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.

*

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…

Bergcast #39 - The Blu-ray Xperiment

The latest episode of the Bergcast podcast, devoted to all things Nigel Kneale, features an interview with Steve Rogers at Hammer Films, responsible for the current run of deluxe Blu-ray releases including The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2.

I'm also interviewed about the two-part documentary about Kneale I worked on for these releases, with Jon Clarke and Robin Andrews at Eklectics, brother Tom and expert pundits Toby Hadoke, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz, Dr Tom Attah, Joel Morris, Jane Asher and Ted Childs.

Excitingly, Hammer are showing Quatermass 2 and the second-half of the documentary TONIGHT, 9pm on 31 October 2025, on YouTube. Quatermass! The rocket guy! Pew!

Both Quatermass films are also being shown at Derby QUAD on 6 December, with talks by Toby Hadoke, Andy Murray, Brontë Schiltz and Jon Dear.

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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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...)

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks — II

PART TWO

Following part one, this post concludes a great plunge into the novelisation Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks, first published on 15 January 1976. Here, I’ll focus on what Terrance added to the TV story Terror of the Zygons written by Robert Banks Stewart and script edited by Robert Holmes.

The opening scene of the TV story is set on an oil rig at sea. Munro speaks by radio to an unseen, unheard person called Willie — pronounced “Wullie” — asking him to send over some haggis as the chef “doesnae ken” about it. This subtly conveys to the viewer that we are off the coast of Scotland. 

There’s then a disturbing, electronic sound and the oil rig is destroyed by something unseen — though the title of the novelisation is a bit of a giveaway. 

(Nine year-old Lady Vader helpfully summarised the story for me this morning: “The Loch Ness Monster isn’t good or bad, it’s just a big puppy and they’ve hidden it’s treat.”)

So, what does Terrance do with this? He tells us in his first sentence that this is the oil rig Bonnie Prince Charlie, though it’s not named on screen until much later in the story, where it’s just “Prince Charlie”. In his first draft, Terrance called it the Ben Nevis, which is another rig destroyed in the story, suggesting that the simple effort to underline exactly where we are at the start of the story took more effort than we might expect. 

Jock Munro, his first name Terrance’s coinage, is drinking “rum-laced cocoa” and his internal monologue is a little spicy:

“Grinning to himself, he waited for Willie to demand how the blankety-blank he was supposed to find haggis for twenty-odd men at a few hours’ notice.” (p. 7)

Strong liquor and swearing in a book for children, and we’re only on the first page! (Reading this as a child, I thought blankety-blank was a reference to the TV game show, but Blankety-Blank didn’t air until 1979).

Terrance gives Munro — and the reader — a glimpse of the titular monster, “something huge, incredible” at this early point. But he doesn’t explain the term “RT”, used several times here and later. Perhaps these were more common in the mid-1970s, or it was felt that given the setting is the radio room of an oil rig we’d know that RT means “radio transmitter”. Still, it’s unusual for Terrance not to spell it out.

We cut from this monstrous attack to the arrival of “the blue police box” — definite article — with its “strange, wheezing, groaning sound”, the phrase Terrance coined in his first novelisation (where it’s “a strange wheezing and groaning”) and would reuse many times after this. 

In fact, several phrases here are repeated from other books. “That mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as ‘the Doctor’” (p. 9) is word-for-word the opening sentence of The Doctor Who Monster Book (although there “the Doctor” is in bold). Here, as there, Terrance explains the acronym TARDIS (“dimensions” plural). This stuff is the essential lore of Doctor Who and Terrance repeating it in different books etched it into readers’s brains.

Harry Sullivan, a companion Terrance created, is — as per his Doctor Who and the Giant Robot — “handsome” with a “square jaw, frank blue eyes and curly hair.” We’re told Harry is “conventionally dressed in blazer and flannels” and is “like the hero of an old-fashioned adventure story”. It’s the same method Terrance used in the Monster Book to pithily describe the four Doctors: facial appearance, clothes, the kind of heroics in evidence. 

By contrast, Sarah here is simply a “slim, attractive girl” (p. 9). Still, when Harry’s medical skills and Sarah’s journalistic prowess are useful to the plot, Terrance tells us about the mechanics of doorstepping local people as Sarah gathers her “harvest of gossip” (p. 20). He had first-hand experience of this kind of thing, having once had a job going door-to-door to ask people their habits in shampoo and dog food. 

