed by 17 November, which means he was writing roughly 1,000 words a day. The book as published comprises 12 chapters and no epilogue, so he didn’t stick too rigidly to that first outline.

Once again, he seems to have drawn from the non-fiction history of the real-life Mounties, Maintain the Right by Ronald Atkin (1973). One crucial element, first detailed on p. 27 of the novel, is the poor state of the Mounties’ uniforms, which comes right out of Atkin:

“In fact, the quality of the uniforms was a continuing disgrace during the Force’s early years. In 1876, in an attempt to cut costs, the Canadian government had the police clothing and boots made of inferior materials by inferior craftsmen — the inmates of Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario. One constable reported that when he got his prison-made boots wet he was unable to remove them when they dried, so he had to soak them again before being able to get them off.” (Maintain the Right, p. 126).

Atkin also tells us about 25 year-old Ephraim Brisebois, in charge of the Mounties’ F Division, who was, in August 1875, tasked with the construction of a new fort.

“Inspector Brisebois made persistent attempts to have the new fort named after himself, even writing ‘Fort Brisebois’ at the head of all outgoing correspondence and on bills and invoices.” (MtR, p. 98).

Terrance refers to the real-life Brisebois in his notes but in the novel it’s a fictional Inspector Bellamy who wants the new fort named in his own honour (p. 13). In Atkin, we’re told work to build the fort was contracted out to the firm of one IG Baker (p. 98). In the novel, Bellamy has the Mounties doing the construction — as further sign of his self-serving nature.

In reality and in fiction, Commissioner Macleod over-ruled the inspector and named the new fort “Calgarry” — two Rs — giving the modern city of Calgary its name. In the novel, that’s because Macleod was born in a place of the same name on the Isle of Skye (p. 125); in reality, the gothic mansion known as Calgary Castle is on the Isle of Mull and Macleod had been a guest there. Terrance either misread what Atkin said or chose to simplify reality for the benefit of his readers.

Unlike the first two novels, there’s no “author’s note” here to tell us that the story is based in real history, which suggests that Terrance was conscious of being freer here with the sources. He took the problem of the poor uniforms and the problem of the vain inspector and imagined what happened next.

On meeting the “pompous and unpopular” Bellamy, Rob is amazed to find the inspector wearing a “handsome blue cloak” — part of the uniform of the US cavalry. Bellamy says, “complacently”, that his own cloak is “threadbare” and American uniforms have been delivered to him by mistake, so “I saw no harm in wearing this” (p. 14). Rob replies crossly that if the Indians see him in US Cavalry uniform, they are liable to attack…

Rob is, as usual, correct. What’s more, the Indians have been attacked by Mounties so turn on Rob and his friends. That’s what we see in the cover artwork, once again by Jack Hayes. It is not a hundred miles from the cover of the second Mounties novel: Rob on horseback in the centre of frame, staring coolly back at the advancing, aggressive Indian(s). 

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

Being closer in on the action this time, we see Rob’s face more clearly, which I think makes the cover more effective. It might have helped if the Indian’s arrow and the line made by his arms pointed at Rob’s face, to direct our focus — but perhaps that was thought too violent for young readers. Otherwise, it has the dynamism Hayes could convey so well, Rob’s horse rising up on its rear legs while he remains calm in the saddle. The whole composition is full of strained muscles and dramatic tension.

But am I imagining that Rob’s hat was added later, and doesn’t quite sit right on his head? The hat anyway makes Rob less relatable than the bare-headed young man of the first book. I’m not sure how well it would connect to the boys this was aimed at. It lacks what is achieved in the cover of the first book, a kind of “Who’s this cool guy I’d like to be?”

The text, though, works hard to ensnare us. First there’s the injustice of bad guys dressed as good guys as they carry out a crime. Then Rob, our hero, has to put up with a dangerous, vain idiot in command. Soon the plot kicks in, Rob setting out to find the needed evidence that some third party is stirring up trouble between Mounties and Indians. 

This plot seems to have been borrowed from the 1973 Doctor Who story Frontier in Space (script editor T Dicks), in which a third party is fomenting war between humans and Draconians. That, in turn, was surely borrowed from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the Americans and Soviets teeter on the brink of war. In each case, the third party playing off the two sides turns out to be an old foe of the hero — Running Fox (from the first Mounties novel), the Master and Ernest Stravro Blofeld.

“See how it works? Fake Mounties killing Indians, fake Blackfoot attacking white men. Much more of this and we’ll all be at each other’s throats, They’ll just be able to stand back and watch us kill each other.” (p. 70)

Villains dressing up as, variously, Indians and Mounties, is also a reversal of what happens in one of Terrance’s favourite childhood books, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, where the young hero moves fluidly between British soldiers and native Indians (in India this time) by changing clothes and make-up. I think Terrance’s version of the Mounties’ Commissioner Macleod may even owe something to Colonel Creighton in Kim, a four-square British officer who knows when to turn “a discreet blind eye” to the natives, such as when the Indians here share some illegal firewater when celebrating their victory (p. 122).

Rob is, like Kim, a Friend of all the World, good at getting on with people from any background or culture. His valiant actions lead to Chief Crowfoot agreeing to a treaty with the white authorities (here, very much a Good Thing). Before that, Rob’s mission depends on the help of a villainous character from the first novel, the whisky trader Dempsey, with the plot hingeing on whether he can really be trusted. Effectively, it’s a test of Rob’s optimism and instincts, the very kind of hero he is.

The sub-plot, in which Rob’s friend and colleague Fred Denbow goes undercover as a posh, rich English idiot but gets caught by villains who aren’t funny at all, is a little like what Harry Sullivan gets up to in Terrance’s Doctor Who story Robot, though it’s also fairly standard stuff for this kind of adventure. For example, see John Steed going undercover as a man called Goodchild and then having to submit to the dentist’s chair in Terrance’s first work for TV, The Avengers episode The Mauritius Penny (1963).

The point is that this third Mounties novel is a mash-up of stuff from other adventure fiction peppered with details from real history. I don’t think the details all come from Atkin; Terrance must have been reading more widely. Fred’s quest, for example, means travelling the country.

“He ate so many free meals he hardly needed supplies. At every line camp, every round-up chuck wagon, every isolated ranch-house, he was invited to ‘Light down and set’, the traditional greeting invitation to the hungry stranger.” (p. 82)

This tradition and “Light down and set” aren’t in Atkin; they must be from some other historical source. One of the people Fred speaks to refers to the villains as “some mighty mean looking jaspers” (p. 83). I know that last word as a term for wasps, from growing up in Hampshire (it’s also used in Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham, who grew up not far from where I did). Whether or not Terrance meant it in that sense, where did he get it from?

Then there are the words and phrases that he doesn’t use here. Terrance makes no play on the real-life towns that feature in the plot, Lethbridge and Benton — the names of regular characters from Terrance’s time overseeing Doctor Who, who feature in several of his novelisations. In some later original novels, Terrance couldn’t resist the odd in-joke. Here, I think he was careful not to break the illusion, and to make the setting of the Mounties novels real. 

That meant avoiding cliches. The workers on cattle ranches Fred encounters are “cow-hands” (p. 86), never — in any of these books — cowboys. In places, Terrance even spells out the cliches he’s avoiding:

“You’ve been reading too many dime novels. Most Western gunfights happen over a bar-room table — and if you can get your man in the back, so much the better.” (pp. 60-61)

I think perhaps he also, here, corrects a cliche from the previous two books, in which he sometimes referred to the Indians as childish or child-like. Yes, the Indians here can be simplistic:

“To them the red coat was the Mounted Police. The possibility of trickery hadn’t even occurred to them.” (p. 33)

But in this novel it’s the villains who have “an almost childish sense of the importance of fair play” (p. 110) and are “like kids” as they dress up as Mounties and Indians (p. 113). Then, at the end, the villains’ plot is exposed and they are made to strip off their disguises.

“The Indians, always appreciative of a good joke, began to guffaw among themselves, and even women and children appeared from nowhere to see the fun. Soon the mercenaries were standing shame-facedly before their captors in an assorted of patched and filthy underwear.” (p. 121)

This is fun but lacks the punch of the second novel, which ended with what we feel is a gross miscarriage of justice and then a final twist. At the end of that book, I was left eager to find out what happened next in Rob’s relationship with the half-Indian Jerry Potts. Potts hardly features in this one. There is no consequence to the shock ending of that previous book and no twist at the end of this one to anticipate the next.

I don’t think Terrance could have ended on a cliffhanger as these books are meant to stand on their own. It is just all a bit neat and easy. What makes us want to read on is rough edges and things not being quite right. It may be that Terrance ended things on this happy note because he knew the Mounties were not going to have more adventures. 

In April 1976, he sent the first two Mounties books to Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, suggesting a TV version co-produced with Canada. But he included the books and made the suggestion in a letter about something else entirely and I am not sure he meant it too seriously. There is no record of a reply. 

Then, in July — the same month this third novel was published — Terrance pitched an entirely different Wild West series to Carola Edwards at the same publisher. This would have ventured into much more adult territory, written under a pseudonym to distance them from the books that Terrance wrote for children. Again, there’s no record of a reply and nothing came of the pitch.

Instead, Allan Wingate / Target commissioned Terrance for ever more Doctor Who titles. Among them, I think, are some of his best work. Yet he still hankered after his own original series; his biography in the backflap of this book speaks of his developing interests in mysticism and meditation, which relate to a project he worked on that never materialised; I will detail that in the biography.

Then, in September 1976, Richard Henwood got back in touch. Henwood had, of course, set up the Target range, commissioned Terrance to write his first novelisations and come up with the idea for the Mounties series. Now, as group publishing manager at Blackie & Son in Glasgow, Henwood wanted to discuss new ventures.

But woah there, those ventures are a long way off for Terrance yet. First, there are a whole slew of Doctor Who books, starting with one of the best… 

*

These long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and incur expenses, and I can’t afford to press on without help. Last week’s detailed post on Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen has had hundreds of views but resulted in zero contributions.  

Throw some cash in the hat and next week you get Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, Terrance’s tenth novelisation. The Doctor speaks German, Harry wants a meal before he’ll try to save Sarah’s life, and Sarah is buried under stiffening corpses.

Oh, and Terrance explains what’s up with Davros and makes the continuity fit with the Daleks’ first  TV adventure… Is that not worth a few quid?

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

I said a couple of years ago that the experience of reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles was a bit like a conversation with my late father, as it was the last novel he finished reading and the last book he recommended to me before he died. I’ve felt something similar reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. 

As with Bellarion by Rafael Sabatini, this was a childhood favourite of Terrance Dicks, about whom I am writing a biography (in case I’ve not mentioned that fact). Kim was also a favourite of my late grandfather, who served in India in the 1930s. He enthused to me more than once that he’d been in Lahore and seen Kim’s gun.

First published in 1901, Kim is the classic tale of a streetwise young orphan boy who we first encounter, in the opening sentence and “in defiance of municipal orders”, sat astride the great gun Zam-Zammah, which is mounted on a brick platform outside the Lahore Museum. We’re then told that whoever holds the gun holds the Punjab, so that it is “always first of the conqueror’s loot”, and that 12 year-old Kim has taken his seat on it by dethroning another boy.

In just these first three sentences, we see Kim defy instructions in a region clearly subject to strict controls; this region is subject to conflict and changing regimes; there is some parallel implied between such conflict and Kim’s own spats with other children. Character, place, context, analogy, intrigue — deftly hooking our interest.

A big appeal of this book, I think, is the way it so simply and vividly conjures a sense of India. There are no long speeches or info-dumped bits of narration to explain what things are, how they work or what the author thinks of it all. Instead, it’s conveyed by a steady flow of small nuggets, almost like asides. These engage all the senses: colour, smell and texture, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the spoken word — the way one character says “thatt” with a closing double-T, or “veeree” and “effeecient”.

This immersive world we hear and smell and taste is lively and often comic. Yet Kim navigates the complex bustle of it all with pluck and skill, an Indian Artful Dodger. At first that seems to be because this is the world he grew up in as an orphan; his engaging cheekiness is a strategy to survive, “Friend of all the World” (the phrase used about him a lot) because he has no family to fall back on.

But then, a few chapters in, he learns his past: Kimball O’Hara is the white son of a dead Irish soldier and — to the Indians — a Sahib. Though he still lives among Indians, and often passes for one, even his closest Indian friends acknowledge this difference. On learning of Kim’s background, the old lama to whom he has been chela or assistant insists that the boy must now have an education, and of the highest quality. This is more than selfless piety; there is something magical in what happened next. Until now, the old man has has needed Kim to beg food and lodgings for them both; now the lama convinces Colonel Creighton of the British Army that he can pay for the best schooling money can buy — and the money duly arrives.

Creighton is another benevolent figure, though very different in background and attitude to the lama. Hetakes Kim under his wing, organises school and extracurricular lessons in spycraft, but also turns an indulgent eye when need be. This happens not least in school holidays and when Kim’s formal schooling ends, whereupon he slips off his restrictive English clothes, adopts his former attire as a native and heads off for more adventures with the lama. 

Such changes of outfit, referred to as disguises, are highly effective. Even the shrewd lama doesn’t recognise Kim when he is thus transformed. On another occasion, Kim helps an agent working for the British to escape from enemies in close pursuit by hurriedly whipping up some make-up from left-over ash and other oddments.

This kind of thing is a staple of adventure fiction. Sherlock Holmes is also a master of disguise — he can pass anywhere in the capital and is apparently a Friend to all of London. Or there is James Bond, who, in short story “For Your Eyes Only”, can pass fluently as an American so long as he doesn’t use the word “actually”. In the Bond film You Only Live Twice, screenplay by Roald Dahl, Bond is made-up in yellowface so he can live undercover on an island in Japan within plain sight of the baddies.

Admittedly, the bad guys don’t seem remotely fooled and there’s an attempt on Bond’s life on his first night on the island. Likewise, in his introduction to my Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of Kim, Edward Said is not convinced by Kim’s own prowess at disguise, or by claims of real-life white protagonists doing this sort of thing.

“Was there ever a native fooled by the blue or green-eyed Kims or [TE] Lawrences who passed among the inferior races as agent adventurers? I doubt it” (p. 44)

This reminded me of real-life agent Colonel Bailey, undercover in Central Asia just after the First World War, with the Bolsheviks in hot pursuit:

“I decided to go to the house of an engineer named Andreyev whom I had met once or twice in the early days of my time in Tashkent and who, I thought, would be sympathetic. The house stood in a small garden. I walked up and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl whom I had also met previously. I hoped she would not see through my disguise of beard and Austrian uniform. She gave no sign and said she would call Andreyev. I said to him in Russian: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He replied in English: ‘I suppose you are Colonel Bailey.’ ‘It is clever of you to recognize me,’ I said. He replied: ‘The girl who opened the door told me who you were.’ This was bad new as she was famous for being the most unrestrained chatterbox in the town.” (FM Bailey, Mission to Tashkent, p. 134)

That real-life memoir is packed with incidents in which things go badly wrong, or don’t work out as planned, or chance conspires against Bailey and his compatriots. He damages his leg; he is told what he needs is a massage, but the only masseuse is a terrible gossip who will surely blow his cover; he perseveres with a limp but it makes him distinctive. In a lot of this, Bailey scrapes through as much by luck as judgment.

In Kim, chance is at the service of our hero. By chance, he happens into the very regiment in which his late father served, which by chance includes officers who knew Kimball O’Hara Senior and feel an obligation to his son. On several adventures, he by chance bumps into people he already knows who can help him. A secret message is given to him just in time not to fall into the hands of an enemy; he delivers it just in time and to the right person. It has exactly the expected effect.

It is all a bit straightforward in a book so full of colour and incident, and so many richly drawn characters. Kim has two plot threads going on at once: he aids the old lama in looking for a river as seen in a dream, and he is educated as a British subject and potential spy. While Kim’s three years at school mean a pause in his travels with the lama, there’s little sense of the two threads, the two very different worlds Kim is part of, ever being in conflict. That’s partly because Kipling glosses over Kim’s schooling, more interested in what he gets up to during the holidays and afterwards. (My sense from Stalky & Co is that Kipling saw school as something to be endured rather than enjoyed.)