Reference is made briefly to the “many strange things” Sarah and Harry have seen in their adventures in Time and Space (with capitals), but Terrance doesn’t cite examples. When we’re told the Doctor has been summoned urgently back to Earth, there’s no asterisk and footnote saying “See Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen”, the adventure immediately preceding this one and the novelisation that Terrance wrote next. As we’ve seen, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot includes a footnote citing the then not-yet published Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. The fact that the same thing doesn’t happen here may mean a novelisation of Revenge of the Cyberman hadn’t been scheduled when Terrance wrote this.

Terrance also says that the Doctor gave the Brigadier the “recall device” — not “space-time telegraph” as in Revenge of the Cybermen — “just before this latest trip” in the TARDIS. That implies that the gift was given not long prior to the end of TV story Robot, ie during the events of that story. In Terrance’s later novelisation Doctor Who and the Face of Evil (1978), we learn that during the events of Robot the newly regenerated Doctor takes a quick jaunt in the TARDIS to a planet in the far future where he attempts to fix the broken computer of a survey team from Earth. I’m rather taken by the idea of the TARDIS landing back in the laboratory at UNIT HQ late one night, only for the Doctor to be caught by the Brigadier who takes him to task for sneaking off in the midst of a crisis.

But I can’t see the Fourth Doctor conceding, or giving the Brigadier this kind of electronic leash. It’s surely more likely that the recall device was a gift from the Third Doctor, prior to the events of Planet of the Spiders. We saw in the novelisation of The Three Doctors that, despite being granted his freedom to travel in time and space again, the Third Doctor felt tied to his “home” at UNIT. Maybe he and the Brigadier swapped gifts just before heading out for the night together to watch a magic show and erotic dancer.

I didn’t mention it in my post on Doctor Who and the Planet of Spiders, but that novelisation suggests its own scene not included on TV. We’re told at the end that the Brigadier has been to the meditation centre to help with the mopping-up, alongside Sarah and former UNIT captain Mike Yates. The Brig and Yates don’t share a scene in the TV story, but I like the idea that they had a chance to clear the air, Mike earning some redemption because he helped to thwart the spiders. Perhaps they shared one last pint. 

The loss of Captain Yates from UNIT led, in the next TV story, to the promotion of Sergeant Benton. As he explains to Sarah in Part Two of Robot:

“That’s promotion, Miss, to WO1. … Warrant Officer. You see, technically speaking the Brig should have a major and a captain under him. The UNIT budget won’t run to it so they settled on promoting me.”

This may have been a late addition as it was missed in the closing credits, where he’s still credited as “Sergeant Benton”. But the promotion was picked up in Doctor Who books, and he’s “Warrant Officer Benton” in The Doctor Who Annual 1976 (published September 1975) and again here, on p. 47 of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster.

But he’s not “Warrant Officer Benton” in the TV version of this story: he’s “Mr Benton” in dialogue, and “RSM Benton” in the credits — that is, a regimental sergeant major. This isn’t wrong; “RSM is the most senior rank held by a Warrant Officer,” clever Paul Scoones explained to me on Bluesky. I suspect the hand of director Douglas Camfield in this maximised promotion; a stickler for military matters, he also cast his friend John Levene in the role of Corporal Benton way back in The Invasion.

There’s an unnamed corporal played by Bernard G High in Terror of the Zygons who, in Part Two, features in a fun scene where he responds “Sir” to everything the Brigadier says. Terrance gives this “super-efficient” and “invaluable” corporal a name — and its one we’ve seen before. In Terrance’s previous book, Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, Corporal Palmer is the first to respond to the attack on UNIT HQ by antimatter jelly.

Palmer is also named on screen in the TV version of The Three Doctors, where (unlike the book) his first sight of the jellies is met with the words “Holy Moses!” He was played by Denys Palmer, who surely gave the character his name. But this character was at least in part the creation of Terrance Dicks. 

We can deduce this from surviving paperwork included on the Blu-ray release of the story. On 9 November 1972, just after production began on The Three Doctors, Terrance sent writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin copies of the scripts, which he had had to revise at the last minute. He explained the various changes he’d made.

“Firstly because of a contractual mixup Frazer Hines became suddenly unavailable and we had to substitute Benton for the Jamie role.”

It seems that as originally written, the Second Doctor and companion Jamie McCrimmon turned up in the TARDIS in Part One, to the surprise of the Third Doctor and Jo. In the rewrite and as broadcast, the Third Doctor and Jo are accompanied by Benton, who has entered the TARDIS for the very first time. This change meant that Benton couldn’t also be, as I think originally written, outside UNIT HQ when it vanishes at the end of Part Two. His astonished reaction was duly assigned to a subordinate, ie the corporal whose more-prominent role in the story meant he now deserved a name. 