In fact, there’s no sense here of any innate conflict in the fact of the British being in India. When we met an Indian officer who was an eye-witness to the real-life uprising of 1857 (here, the “Mutiny”), he speaks of a “madness” that consumed his fellows so that they killed the Sahibs’ wives and children. It was an aberration, without cause. There’s no suggestion, no contrary voice, here or anywhere else in the novel that perhaps not everyone is happy with the British presence in India. Agents of other nations, such as the French and Russians, must be stopped, but the British are entitled.

Without that tension, there is nothing to stop Kim from achieving both his aims: the lama finds his river and Kim serves the mother country by foiling a Russian plot, providing evidence on paper of what the villains were about. The sense is that he will continue to flourish in both worlds. I wonder what became of him: aged 15 years and eight months when the novel was published in 1901, he would have been 63 at the time of Partition in 1947. What kind of eye-witness account would Kim have offered?

In his introduction, Edward Said compares Kim to contemporary novels such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which the protagonist has optimistic dreams and ideals to begin with but is crushed by grim reality. Kim undergoes no such disillusionment. Indeed, he goes to posh school, is trained and works as a spy, and yet remains largely unchanged. At the end of the novel, he is still the cheeky boy who sat astride the gun at the start; he’s just learned a few more tricks.

In opening, I said that the novel simply and vividly conjures its setting, but in being so uncritical it is highly simplistic. It badly lacks some voice of dissent, some challenge to the worldview. In stark contrast to the perils of real-life Mission to Tashkent, in Kim the Great Game of Imperialism in India is literally that — a game in a kind of playground version of India, with dressing up and puzzles as diversions from boring old school. 

I can also see why that proved so intoxicating to generations of readers, not least those directed into certain kinds of schools to be shaped into certain kinds of servants of Empire. The idea that they might escape for occasional larks, that they might endure the process unchanged, that the world awaiting them could be exciting and fun…

It’s not true. But it’s a very good trick.

(I’ve further thoughts on why this book appealed so much to Terrance Dicks in particular, and what he drew from it in his own writing and in editing other people’s work; I’ll save that for the biography…) 

See also:

• Me on The Jungle Book by Kipling

Massacre in the Hills, by Terrance Dicks

The second novel in the Mounties trilogy was published simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 8 April 1976, a little more than two months after the first book. My first-edition paperbacks of these two adventures are very similar, sporting the same logo, strapline (save for one word), typeface and cover artist. They have the same red spines and back covers, with a two-paragraph blurb in yellow text.

Two things are different. First, the strapline of the first book declares it to be, “A thrilling adventure series featuring Rob MacGregor of the Mounties”, while the second omits the word “series”. Perhaps the publishers felt that it would sell better as a standalone story, with no suggestion of prior knowledge being required.

The second book is also thinner. While both paperbacks comprise 128 pages, the first Mounties book, in paperback, is about 1cm thick and the second about 8mm. We saw the same thing when comparing a 1976 first edition and 1980 third impression reprint of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. The original is thicker, on better quality paper and so has a heftier feel. The sense is that it is more prestigious. Was a thinner second book, and not referring to it as a series, a sign that the publishers had already lost faith in the Mounties?

Jack Hayes’s dynamic, painted artwork this time focuses on the Indians, three of them on horseback, with lots of strained muscles and movement. Hero Rob MacGregor is central to the composition but at middle-distance, so we can barely see his face. I think the white pith helmet serves to anonymise him, whereas the bare-headed young man foregrounded on the cover of the first book is immediately more relatable.

Behind Rob is a small figure with a moustache, not in Mounties uniform. This is Jerry Potts, a real-life figure from the history of the Mounties, who Terrance made a sidekick to his fictional hero. Whereas the scene on the cover of the first book is from right at the end of that novel, on the second book what we see is something from page 30, and part of the set-up for the adventure as a whole.

Again, the blurb lays out what’s at stake here:

“When a party of American hunters turns up at his trading fort, Abe Farwell senses trouble. But even he does not expect to witness the total slaughter of a small Indian village.

“The Cypress Hills Massacre, as it became known, caused bitter enmity between the white man and Indian in Canada. Such enmity that the new Mounted Police Force, formed to bring law and order to the country, risks violent revolution from the vast Blackfoot Indian tribes. Rob MacGregor, Mountie hero of the story, is sent on a treacherous, seemingly impossible mission… To find the dangerous murderers from over the border, and bring them to trial…”

As Terrance says in his “Author’s Note” (at the back of the book this time, not the start), this is “fiction based on fact”. The key source is surely, once more, Maintain the Right by Ronald Atkin. The real-life Cypress Hills Massacre of May 1873 and its fallout are detailed in that book on pp. 37-39, and the efforts to bring the culprits to trial in 1875 on pp. 95-96. 

Atkin also tells us about another, separate incident. The Canadian Government made $30,000 available to pay the Mounties’ wages, but with one small snag: the money needed to be collected from a bank in Helena, Montana, some 300 miles from Mountie HQ. Undaunted by the challenge, Assistant Commissioner James Macleod set off on 15 March 1875, accompanied by Sub-Inspector Cecil Denny, Sub-Constables David Cochrane and Charles Ryan, and scout Jerry Potts. 

“They took with them saddle and pack horses, blankets, tea, bacon and biscuits — but no tent. Near Milk River the party was enveloped in a fierce blizzard, with no wood available for fire-making. Potts showed them how to gain makeshift shelter from the howling wind by digging a deep hole into the river bank. There they crouched for thirty-six hours, waiting for the storm to blow itself out and eating biscuits and raw bacon. A buffalo herd also swarmed into the river bottom seeking protection from the weather, forcing the party to take two-hour shifts holding their horses’ halter ropes to prevent the animals becoming lost among the buffalo” (MtR, p. 91).

When they dared to move on, Sub-Constable Ryan was so frozen stiff that he could not bend his knees and told the others to go on without him. Sub-Inspector Denny lifted the man on to his horse. The bedraggled party emerged from the storm and were then apprehended by a patrol of American soldiers, who mistook them for whisky smugglers.

Terrance took this hair-raising account and wove it into his story. In his version, the journey to Helena has two objectives: to get the money for wages and to track down the culprits of the Cypress Hills Massacre so that they can be brought to justice.

In the novel, Macleod and Potts are accompanied on the journey by two ordinary constables — heroic Rob MacGregor and the bitterly complaining Evans. Their party are waylaid by the blizzard for hours before they reach Milk River, where the steep slopes of the ravine give some protection from the onslaught.

“With their knives they hacked out an enormous cave in the snowy bank, Macleod working harder than any of them. When it was finished the cave was big enough for all, men and horses, to huddle inside, away from the howling winds” (p. 66).

Potts remembers, the previous year, having seen an old, smashed up wagon out on the plain, so he and Rob venture out into the snow again to find it and bring back firewood. At Macleod’s suggestion, the party keep their spirits up by singing songs around the campfire. 

But the firewood runs out by the second night, and then they discover a huge herd of buffalo outside their cave, sheltering from the storm. They must keep hold of and calm the horses to ensure they don’t get lost among the buffalo. Next day, the party decides to head on, but Evans is frozen in the snow and Rob must lift him to his feet. The poor man has gone snow-blind…

We can see that Terrance turned the perils described by Atkin in a couple of paragraphs into a whole thrilling chapter. What’s more, the men’s actions under pressure reveal their individual characters — Rob stoic and brave, Jerry Potts the skilled and able scout, Macleod the kind of officer who works every bit as hard as those under his command, Evans a rather sorrowful figure.

The novel also makes use of several incidental details from Maintain the Right. Atkin tells us about the poor conditions at the Mounties’ HQ at Swan River: 

“The cutting wind whistled through the cracks and chinks in the unseasoned lumber of the exposed buildings; there were gaping holes in roofs; snow lay unmelted on the beds and floors of the living quarters” (MtR, p. 88).

Such hardships, we’re told on the same page, led to a mutiny, “or ‘buck as the police called them, on the night of 17 February [1875].”

In Rob’s first scene in the novel, he’s in the barracks at Fort Macleod — not Swan River — but:

“The roof leaked, the floors were damp and cold winds whistled icily through the many chinks in the log walls” (p. 17).

Later, we learn that,

“‘A buck’ was Mountie slang for any kind of grumble or complaint” (p. 57).

It's the vocabulary and detail from Atkin, but applied to the situations that Terrance devised.