I think Terrance must have recalled this as he novelised The Three Doctors and then reused Palmer here, in his very next novelisation. Palmer’s reappearance is, then, a result of the order in which Terrance happened to write these books — and I’ve only spotted the connection by reading them in the same sequence. 

The efficient, kindly Palmer later offers to fetch Sarah some tea, even if he has to make it himself (p. 58); observing that she’s now alone, the Zygons choose that moment to attack. That neatly explains why there aren’t any soldiers closer at hand when Sarah calls for help, an example of Terrance script editing a story a good year after he had left that job on Doctor Who.

A cup of tea being a plot point is also very Terrance Dicks. An innocuous moment in which Benton offers to share a bar of chocolate with Sarah while they’re waiting for news is as per the TV version but Terrance adds three whole meals to the story. Chapter 1 ends with the Doctor informed of suspicious deaths and “briskly” asking “where do we start” with the investigation — as if eager to get moving. On the next page, we’re told that he and his friends enjoy “a large and filling lunch first” (p. 18). 

They also enjoy a proper Scottish breakfast, with Terrance telling us how our heroes take their porridge.

“The Doctor, in true Highland fashion, ate his with just a sprinkle of salt, saying something about having acquired a taste for it during the Jacobite rebellion” (p. 79).

With Terrance taking ever more professional interest in the history of Doctor Who, that may well be a conscious reference to the events of 1966 TV story The Highlanders. But there is also something a bit Ian Fleming / James Bond (of which Terrance was a fan) about telling us that our hero eats the local delicacy in the most authentic manner.

Then, having told us about lunch and breakfast, we get a reference to dinner. After his near-death ordeal with the Skarasen, the Doctor says he wants “a hot bath … then a very large meal, and a nice long sleep” (p. 75).

It’s odd to think of the Doctor soaking in the bath — when he takes a shower in Spearhead from Space, it’s part of a daring escape. Dinner, bath and sleep are all so... ordinary, especially for this particular Doctor. However, we soon learn that a long sleep to the Doctor is just three or four hours and next morning he bangs on doors early to rouse his friends. We’re told that,

“Sarah groaned as she struggled into her clothes” (p. 79). 

Again, it’s an odd mental image. Is she — like the bathing Doctor — naked? Perhaps, at some point between doorstepping villagers and being locked in a decompression chamber, she popped back to the TARDIS for a nightie. Perhaps that always-useful Corporal Palmer was dispatched to source a toothbrush and clean knickers.

There are other odd things of this sort that result from Terrance filling gaps between scenes or explaining details. We’re told twice — on p. 24 and p. 90 — where the Caber got his name. On p. 40, we’re blithely informed mid-paragraph that Sister Lamont is really a Zygon rather than it being a big revelation, and in the next paragraph reference is made to Broton, a page before we’re introduced to him as leader of the Zygons.

The sense is of a book written and revised in some haste, and a light-touch editorial process. Yet many additions are skilful and great fun. Terrance makes Broton a much richer, more memorable character than we see on screen. On TV, John Woodnutt gives the human-form Duke of Forgill a delicious, withering disdain, but the Zygon-form Broton is a more generic monster, saved by amazing costume design and the choice to speak in a whisper. Terrance, brilliantly, makes Broton a vain show-off, bothered when Harry doesn’t “show the proper terrified reaction” (p. 53), and explaining a lengthy bit of exposition as his “need to tell someone of his cleverness” (p. 105).

The other Zygons don’t fare quite so well. On screen, the design makes each Zygon visually distinctive and the dialogue gives them individual names. Terrance uses one of these, “Madra” (p. 61) but omits “Odda” — the Zygon who takes the form of Sister Lamont, named by the Duke-form Broton towards the end of Part Three. Otherwise, little in the way of character is revealed among these Zygon underlings. It’s not in the TV story either, but Terrance often takes care to ensure that groups of people (or aliens) are not uniform, adding bespoke desires, feelings and fears.

See, for example, what he does with the Doctor, with a pause to acknowledge that our hero “hated” having to blow up the Zygon spaceship and its crew for all he understood the need (p. 117). There’s a nice character moment for the Brigadier when he explains the best means of searching for the Doctor out on Tulloch Moor, which sums up his whole outlook: “System and method, Miss Smith” (p. 74). The fastidious, old-fashioned Brigadier also expresses distaste for the slang term “bug” (p. 63).