He also added a lot of his own to the novel. Putting Rob on his own in a town full of potential enemies where he must round up different villains, not realising that they are already plotting his death, is all Terrance’s invention (but may owe something to Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, a book I know Terrance loved).

He added his own incidental details, too, such as Macleod sharing with us “the soldier’s motto [of] Never explain, never complain” (p. 25). This is also said by the soldier-dad of the young hero in Terrance’s semi-autobiographical Prisoners of War (1990), and seems to have been his real-life dad’s philosophy.

I wonder if first-hand experience informed other elements of life among the Mounties as described here, such as the effect on Rob of military discipline and training, filling out “the gangling farm boy” who’d joined up six months previously. Then, at the end of the novel, Rob is awarded promotion, about which his commanding officer makes a wry joke:

“You have carried out an important and dangerous mission for the Force. I therefore propose to reward you by giving you a good deal more work, a great deal more responsibility and a very small increase in pay” (p. 120)

Rob is pleased to have earned his stripes yet also concerned that it will create a distance between him and the friends he has made in the force. It’s not as straightforward as him thwarting the villains and being handed a prize; it feels based in reality.

Other details flesh out Rob’s background a little, such as when he encounters,

“an old lady in a poke bonnet … a bright-eyed, bird-like old lady, reminding him of his Great Aunt Wilhelmina back home” (p. 94)

The old lady is the only woman to speak in the book; Great Aunt Wilhelmina is the only woman named. Abe Farwell, witness to the massacre, has an Indian wife — “a silent, smiling Blackfoot squaw” who does the cooking (p. 7) and is later a key element in the plot, but she doesn’t warrant a name. This modest total of women is still an improvement on the first Mounties book, but very different from Maintain the Right which — as I said last time — is male-dominated but features some prominent, memorable women.

Even so, the brief description of the old lady in the poke bonnet is typically vivid. Though Great Aunt Wilhelmina is absent from all three novels bar this namecheck, she was clearly a significant figure in his early life. Rob clearly knows her very well, which enables him to correctly guesses how to address the unnamed old lady to get the information he wants from her. 

It’s a shame we don’t see how adept — or otherwise — Rob might be in tackling other women. Atkin describes a number of formidable characters such as the Indian women who insist on being heard in meetings with the settlers, or the plucky female journalists reporting on the Yukon gold rush. Would Rob be confident or coy with such characters? Might these books have had wider appeal if there were someone like Sarah Jane Smith for Rob to spar with?

The vital information provided by the old lady is the whereabouts of Frank Chalmers, one of the suspects in the Cypress Hills Massacre that Rob hopes to bring to justice. As Terrance admits in his “Author’s Note”, he created his own villains for the story. Why he did that is worth digging into.

Maintain the Right names five of seven men thought to be the culprits of the real-life massacre: John H Evans (the leader), Tom Hardwick, Trevanion Hale, Elijah Deveraux and Charlie Harper, plus two unnamed men who were arrested but then escaped. The real-life Evans seems to have given his name to the complaining Mountie in the early part of Terrance’s novel. 

He presents a gang of six, not seven, villains responsible for the killing. Their leader is a bony-faced man called Skelton, his features and long, greasy blond hair making him distinctive. Then there’s Frank Chalmers, now the respectable proprietor of a store, the New Helena Emporium — meaning that he has some standing in the community, and something to lose. Another gang member, Jim Mason, is the landlord of a saloon, where he employs a further compatriot: drunk, nervy Seth Hayter, who is riddled with guilt over what they all did.

Then there are the brothers Tim and Mike Sedgewick, a pair of hard-boozing cattle-rustlers who prove to be ruthless foes. The brothers’ first names are, surely, taken from Tim and Michael Atkin, sons of the author of Maintain the Right, to whom that book is dedicated because they “like adventure stories". Had Terrance been in touch with Atkin and his sons, and included them as an in-joke? I’ve sent a message to Tim Atkin, now a leading wine journalist, but haven’t yet heard back…

I think Terrance created his own villains so that he had the freedom to delineate their different characters, temperaments and motives. It's what he does with the Mounties and with the Indians: each group comprises individuals with different points of view. Some are shrewd and patient, some hot-headed and easily provoked. As well as all the punch-ups and shoot-outs, Rob must navigate the nuances of relationships.

There’s a good example of this in Chapter 4, when Chief Crowfoot visits the Mounties and is invited to observe a trial of illegal whisky traders. Having found them guilty, the makeshift court moves on — and the next defendant is Chief Crowfoot’s own son. It’s a tricky situation but Rob advises the presiding judge that they need to demonstrate that the law applies equally to everyone. The son is found guilty and given token punishment, which both he and his father take with good grace. There’s a crisis, Rob applies some common sense, people agree and move on. 

This is a bit like Bellarion, the 1926 novel by Rafael Sabatini and a childhood favourite of Terrance’s. In that, Bellarion’s schemes and insights quickly solve whatever crisis has come up. There’s no sense of him making the wrong call and exacerbating the problem, which in turn drives forward the plot. It’s all quite straightforward: problem, solution, next problem.

In the same way, Rob uses a combination of courage, guile and luck to track down the villains, overcoming various obstacles on the way. By the end of the final chapter, all the gang but Skelton have been arrested and face an extradition hearing. The chapter closes by telling us that Rob encountered Skelton again in “strange and gruesome circumstances” — suggesting, I thought initially, that he would return in the next Mounties book. But this adventure then has a last twist.

The epilogue rests on the nuances of one leading character, the scout Jerry Potts. Atkin, citing 19th-century primary sources, describes the real-life Potts as, “a short, bow-legged, monosyllabic half-breed scout”, the son of a clerk from Edinburgh and a “Blood Indian” (ie Kainai) woman called Crooked Back. Potts grew up, 

“between Indian camps and white settlements. He fought with Blackfoot, Blood and Peigan war parties, and worked at the whiskey forts, where he developed an ardent and life-long addiction to liquor … The word laconic might have been invented especially for Jerry Potts. After one meeting between some Blackfoot and the police, Potts was asked to interpret the lengthy speech of a chief. He shrugged his shoulders and muttered, ‘Dey damn glad you’re here’” (MtR, pp. 75-6).

Terrance could have played up the comic side of this, laughing at Jerry Potts. But he makes Potts a skilled scout, saving the lives of the men in his charge during the trek to Helena, and a shrewd judge of character. Maintain the Right cites the contemporary term “half-breeds”, with its racist connotation of inferiority, so often that it’s included in the index. Terrance uses the term just once in the novel, in introducing the character:

“Jerry Potts was a half-breed scout who had been working for the Mounties since the Force was formed” (p. 23)

It’s not used as a judgment; we judge Potts from his actions. He’s idiosyncratic but a more heroic figure than the man described in Atkin’s sources.

Then comes the twist. As per real history, the verdict of the extradition hearing is that all the villains are set free. Rob’s commanding officer is furious, Rob is stunned but knows he should inform Crowfoot and the other Indians, whatever their reaction might be. On arriving at the camp, he discovers that they have apprehended Skelton and scalped him — his distinctive hair means he can still be recognised. What’s more, it seems Jerry Potts helped track down and kill him.

Confronted by Rob, Potts gives a laconic response: 

“Jerry said, ‘Sometimes [my] white half doesn’t work so well. Indian half gets things done better. You tell Macleod?” (pp. 126-7).

Rob shakes his head, recognising that there has been “A kind of justice”, the title of this epilogue. For us to agree, or at least to find this dramatically satisfying, we need to feel the injustice of the other villains going free, and the unfairness that Abe Farwell was not considered a reliable witness because his wife is Indian. We understand the individual characters, perspectives and interests, the different levels of irony at play in the man who escaped being killed — and it works really well.

This means of tackling the injustice of a real historical event by ensuring that some form of justice is served is, I think, a twist on a rule laid down by Terrance’s friend Mac Hulke in a book first published in 1974:

“If it’s a kids show, and the story involves a ship sinking at sea, save the ship’s cat.” (Malcolm Hulke, Writing for Television, p. 243.)

There’s also a precedent for a fictional detective turning a blind eye to a murder committed as response to provocation: Terrance was a fan of Sherlock Holmes, who does something on these lines in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891).

In that story, we learn that the murderer conveniently died a few months later, so everything is wrapped up rather neatly. Here, Rob agrees to keep the matter secret as he and Jerry Potts head back to join the other Mounties and continue with their work of bringing law and order to the West. 