Even peripheral characters benefit from this kind of thing. We get a vivid sense of the Fourth International Energy Conference in London — whose delegates we don’t see on screen — when Terrance tells us they “muttered and grumbled over their Government champagne” (p. 120).

(“Government” is more usually lower case when employed as an adjective. “Champagne” is a proper noun so should have a capital letter. For some reason, this novelisation also puts “land-rover” in lower case when it’s a brand name. I wonder who subbed this. Can it have been the same person who oversaw “Land-Rover”, capitals, in both Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who — The Three Doctors?)

There are further examples of well-chosen, evocative vocabulary. On screen, the Duke of Forgill drives a Range Rover. Here, it’s a “muddy shooting brake” (p. 11), conjuring something more old-fashioned and characterful. The interior of the Zygon spaceship is all “fibrous” with “protuberances”, “nodules” and “tangles … of roots and vines”, vividly conveying the impression before Terrance puts it more plainly: 

“Somehow the place looked as if it had been grown rather than made” (p. 41).

The terms he feels need explanation are also interesting. Broton says on screen that the Zygons live off the lactic fluid produced by the Skarasen, as per on-screen dialogue, to which Terrance adds, “so the monster was also a kind of milk cow” (p. 43). But a page before this, Broton uses the term “regenerated” and it isn’t explained — because Doctor Who readers could by now be expected to know.

Some additions add to the horror and suspense. The Zygon signalling device doesn’t just stick to the Doctor’s hand as on TV, put attaches itself with tentacles that “made weals in the flesh of his wrist” (p. 71), so the bathing, naked Doctor is also badly wounded. By explaining the workings of a decompression chamber and how long a human can survive without air, Terrance underlines the threat facing the Doctor and Sarah (pp. 39-40). Angus McRanald spends his last moments alive “emptying ashtrays” in the pub, a mundane detail that I think makes his sudden death all the more unexpected and brutal. (It also means that this novelisation for children features smoking as well as boozing and nakedness.)

Terrance further dials ups the suspense when the Doctor and his friends visit Forgill Castle for the first time by describing it in gothic terms as, 

“like that place in Transylvania where Frankenstein carried out his dreadful experiments and Count Dracula flitted around the battlements at sunset” (p. 79).

A pedant might object that the novel Frankenstein is not set in Transylvania, but Terrance is surely evoking the horror films made by Universal which gleefully teamed up Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. He clearly knows the source material well enough to use “Frankenstein” here as the name of the one conducting the experiments — ie the doctor, not his creation. This reference may also be an echo of conversations with Doctor Who script editor Robert Holmes around the time Terrance was writing this novelisation, about a new TV story drawing from Frankenstein, which became The Brain of Morbius.

Our hypothetical pedant (not me, guv) might also object to the moment here in which Sarah spots the fake Harry Sullivan — really a Zygon — because his forehead is not grazed (p. 59), which isn’t in the TV version and doesn’t make sense if the form of fake-Harry is drawn live from real-Harry’s body-print. Much more logical is what happens next, when Sarah knows that this Harry is a wrong ‘un because his manners are lacking (p. 60). The effect of these additions is positive, giving Sarah some agency while being attacked, though Terrance underlines that for all she defends herself, she doesn’t mean “Harry” to fall to his doom. As with the Doctor, she takes no pleasure in her deadly enemy’s death.

In the TV version, the Zygon is killed by this fall. Terrance adds a touch of irony: the would-be killer is skewered on its own pitchfork. When the dead Zygon is then teleported away, the pitchfork protruding from it doesn’t go too and clatters to the ground. It’s such a vivid image, I thought I’d really seen it and was a bit surprised to find, on watching the new Blu-ray the other night, that this doesn’t happen on screen.

Likewise, I love Terrance’s vivid description of the Zygon spaceship concealed in the nook under a cliff-face “like a crab under rock” (p. 103), a suitably aquatic analogy, for all it’s nothing like the TV version where the ship lands in the midst of an open quarry. In fact, it’s so different to what we see on screen, it suggests that Terrance didn’t get to see footage from or a rough cut of these TV episodes, even after completing his first draft of the book. If so, he’d have surely corrected the description to align with what we see on screen — not least because the explosion of the spaceship was so effectively achieved. 

Likewise, Terrance would surely have delighted in the joke ad-libbed by Nicholas Courtney when the Brigadier addresses the Prime Minister as “madam”. In the novelisation, it is “Sir” (p. 110), as per the script. Part of that joke is that this “present-day” Doctor Who was set a little in the future and Courtney thought Shirley Williams might have a chance in the coming election. 

But Terrance has his own eye on the near future. Almost as an aside, we’re told of,

“The development of Man’s technology to the point where the moon [lower case] had already been reached, with interplanetary travel an inevitable next step” (p. 10).

That’s surely foreshadowing UNIT’s next TV adventure, The Android Invasion, broadcast a month before this book was published, which involves a crewed mission to Jupiter. Given this effort to tie up UNIT continuity, I note that Terrance could not acknowledge in this novelisation something that became clear only in retrospect. 

Due to other commitments, Nicholas Courtney was unable to appear as the Brigadier in The Android Invasion as planned. The story features Benton and Harry Sullivan, but it was the last on-screen appearance of both. The Brigadier wouldn’t be back on screen until 1983, by which time we would learn he had left UNIT long behind him. If Terrance hadn’t novelised Terror of the Zygons quite so close to production, he’d have known that this turned out to be the Brigadier’s last story for years, and the end of an era Terrance had helped usher in.

With that in mind, there’s something poignant about the ending of this book. As on TV, the Brigadier and Harry each decline another trip in the TARDIS. Here, the Brigadier recalls his own previous trip — and we get the only footnote in the book directing us to another novelisation, which is the one Terrance wrote most recently. Sarah takes up the Doctor’s offer and off they both go. No one says goodbye or notes the fateful moment.

Terrance adds a little to what we see on screen. The TV version gives the last word to the Duke of Forgill, to which the Brigadier responds with a quizzical look. In the novelisation, that is followed by him wryly wondering where the Doctor and Sarah will end up next. They’re off to their next adventure and all the ones beyond that — but without him.

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These long, long posts on the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take time and effort, so I am busking. Throw some coins in the hat and I can keep going.

Next time: the first of the Mounties books, The Great March West, and Terrance’s first original novel — which features an unexpected appearance by the Doctor...

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, by Terrance Dicks — I

PART ONE

This novelisation was first published on 15 January 1976, simultaneously in hardback by Allan Wingate and in paperback by Target — both imprints of Tandem Publishing Ltd. It’s the second Doctor Who novelisation to feature the Fourth Doctor, his face featured on the cover. 

On the day of publication, the Fourth Doctor was halfway through his tenth adventure on TV: The Brain of Morbius, credited to writer “Robin Bland.” This, of course, was a pseudonym for Terrance Dicks, who asked for his name to be taken off a story that script editor Robert Holmes had extensively revised.

Terrance had another book out later the same month — the first of his Mounties trilogy, The Great March West, also published by Tandem in both hardback and paperback on 28 January. As we’ve seen, the company had only just issued two other books written by Terrance: Doctor Who — The Three Doctors and The Doctor Who Monster Book, both published on 20 November 1975. 

Four books and four TV episodes, all out within a matter of weeks. When did Terrance write these things, and in which order?

Production paperwork survives relating to The Brain of Morbius, providing dates on which scripts were commissioned and delivered. You can browse these papers for yourself, as they’re included among the wealth of PDFs on the new Doctor Who — Season 13 Blu-ray box-set (thanks to the efforts of living saint Richard Bignell).

Sadly, little paperwork survives relating to these four books. Yet Terrance’s archive includes a spiral-bound shorthand notebook in which he jotted thoughts on subsequent writing projects. Some of those notes are dated, from which we can make deductions.

On Saturday, 6 September 1975, Terrance made notes on an idea for a putative TV series that never made it to the screen. At some point after this, he used the same notebook to jot notes on “Cyberman Revenge” — ie his novelisation of Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, published the following year. This was followed by three more entires, dated 6, 9 and 14 October, related to his third Mounties novel, War Drums of the Blackfoot. A full manuscript for that novel also survives, labelled in Terrance’s handwriting “uncorrected” and “November 17th 1975”.

My sense from other paperwork is that Terrance tended to work on one book at a time, completing a manuscript and crossing it off his list before proceeding to the next assignment in line. On that basis, I think he wrote his novelisation of Revenge of the Cybermen at some point between 6 September and 6 October 1975; it was published seven months and 14 days later, on 20 May 1976.

His next book, War Drums of the Blackfoot was written in draft form (requiring another read and corrections) by 17 November 1975, and my guess is that he delivered it to the publisher at the end of that month. The novel was published seven months and 12 days later on 12 July 1976. Terrance — and Tandem — were working to lead-times of 7.5 months.