Rob is now complicit in what has been done. It’s not settled or neat. The result is that this apparently old-fashioned adventure story is more complex, interesting and memorable than it at first appears. It is, like so much of Terrance’s work, deceptively straightforward.

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These long posts on the 236 books by Terrance Dicks take time and some expense, so I’m very grateful to those who are able to lob a few quid in my direction.

Next time: Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, if it’s even called that, and the first time Terrance is faced with novelising a Doctor Who story that, er, isn’t very good…

The Great March West, by Terrance Dicks

This book has been more of a challenge than previous entries in the list of 236 books by Terrance Dicks. It is not as well known as many of his other titles, so let’s get ourselves up to speed care of the back-cover blurb:

“Rob MacGregor wants desperately to leave home and join the new Canadian Mounted Police Force. Their first expedition is to raid Fort Whoop-Up, centre of the thriving but illegal whisky trade, and Rob determines to go with them.

He becomes a spy for the Mounties and quickly discovers that their scout is a traitor, in league with the Indians, and treacherously planning the massacre of the whole expedition. Rob’s near death at the hands of the Sioux, his perilous fight with Running Fox, and finally the attack on the fort, bring the story to a thrilling climax.

This is the first of a new exciting adventure series featuring MacGregor of the Mounties.”

The tenth novel by Terrance Dicks was his first original published work of fiction, in that it’s not based on pre-existing material as with his novelisations. It was released on 28 January 1976, simultaneously in hardback by Allan Wingate’s imprint Longbow and in paperback by Tandem’s imprint, Target. 

(These subsidiaries were all part of Howard & Wyndham, who seem to have set up multiple companies, imprints and whatnot with the sole purpose of vexing your humble scribe.)

When exactly did Terrance write this book?

Our first clue comes from an interview with him in issue 3 of the US/Canadian fanzine Mark II (ed. Lora Lyn Mackie aka Lyn Nicholls), published in the first couple of months of 1980. Asked about the Mounties books, Terrance said: 

“The inspiration was not mine, but the first Target editor’s, Richard Henwood. I have great affection for the books, and enjoyed writing them and was very pleased that they were well received in Canada.”

As we’ve seen, Henwood left Target in April 1974 — Terrance had a meeting with Henwood’s successor, Mike Glover, on 30 April. So the Mounties series was conceived a good 18 months ahead of publication.

This, of course, coincided with Terrance leaving his staff job at the BBC as script editor of Doctor Who. My guess is that Henwood came up with the idea of the Mounties books to support Terrance in his new freelance career. 

The series may also have been part of a drive by the publishing house to expand into further English-speaking territories. Target opened offices in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia, their addresses given in the back of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, published 13 March 1975. Perhaps the company, or Henwood, had an eye on the Canadian market; perhaps they thought Westerns featuring a policeman in the service of Queen Victoria might do well in other Commonwealth countries.

Whatever the case, either this new series of books was formally commissioned by Henwood before he left the company or Terrance, at that first meeting with Glover, had to convince him to continue with the project. 

I’ve worked on stuff commissioned by one person but delivered to their successor. In my experience, they honour whatever was agreed with all the best intentions. But sometimes there is a tendency for stuff they commissioned themselves, even subsequently, to take precedence. 

The outcome of that first meeting with Mike Glover was that Terrance started work on the novelisation Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, which he delivered at the end of May 1974. In June, he met with Glover again to discuss the ongoing Doctor Who list, and the decision seems to have been made there for him to write Doctor Who and the Giant Robot next, which would be brought forward in the schedule and published before the book he’d just delivered. He and Glover were understandably keen to get a Fourth Doctor novelisation on the shelves as close as possible to the broadcast of his first story on screen.

If we apply the same 7.5-month lead-time as per later books (detailed in a previous post), Terrance must have delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Giant Robot around the end of July 1974. As I said in that previous post, I think he delivered his next novelisation, Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, months later at the end of February 1975, as it was published 7.5 months later on 16 October 1975. As detailed in that post, I think Terrance was pretty busy throughout the rest of 1975. The big gap in his schedule is in late 1974 and that first month of the new year.

Into that gap, we can add the Doctor Who stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday, which must have been completed by the end of November at the very latest, given that casting was complete by 5 December, according to a report in the Stage (p. 5).

We also know from Terrance’s spiral-bound notebook how long it took him to write his third Mounties novel: he’d begun work on War Drums of the Blackfoot by 6 October 1975 and it existed in uncorrected draft form by 17 November. I think he delivered the corrected manuscript at the end of November, meaning that he took about two months to write this original novel, while each Doctor Who novelisation took him a single month.

Put all of this together and my working theory is:

≅ end of Jul 1974: Terrance delivers manuscript of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot

≅ Aug-Sep: writes and delivers the first Mounties novel, The Great March West

≅ Oct-Nov: writes and delivers the stage play Seven Keys to Doomsday

≅ Dec-Jan: writes and delivers the second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills, perhaps bearing in mind notes on the first one

≅ end of Feb: delivers Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders

Things may have overlapped a bit more than this. Seven Keys to Doomsday was the more time-critical assignment, as it opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London on 16 December 1974, more than a year ahead of the first Mounties book being published. Terrance might well have written a first draft of Seven Keys to Doomsday, then worked on the two Mounties books, with time off to attend to rewrites, rehearsals and whatever else needed doing on the stage play.

I’m still searching for clues and welcome any tips on paperwork or interviews that help nail down the timeline.

But I think this rough working theory helps to explain one of the odder things about Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, which opens with a prologue set in the Amazon. Professor Clifford Jones is concerned that the local Indians are on the “warpath” (the word used by his wife), and that he’ll soon have to use his revolver. It’s completely out of character for the softly spoken hippie peacenik of the TV serial The Green Death. But this is, I think, an echo of the Mounties books Terrance had been working on immediately before this. 

Just for a moment, Jo Grant is married not to Cliff but to Rob MacGregor, hero of the Mounties. In turn, when at the start of The Great March West a man is fatally wounded, a Doctor is sent for (p. 18) — with a capital D. It is bleed-through of fictional worlds, or iterations of the Terrance Dicks expanded universe.

This rough timeline also means that the Mounties books were commissioned by Henwood, okayed or honoured by Mike Glover, but received by Elizabeth Godfray, who became editor of the Allan Wingate / Tandem children’s titles in January 1975 (having been PA to Henwood and Glover respectively). “I just carried on what they had been doing in terms of sequels and whatever,” she told The Target Book. “All the contracts had been made, there were certain titles in the range that were going to carry on, not just Doctor Who but Agaton Sax, Terrance Dicks’ Mounties series, and so forth. I wasn’t there as editor for very long, and I recall that all the titles had been decided” (p. 37).

That suggests that all three Mounties books were commissioned at once, by Henwood / Glover. Henwood had launched the Doctor Who titles in batches: three titles published together on 2 May 1973, then pairs of novels scheduled for 17 January, 18 March and 17 October 1974. Perhaps that’s what he had in mind with the Mounties, so publication had to wait until Terrance had delivered two or more manuscripts. In fact, by the time the first Mounties book was published, Terrance had delivered the third Mounties novel, fitted in around his commitments to the now very successful Doctor Who novelisations.

Interestingly, the Mounties books were launched to stand on their own. The paperback of The Great March West makes no mention of the Doctor Who novelisations; it only mentions the next two Mounties titles under “Coming shortly” (it doesn’t even use the same “in preparation” as the Doctor Who books). 

The hardback mentions in the author biography on the inside back flap that Terrance wrote the Doctor Who books, and lists his three most recent titles among books also available in the Longbow hardback imprint (alongside The Story of the Loch Ness Monster by Tim Dinsdale, The Creep-Crawly Book edited by Lucy Berman, and The Pony Plot and The Secret of the Missing Foal by Sara Herbert). That is not exactly using the popularity of Doctor Who and the novelisations as a means to sell this new line.

Art director Brian Boyle also seems to have been keen to distinguish the Mounties books from the company’s Doctor Who titles. The cover artwork is very different, eschewing the comic-book style of Chris Achilleos and Peter Brookes (both taking their cues from Frank Bellamy), in favour of a painting of a scene as if captured by camera, in a robust, action-adventure style.