We can apply this lead-time retrospectively to his previous books. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, published 15 January 1976, must therefore have been delivered around the end of May 1975. Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, published on 20 November, must have been delivered around the end of March. Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, published on 16 October, must have been delivered around the end of February.

So: the end of February, the end of March and then the end of May. A book a month, but with a gap in April. I said before that the use of the name “Gellguards” in The Doctor Who Monster Book but not in Doctor Who — The Three Doctors suggests that the latter was written first. My guess, therefore, is that Terrance wrote the Monster Book in that gap in April; the different format of that book meant it had a different lead time. 

Let’s put all this guesswork — marked “≅” — together with some dates we can be sure of:

≅ end of Feb 1975: Terrance delivers manuscript of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders

≅ end of Mar: delivers Doctor Who — The Three Doctors

≅ end of Apr: delivers The Doctor Who Monster Book

01 May: commissioned to write storyline for The Brain of Morbius, target delivery 14 May and delivered by 19 May

≅ end of May: delivers Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster

06 Jun: commissioned to write 4x scripts for The Brain of Morbius, target delivery 30 Jul

25 Jun: BBC acknowledge delivery of Morbius Part One, accepted by script editor Robert Holmes on 01 Jul

01 Jul: Photocall on set of Planet of Evil; photograph of Elisabeth Sladen and Tom Baker from this shoot used in The Doctor Who Monster Book, suggesting design layout undertaken in July

04 Aug: BBC acknowledge delivery of Morbius Parts Two to Four; undated cover note suggests that Terrance actually delivered revised Parts One and Two in line with notes from Holmes and first-drafts of Parts Three and Four. So he’d had notes from and perhaps a meeting with Holmes in July.

04-18 Aug: Terrance on holiday, according to his cover note to Holmes; he returned from holiday to learn Holmes had extensively rewritten Morbius; on 23 Sep, Terrance’s agent formally asked for his name to be taken off the story.

06 Sep: makes notes on an idea for a putative new TV series.

≅ end of Sep (ie after 06 Sep but before 06 Oct): delivers Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen

06 Oct: working on his third Mounties novel, War Drums of the Blackfoot

17 Nov: completes a rough version of War Drums, probably delivered end of Nov

≅ end of Dec: delivers Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, published some 7.5 months later on 22 Jul 1976.

The first two Mounties books — published in January and April 1976 — don’t fit easily into this sequence but I’ll address what I think happened there in a subsequent post.

This rough timeline helps to explain one of the most striking features of the novelisation Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster: the number of things in it that aren’t in the story as broadcast. As we’ve seen in previous entries, Terrance was generally faithful to the source material, for all he might add brief explanations or soup-up the special effects.

In fact, I think he was faithful here, too. It’s just that his source wasn’t the broadcast version of the story.

We know he worked from scripts because his surviving archive includes a rehearsal script for Part One of what was then called The Secret of Loch Ness, issued ahead of the start of production. That script, which Terrance labelled “DRAFT”, is included among the PDFs on the Season 13 Blu-ray set — you are welcome. On a recent episode of the Power of 3 podcast, Richard Bignell details how the rehearsal script differs from the TV version.

Let’s take one example. In the rehearsal script, the TARDIS materialises “at a precarious angle” amid “jagged rock and dark peat pools”, and causes a few startled sheep to scatter. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and identifies the flora all around as heather, giving its Latin name.

Between this rehearsal script being issued and the filming of this scene on Monday, 17 March 1975, this sequence had been rewritten. Stage directions still called for “Jagged rock and dark peat pools” but the sheep were written out. What’s more, no sooner has the TARDIS materialised than it briefly turns invisible — a bit of added jeopardy and interest apparently added by director Douglas Camfield (something similar happens in the last full Doctor Who story he’d directed, The Invasion, in 1968). 

This pre-filmed material was cut together ahead of studio recording of Part One on 7 April. The camera script for that recording, with the story now entitled Terror of the Zygons, includes the scene in full, and the duration of the edited sequence: 3’ 19”. The camera script is included on the Blu-ray, and a copy of this version of the script is held in Terrance’s archive, too.

Scenes filmed on the same day as the arrival of the TARDIS were also reworked between the rehearsal script being issued and the start of filming. For example, there’s the sequence where Harry is on the shore of Loch Ness when he spots a body in the water — Munro, the radio operator of a doomed oil rig. In the rehearsal script, Harry’s arrival is observed by a tall, strong man called the Caber. Despite Harry’s efforts to help, Munro dies as a result of his ordeal and then Harry is pursued by a Zygon, described in stage directions as having a head like an octopus and a body like a manta ray. We later learn this Zygon had, until moments earlier, been disguised in human form as the Caber. 

In the version filmed and broadcast, the human-form Caber uses a rifle to shoot both Munro and Harry, killing one and wounding the other. We don’t see the Caber in Zygon form. When we see a Zygon for the first time at the end of this episode, the design was inspired by a human foetus, though with suckers like an octopus. 

The fetal Zygons, rifle-totting Caber and disappearing TARDIS are all in Terrance’s novelisation, indicating that he worked from the later camera scripts even though he was provided with the earlier drafts. At some point, he also had access to on-set photographs from the production taken on 23 April, because two images are included in The Doctor Who Monster Book.

In post-production, director Douglas Camfield decided to cut the sequence he’d filmed of the TARDIS arriving then turning invisible. Another cut was made to Part Four of the story, which begins with the Zygon spaceship taking to the air, the Doctor a prisoner inside. Originally, the Doctor called the ship an “old banger” then mocked Zygon leader Broton — who responded by stinging him.

The camera script for Part Four says this was to play out in a medium two-shot of a Zygon and the Doctor, panning right to include Broton in a medium three-shot around the control console of the Zygon ship. Once stung, the camera would tilt down, following the sinking Doctor as he succumbed to the venom. This is what’s happening in the evocative photograph in the Monster Book (and two other photographs taken on the same day) and it’s faithfully recounted on p. 99 of the novelisation, though Terrance slightly tweaked the dialogue in the camera script. 

He seems to have felt the need to foreshadow this thrilling moment, as his novelisation adds several earlier references to the Zygons’ stings, not least the detail that they can’t sting while disguised as humans (p. 77). The TV version makes no mention of stinging at all.

There are two surviving, undated versions of Terrance’s typed manuscript for the novelisation. The first is titled Doctor Who and the Secret of Loch Ness, the name on the rehearsal scripts. My guess is that Terrance was contracted to novelise the story while it was under this title — that is, ahead of the start of production. A subsequent manuscript, this time with corrections made in Terrance’s handwriting, is still titled Doctor Who and the Secret of Loch Ness but adds that the novelisation is based on the serial “Doctor Who and the Terror of the Zygons.” (The “and the” doesn’t appear in the title as broadcast.)

The title of the TV story was apparently changed to focus on the Zygons because of perceived shortcomings in the realisation of the huge cyborg Skarasen, which is revealed to be the Loch Ness monster of legend. These shortcomings weren’t an issue for the book, which retained the focus on the well-known legend. Indeed, the title of the book was changed to emphasise the Loch Ness monster rather than the secret.

Chris Achilleos’ artwork reflects this sense of what did and didn’t work in the TV production. The Zygon is a good likeness of the creature seen on screen, based on the photograph used in the Monster Book as Broton stings the Doctor. But Achilleos modified the TV version of the Skarasen, making it more animal-like, fierce and convincing.

Achilleos also returned to the format of the first 12 Target novelisations with a likeness of the Doctor’s head in stippled black and white. The Doctor’s scarf and the Skarasen’s neck break the bottom of the frame, adding a three-dimensional effect which makes the whole thing a bit more dynamic. 

The early covers (and that of The Doctor Who Monster Book) were on white backgrounds but here, as with Achilleos’s cover for Doctor Who — The Three Doctors — a radiating colour gradient fills the frame. On that earlier book, the radiating colour scheme adds to the sense of Omega’s power. Here, the concentric circles and colour scheme make this look like a Looney Toons cartoon, which rather undercuts the Doctor’s serious expression and any terror evoked by these monsters. The colour effect is so simple, I wonder if Achilleos delivered black-and-white artwork with colour applied by someone else, in an effort to save time.

(ETA: A couple of correspondents think I am wrong and that Achilleos produced the colour artwork all himself. I have been given a lead on a source to corroborate this and will investigate. More to follow...)

I bought what I thought was a first edition of the paperback which turned out, on arrival, to be a third impression reprint from 1980, with a green logo that doesn’t match the other colours of the artwork. Thanks to the generosity of donors to my Ko-fi, I then bought a first edition so I could compare the two.