The Target logo on my paperback obscures the signature of the artist but DWM writer Russell Cook has been kind enough to let me see a hardback, in which we can clearly see the word HAYES in the bottom left. That matches other signatures by the same artist, Jack Hayes, much in demand at the time for book covers, especially with romantic / historical subjects.

“In the early 1970s he illustrated paperback covers for Corgi and Fontana on titles as wide-ranging as The Long Wait and Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane (both 1970), Too Few For Drums by RF Delderfield, Only the Valiant and Great Legends of the West, both by Charles Marquis Warren (all 1972), The Gallows Herd by Maureen Peters and Steamboat Gothic by Frances Parkinson Keyes (both 1973).” — Bear Alley. 

His other work includes covers for the Angelique series in the mid-1970s and the lavish cover and internal illustrations for the New Oxford Illustrated Bible (1969) — see examples. I think the latter is in the “historicist” tradition of Biblical and classical art: bold and expressive composition, muscular figures like something from classical sculpture, all bright colours and idealised forms.

To a certain degree, that’s what we see in the cover of this first Mounties book. The image shows clean-shaven, immaculate Rob MacGregor grappling with, but dominating, a scruffier man called Nolan. In the background, we see more uniformed men on horseback — because the whole point of this series is that these are Mounted Police — and the ruined gate of Fort Whoop-Up. The sky behind them is bright white and blue.

The scene chosen is from late in the book, p. 124 of 128. That’s because Rob doesn’t get his distinctive uniform until the last few pages; before this, he was not a Mountie and wouldn’t look nearly so idealised or heroic.

We see his left side: red coat with leather strap over his left shoulder, the left leg of his blue trousers with bright yellow vertical stripe, and left calf-length boot. The whole of his left hand, in a white glove is visible. We can also see the fingers of his right, gloved hand.

That’s also what we see of the Mountie on the cover of Maintain the Right, a non-fiction account of the first 25 years of the Mounties published in 1973, to mark their centenary. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, because this is the book Terrance clearly drew from for his novel — as I’ll come to.

The artwork for that history was by Gordon Maclean / Harvey Brydon Productions. It’s a less dynamic image, the officer upright and still. The moustache makes him look older than young Rob, the landscape behind him is dark, with buffalo framed against an ochre sky. It’s a less relatable image than the cover of the The Great March West, which looks familiar to us from Westerns.

Maintain the Right was written by Ronald Atkin, the then Sports Editor of the Observer, and dedicated to his sons, “Tim and Michael, who like adventure stories.” It’s a collection of extraordinary adventures spanning the first 25 years of the Mounted Police, from the brutal “Cypress Hills Massacre” that led to the formation of the force, to an extraordinary murder case in 1900 solved by the patient, dogged piecing together of clues.

We can doggedly piece together the bits of this book that Terrance cribbed for his novel. For example, here’s what Atkin says of George Arthur French, first commanding officer of the Mounted Police, setting out from Dufferin on his Great March West on 8 July 1874:

“With a keen sense of occasion he had mounted his six troops of fifty men on horses of different colours. In A Division they rode splendid dark bays, the men of B Division had been allocated dark browns, C were on bright chestnuts, D had greys, E were on black horses and light bays” (Maintain the Right, pp. 19-20).

Here’s Terrance opening Chapter 4 of The Great March West:

“Commissioner French sat straight-backed on his horse and looked proudly before him. Three hundred scarlet-coated horsemen were drawn up in columns, waiting for the march to begin. The sun reflected the dazzling white of gauntlets and helmets, and glinted from the gleaming brass chinstraps and highly polished boots.

“The men were divided into six troops, each troop with its own colour horse: dark bays for ‘A’ Division, dark browns for ‘B’, chestnuts for ‘C’, greys for ‘D’, blacks for ‘E’ and light bays for ‘F’” (p. 40).

Rob, initially refused entry into the Mounties, has to make do with driving oxen alongside them. Atkin tells us that the Mounties faced mosquitos, lack of water, thunderstorms and other hazards on the march, but that, 

“The heaviest set back was the blow to their dignity when French ordered them to take turns driving the ox teams” (Maintain the Right, p. 64).

On p. 47 of the novel, Rob befriends a Mountie called Henri Dubois who cooks him a meal of “many fine frogs”. This is taken from a real incident, when a Frenchman call d’Artique, “adjusted himself to the food shortage” faced on the march by,

“catching frogs in the swamps with a whip and sharing the feast with some initially dubious friends” (p. 65).

At one point, Atkin says Commissioner French thinks the guide is misleading them (p. 72), which Terrance makes a big part of his novel. Real people — Commissioner French, Assistant Commissioner Macloed, Chief Crowfoot, the Indian scout Jerry Potts — are all as described in the history book. The details of guns used by the Mounties — a six-shot Adams .45 calibre revolver and single-shot Snider-Enfield carbine — are also as per Atkin.

But Terrance omits many of the privations faced by the Mounties, not least the problems of lice.

“There was much suffering and cursing until the force was paraded naked and each policeman rubbed down with juniper oil. They also learned from their half-breed drivers how to remove the lice from their clothing by placing them on anthills” (p. 69)

The ending is also very different. The Great March West was conducted with the aim of closing down Fort Whoop-Up, the well-defended stockade that was the centre of the illegal whisky trade. In reality, when the Mounties arrived, Assistant Commissioner Macleod and Jerry Potts rode up to the gate and — to their surprise — were invited inside for dinner. There was no sign of any booze, which had all been moved out long before.

In the novel, Macleod invites Rob MacGregor — who has just exposed the treacherous guide — to ride with him to the gate of Fort Whoop-Up. The men inside refuse to open up, mocking the two Mounties for their smart uniforms. Macleood retreats, telling Rob he was ordered to try a peaceful approach first. Then he orders the Mounties’ field guns to fire.

Blasting through the gate, the Mounties take the fort but the men inside insist they have no whisky. It would be a serious error to have attacked an innocent settlement, but Rob uses his wits to deduce where the booze is hidden. That done, he has a fight with one of the villains and brings him to justice. It’s all much more dramatically satisfying than what really happened. 

Terrance also adds plenty of his own invention to the historical facts. When forced to fight with an Indian, Rob decides to do so bare-handed rather than with a weapon, correctly guessing the effect this will have on those watching. Challenged to a duel by another Mountie, he apologises for any offence — and so becomes good friends with his rival. Twice, he goes swimming naked — once, while being watched by the Indians. A guest of the Indians, he eats a meal of puppy. He learns to drive two oxen by yelling “gee” and “haw”. None of this stuff comes from Atkin.

The philosophy, too, is pure Terrance. Macleod tries to enter Fort Whoop-Up on friendly terms; he only attacks when given no choice. Early on, Rob is advised by his “laconic” grandfather that he must make a choice about joining the Mounties or not; but neither will be easy. These are the kinds of “moments of charm” we seen in Doctor Who overseen by Terrance. 

Another note he gave his writers was to show a clash between characters, neither of whom are necessarily wrong. Here, the book opens with “cheerful and optimistic” Rob and his father who thinks “life was a battle”. Later, Rob must acknowledge that the Indians comprise individuals holding different views. I’ve more to say on the representation of Indians, and the language used about them, when I post about the next two Mounties books.

But perhaps the most notable difference between this first Mounties novel and the non-fiction book Terrance drew from is the women in them.

Atkin depicts a male-dominated world, but there are constant references to the “Great Mother”, aka Queen Victoria, respected by the Indians. We hear from several Indian squaws, there’s a scandal involving the wife of Commissioner Herschmer, and there are a couple of women journalists reporting on the Yukon gold rush, both of them extraordinary characters. Not exactly loads of women, but some notable examples.

Yet in this first Mounties novel, Rob comes from an all-male home, living (and bickering with) his father and grandfather. There is a reference to a place called Old Wives Creek (p. 54) before we briefly witness a “crowd of women and children” (p. 56). And that’s it.

I think that’s to do with the perceived market for these old-fashioned adventure stories aimed at boys aged 8-12, though that is really no excuse. And it’s in marked contrast to Terrance’s later original novels, such as The Baker Street Irregulars (commissioned by Richard Henwood) and Star Quest (from the same publisher as the Mounties books), which feature groups of heroes with a mix of boys and girls. Indeed, Terrance’s last original novels were aimed specifically at girl readers, with Cassie and the Riviera Crime and Nikki and the Drugs Queen Murder both published in 2002.