This first edition has a pale blue logo, brighter than the blue at the top of the artwork but in sympathy with it, while clashing with the orange that frames the Doctor. Clashing “complimentary colours” (primary blue with secondary orange, yellow with purple, red with green) make an image seem brighter — it’s an effect used by the Impressionists. So the original, blue title is brighter and more arresting, the later green version more muted.

The cover art on the latter edition is an nth-generation reproduction, darker and with less fine detail than the original. It’s the same artwork and design and yet overall less pop.

Both editions comprise 128 pages but the first edition is notably thicker, being printed on better quality paper, and is 2mm taller. I need to read up again on the mechanics of reissuing titles but the height discrepancy suggests that the later edition is a reissue rather than reprint, with the cover and spine removed from unsold, pristine stock and a new cover applied to create what was considered to be a whole new book. If I remember rightly, the process involved trimming the pages to remove any scuffed or bent edges, hence the slightly smaller book.

If so, that affects any reckoning of numbers of copies produced. The dead useful Doctor Who Toybox says (if you put “Loch Ness” in the search box) that the 1978 second impression of Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, i.e. the first version with the green logo, was published in two print runs, first of 3,000 then of 10,000 copies. A print run of 12,000 copies followed in 1979 and one of 15,000 in 1980 (one of the latter my copy). There were then print runs of 15,000 in 1982, 20,000 in 1983 and 10,000 in 1986. But the missing 2mm suggests that at least some of these were not wholly new books but reissued stock. That would mean we can’t simply add up these different figures to get total copies printed (which would be 30,000 1977-80 and a further 45,000 1982-86). 

Besides, books printed isn’t the same thing as books sold. I’ll have more to say on numbers sold in due course…

The back-cover blurb is the same on both these editions. “DOCTOR WHO” and “ZYGONS” both feature twice, both times all in capitals, but “the monster” is lower case despite the emphasis given to it in the book’s title. “The Doctor, Sarah and UNIT” are mentioned, but not poor Harry Sullivan — a bona fide companion though this is his final trip in the TARDIS. He made his final onscreen appearance on 13 December 1975, just a month before this book was published and long after this blurb was approved.

Both books cite the Writers’ Guild Award won by the Doctor Who script-writers on 12 March 1975, a long time ago by the time of the 1980 reprint. (I wonder if any young readers thought it applied to the most recent run of episodes on TV…)

Inside, the first edition explains “THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO” but the 1980 reprint does not. The first edition lists all the Target novelisations to that point except for Doctor Who and the Giant Robot — once again, the late addition of that book to the schedule seems to mean it got missed from subsequent lists. It’s also missing from the much longer list of available titles in the 1980 reprint, but that skips a load of others titles, too, including Terrance’s Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders and Doctor Who — The Three Doctors. 

The title page in both editions gives the name of the book (well, d’uh) and tells us it is “Based on the BBC serial “Doctor Who and the Terror of the Zygons by Robert Banks Stewart by arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation”. This is followed by Terrance’s name in capital letters. In the first edition, the Target logo appears at the foot of the page. In the later edition, there’s a smaller logo with a caption saying that Target is the paperback division of WH Allen and Co. I bet there was a long, involved meeting to decide that change.

Over the page, the indicia is different, the later version acknowledging that it is a “third reprint” but the blue-logo one not saying that it is a first edition — which doesn’t half cause some bother when tracking down first editions. The details given of the publisher are also different. Target, originally an imprint of Tandem, had been born at 14 Gloucester Road, London SW7 and was still there when this book was first published. By 1980, Target was at 44 Hill Street, W1. But the printer remained the same on both editions: Richard Clay (the Chaucer Press)  in Bungay, Suffolk.

The only other difference between these two editions is the interior back page: readers are invited to write in for a free badge and to be entered into a draw to win free books, but with Target having moved offices there’s a different address in each edition. In all, eight of the 128 internal pages are different in to the two editions, but everything else — the contents page, the chapters — are identical. My guess is that the printers simply pulled out lithographic or photographic plates from storage and set the presses running, but were able to make amendments to the first and last pages to update postal addresses and credits.

The books changed with new editions — the look and feel of them, the technicalities of head office. Yet what Terrance wrote in May 1975 remained unchanged, a constant through the years.

At last we come to what Terrance actually wrote. That incldues the return of a character created for The Three Doctors. There’s booze, cigs and swearing, and two lead characters get naked.

But that is still to come in part two.

*

These long, detailed posts as I work my way through the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks take a bit of time and effort, not least to get hold of the books under scrutiny. You can support the cause by making a small donation.