More on this to follow, as I work through the next two Mounties novels...

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Thanks to everyone who has supported this series of posts. They take time and there are expenses, so do consider making a contribution.

Next episode: the second Mounties novel, Massacre in the Hills (and then, for those of limited patience, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen...)

Secret Classrooms, by Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman

First published in 2011, this absorbing history of the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) describes how, during the 1950s, some 5,000 young men underwent intensive teaching in Russian, the aim to produce translators for signals intelligence (Sigint) as well as interrogators, field agents and spies.

That bit in Doctor No (1962), when we see the cardigan-wearing men and women in London listening in on coded signals and realising Strangways has been murdered? That’s where these people came from.

The book was inspired by a piece by Alan Bennett in the London Review of Books, in which he happened to mention that, as a National Service conscript on the Russian course in the early 1950s, he’d been required to clean the urinals of a mess with his bare hands. Another conscript, Geoffrey Elliott, thought “Hey, me too!” and, with historian Harold Shukman — another veteran of the course — set out to tell the full story.

That origin story gives something of the flavour of this book, full of telling detail. Such drudgery contrasts with the big names involved. The “kursanty” — Russian for students — included many who later forged careers in words: as well as Bennett, there were Jack Rosenthal, Michael Frayn and Dennis Potter, in an adjacent cabin at the JSSL school in Bodmin to his later producer Ken Trodd. Also, not mentioned in the book, Terrance Dicks was at JSSL in Crail, Scotland, around 1958. 

But it wasn’t just writers.

“JSSL’s pupils went on to scale many commanding heights. Professors of Russian, Chinese, Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, German, History, Japanese, Politics and Drama at leading universities, ambassadors to Argentina, China, Italy, Libya and the former Yugoslavia, authors, a member of the Royal Academy, novelists, playwrights, poets, screenwriters, actors, leading members of the Bar, economists, Heads of Oxbridge colleges, public school housemasters, officials of the Royal Household, historians, rare book dealers, journalists, including several Moscow correspondents for Reuters, the BBC and Fleet / Street, churchmen — a bishop among them — diplomats, a Director of Public Prosecutions, Controller of Music at the BBC, the British Government’s senior interpreter over many key Cold War detente years, the current proprietor of the New Statesman, the editor of New Society, an authority on medieval German manuscripts, officers in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), ‘perhaps the best Rugby coach Wales ever had’, the Coroner of Greater Manchester, the Governor of the Bank of England, a Discalced Carmelite Friar, a professional bridge player, and many officers, including a Director and Deputy Director, of Government Communications Headquarters” (p. 13)

It’s a whole generation of boffins, “an unusually large number of them bespectacled” as the authors say (p. 6) of ranks they were themselves part of. They also refer to, “JSSL’s unmilitary, bottle-eyed swots in their baggy uniforms” (p. 40).

The book describes a rigorous educational regime for these dorky swots, with long days spent cramming lists of obscure words, and classes using the “direct method” of teaching — ie all spoken in Russian — with constant conferences, exercises and tests. They read Crime and Punishment, they put on plays, they did dictation during lunch. Sometimes against their best efforts, it got into their heads. Decades later, Sir Peter Hall could remember Lermontov’s “The Officer Cadet’s Prayer” by heart, and Alan Bennett the Russian for “rolling barrage” (p. 222).

There was an extraordinary incentive to work. Those who failed were RTU’d or returned to their former units, which was no small threat given the chance of active service in such places as Cyprus or Korea. Even so, “pupils were bright and instinctively rebellious” (p. 12), while conscripts who showed prowess in fighting and traditional army skills were exempt from JSSL. It must have been “a temptation for a regimental commanding officer, or his naval and air-force counterparts, to fob off on JSSL anyone who looked or indeed was odd, or likely to be an unmilitary nuisance” (p, 47). 

Among this Awkward Squad was Jeremy Woolfenden, who I read about in Some Men in London. Here we learn he wore odd socks “to irritate people on the Tube”, is said to have quipped, “We can’t all be brilliant but I find it helps’ and, when challenged on the paucity of his accent, claimed to speak the language of the Moscow racetrack (p. 162).

That all gives the impression of Carry on Sergeant only with nerds. But there’s something richer, stranger and more tragic in the story here, le Carre through the eyes of the League of Gentlemen.

Much of that is because the staff were just as much misfits as the kursanty, many of them exiles or refugees from across eastern Europe. The characters we’re told about include Mitek Gigiel-Melechowicz, who lost both hands and an eye in the war, but could still work a piece of chalk — or glass of vodka — with scissor-like attachments in his stumps (p. 161). Young Mr Ross enthralled students with first-hand accounts of the siege of Leningrad where he had been captured by Germans and then escaped to Denmark (p. 80). Or there’s

“The tall, sad-eyed Alexei Ivanovich, always impeccably turned out with his trademark bow-tie” (p. 135)

Elegance in exile, I thought, like a former lord of time in his velvet jackets and frilly shirts.

Much of JSSL was overseen by the extraordinary Liza, as the kursanty almost certainly did not call Elizabeth Hill to her face. Her mother had been Russian nobility and her father a Lancing-educated Scottish businessman who fled the Russian revolution. Liza is an enthralling character, blustering, self-aggrandising and over-exited but inspiring adulation in her students (p, 156). She also had a lifelong companion in Doris Mudie, who invited Liza back to her large family house in Vincent Square, London, with the immortal words, 

“Why don’t you come and live with me there and do your studies. Don’t worry, I’m not a lesbian.” (p. 17).

There’s plenty here on Liza’s battles with other colleagues and with the students, determined to ensure they exert themselves. It’s irresistible stuff, such as when another exile, Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Chernysheva, fell out with Liza. 

“The proximate cause to judge from the latter’s memoirs seems to have been that Alexandra had wandered into the complex electromagnetic field of emotions that made up the relationship between Liza and her ‘Sister in Chief’, Doris Mudie, whom Liza supported financially and morally with unremitting commitment. He was always at pains to find, and invent, a role for Doris, who fluttered helpfully in the wings of Salisbury Villas, making recordings and copying texts and diffidently giving small group classes in phonetics, even though most suspected she actually spoke little or no Russian.” (p. 138)

I’d so love to read more, but Jean Stafford Smith’s biography, In the Mind's Eye: The Memoirs of Dame Elizabeth Hill, is eye-wateringly expensive. And I have a hundred other things to be reading and writing first.

At the end, the authors sum up that the course provided value for money for the British government, and had lasting positive effects on the kursanty — instilling confidence, drive, a love of language and so on. But I’m especially taken by the idea that understanding Russian meant understanding what the enemy was up to, enabling swift and efficient response. That meant the kursanty who found jobs within the intelligence system helped to prevent escalation — and war.

In effect, these non-soldiery soldiers, unsuited to conventional fighting, were an extraordinary weapon. Don’t underestimate boffins with their books.

Penda’s Fen Scene by Scene, by Ian Greaves

This is an impressively detailed, close analysis of compellingly nuts and unsettling TV film Penda’s Fen, originally broadcast on BBC-1 on the evening of 21 March 1974. 

Ian Greaves — a friend for decades and now a stablemate at Ten Acre Books — devotes a chapter to each of the 27 scenes in the play, in order. He carefully compares different drafts of script and other sources, with new testimony from many of those who worked on it. Many of these chapters are followed by ‘Interludes’ that explore a topic in further depth — for example, the role of Sir Edward Elgar and his music, the history of one of Rudkin’s other plays (for radio), or biographies of leading figures in the cast and crew.

Of the latter, I was blown away by the extraordinary life and output of producer David Rose. I’ve often seen his name attached to compelling works of drama but Ian lays out how brilliant he was at facilitating good work from others. 

“In every anecdote about him, the wording and circumstances may vary, but they each tell the same story — of his light touch, his willingness to delegate, to enable good work, and above all to trust and empower those around him” (p. 123)

What an epitaph! 

The scene-by-scene analysis is so brilliantly done, full of top facts and smart insight. Then the last chapter, on the context of transmission, is a revelation. 

How extraordinary to see this weird film in the context of the otherwise mundane TV that day of broadcast, in the context of the oil crisis and in the context of everything else. We understand what Penda’s Fen is and its impacts, the mixed reactions to it at the time and after, by knowing what it sat amidst in the schedule and in people’s lives.

Ian then continues this to cover repeat screenings and the sharing of the play on video among jitter-fingered fans. So often, analysis of a particular TV programme or film sees its subject as a discreet unit, cut off from context. A film of this sort gets labelled as “folk horror” and bracketed with other stuff of what is seen as similar type. But that excises what made this so strange and jarring: it wasn’t like anything around it. By wading into that context, Ian makes Penda's Fen even more odd and interesting. 

I read the book a little guiltily, as it’s unrelated to the huge heap of work I need to get done on my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks (who, at the time that Penda’s Fen was first broadcast, was just coming to the end of his full-time job with the BBC as script editor of Doctor Who). And yet there are overlaps here. 

For example, on p. 151 Ian identifies two special effects shots in the play as the work of Bernard Lodge, who got the job in September 1973 and made use of his own version of the ‘slit scan’ technique from the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, this was at just the same time that Lodge was also using the same technique to create the new opening title sequence for Doctor Who.

That prompted me to look at the transmission of Penda’s Fen in the context of Doctor Who. Of no interest to anyone but me, it went out in the week between Part Four of Death to the Daleks and Part One of The Monster of Peladon. That was also the week in which the novelisations Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon and Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks were meant to be published; the archive of the Official Doctor Who Fan Club of the time suggests that both books were delayed until July.

One of the things Ian discusses in the book is that Penda’s Fen was never expected to be repeated; viewers were expected to make up their minds about its strange, opaque meanings from a single viewing. That’s true of those working on Doctor Who in the same period. These things are, quite by accident beyond the cast and crew, ephemera that has endured for half a century now, while so much of the stuff around it has long faded.

Some Men in London vol 1, Queer Life 1945-1959, ed. Peter Parker

Reading Bookish and its brief, telling reference to a man who walks into the sea because someone has his letters prompted me to try this, the first of two volumes collecting primary sources on what the blurb calls "the rich reality of life for queer men in London, from the end of the Second World War to decriminalization in 1967."

It's a fascinating, insightful and often disturbing read, presenting contemporary accounts by gay men alongside the things said about them such as in the press and Parliament. Editor Peter Parker largely lets these things speak for themselves, providing context rather than judgement, though one or two contributors get short thrift and you feel his anger in the Introduction when citing archives that would not allow publication of relevant material.

Some of what is presented here I knew, such as Noel Coward's outward support for and inward impatience with Sir John Gielgud following his arrest. I also knew some of the history of the Fitzroy Tavern. But it's very different to see all this stuff in context. There is a lot of buttoned-up, barely contained emotion, as much from those apoplectic about gayness as the gay men themselves.

A number of pieces here are particularly haunting. There's an extraordinary account by Brian Epstein, describing his arrest on 24 April 1957.

Having been to see a play that evening in London, Epstein stopped to use the public lavatory at Swiss Cottage tube station and, on leaving, made eye contact with a man staring at him, who then followed Epstein down the street. When Epstein looked back, the man, "nodded again and raised his eyebrows". Epstein walked on but then decided to go back to this man, who asked if Epstein knew anywhere they could go. Epstein suggested a nearby field, but as they headed off together another man joined them - both men were policemen and arrested Epstein for "persistently importuning".

At the police station, the arresting officers told the sergeant that they'd caught Epstein importuning four men. The next day, at Marylebone Magistrates' Court, he was advised to plead guilty as it would, said the detective, result in a simple fine rather than his history being looked into. The same detective then proceeded to give evidence that Epstein had been caught importuning seven men.

"I am not sorry for myself. My worst times and punishments are over. Now, through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends. The damage, the lying criminal methods of all the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me leaves me cold, stunned and finished" (pp. 277-78)

It's one of a number of examples here of similar methods and false claims by police. I've looked up the details and Epstein was sentenced to two years' probation. Given his experience, it's extraordinary to learn that in 1958, while still on probation, he went back to the police to report being assaulted and extorted by a man he'd had sex with, which ended up in him having to testify in court and to come out to his family. The press were not allowed to name him; if they had, I suspect Epstein would never have gone on to be manager of the Beatles.

Among the examples of disgust and fury from the press, Parker quotes in their entirety three notorious pieces by Douglas Warth, published over consecutive weeks in the Sunday Pictorial in the summer of 1952. The first, from 25 May, is headlined "Evil Men" and feels the need to explain slang terms "slap", "dragging up", "send up", "camp" and "rough" (p. 134). That suggests readers had little knowledge of the subject, but the piece goes on to counter misconceptions and address claims made in defence of gay men. 

It quotes London psychiatrist Dr Carl Lambert, who admits that gay men can include those in what he calls the "virile professions" such as,

"generals, admirals [and] fighter pilots ... The brilliant war records of many homosexuals is explained by the fact that, as the Spartans, they fought in the company of those whose opinions they valued most highly" (p. 133).

The implication is that heterosexuals who display courage under fire do so for reasons other than peer pressure and being easily led. 

The following week, 1 June, Warth was trying to unpick the causes of gayness and cited an unnamed "celebrated psychiatrist":

"We all have some homosexual tendencies. Sex is a delicate balance and there is something womanly about the toughest man. So we must all alert ourselves to the danger" (p. 139)

There was more of this attempt to explain causes the following week. The extraordinary subheading "Why not a Broadmoor for such people" refers to the infamous high-security psychiatric hospital, but the piece that follows then suggests a physical cause: 

"There is a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities" (p. 141).

Having suggested a hormonal cause, effectively something a person is born with, the article then switches back to psychiatry, quoting Harley Street psychiatrist Dr Clifford Allen:

"Homosexuality is caused by identification with (or moulding oneself on) the mother ... In such cases, the mother, by being alternately cold and affectionate, has made the child seek an affection it has never enjoyed."

Allen goes on to say it's not all the fault of mothers. 

"With a son often the father is too busy, or too interested in golf" (p. 143).

Parker, usually impartial about sources, describes Allen as "unhelpful" (p. 381). But the muddle here is all Warth. The cause of gayness is glands, it's Mum, it's Dad, it's golf. It's something in some of us and it's something in us all. It's secret, nefarious and evil; even when gay mean are "brilliant" and heroic, it must be for wrong reasons.

There are other dubious explanations given by those horrified by gayness. For example, Sir John Nott-Bowes, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee on 22 November 1954 that the recent rise in arrests for importuning was due to, of all things, the Festival of Britain: 

"This is borne out by the fact that the increase took place during the exact months when the South Bank Exhibition was open" (p. 204).

Forget glands or golf; it's the Skylon.

Speaking of Wolfenden, Some Men in London, ends with biographies of the leading figures cited, presented in alphabetical order. That means we finish with Sir John Wolfenden and his son. We're told that on being appointed as chair of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Sir John wrote to Jeremy:

"I have only two requests to make of you at the moment: 1) That we stay out of each other's way for the time being. 2) That you wear rather less make-up" (p. 431) 

That we're also told that this is something Jeremy Wolfenden "claimed" suggests editor Peter Parker is not convinced it is true. How fascinating, even so. Jeremy was born in 1934 and,

"did a Russian interpreter's course during his National Service" (p. 430).

That means he was probably at the Joint Services School for Linguistics at RNAS Crail in Scotland, one of the 5,000-7,000 students there between 1956 and 1960. Given his age, Wolfenden could well have been there alongside Alan Bennett (also born 1934), Terrance Dicks and Dennis Potter (both born 1935), Jack Rosenthal (1931) and Michael Frayn (1933) - all but Terrance mentioned here. 

Terrance's widow Elsa tells me that Terrance didn't exactly apply himself to the Russian course and spent most of his time in Scotland playing golf. Jeremy Woldenden seems to have stuck at his lessons, given that he was recruited by the Secret Service and later become Moscow correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. While in Moscow, he,

"befriended Guy Burgess, whose habits of drunkenness and promiscuity he shared. Caught in flagrante, he was asked by the KGB to report on his press colleagues, while the British wanted him to to report back to them" (pp. 430-31).

He died in mysterious circumstances in 1965. In looking into this, I find that the Wolfendens, father and son, were the subject of a film shown on BBC Four, Consenting Adults (2007). The role of Police Constable Butcher was played by Mark Gatiss - years before he conceived Bookish.