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

Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

The eagle-eyed reader might spot the odd, occasional typo in this series of long, long posts about the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks. I blame the growing cyber-menace that is autocorrect and not my own fleshy human weakness. However, there is not a word missing from the title of this post. The absence of “and” is deliberate.

This is, after Doctor Who — The Three Doctors, the second Doctor Who novelisation not to employ an “and the” title. At least, the “and” is missing from the front cover of my first edition of this book. On the spine and title pages, and in most references to this novelisation, it is Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen. It is only from the front cover that the word has been deleted.

This was clearly done to make a long title fit the established cover template. On Terrance’s next novelisation, the long title Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks was made to fit by reducing the vertical height of the letters, still set in Futura Condensed ExtraBold, from 6mm to 5mm, or from 40pt to 35pt (based on the typeface I have for reference). 

The team at Wyndhams — who published Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 20 May 1976 — initially intended to shorten the title still further, presumably to make it better fit the template. “[Doctor Who and] The Cybermen’s Revenge” is the title given on a list of “Advance information on Doctor Who novelisations in preparation” sourced from Wyndhams, handwritten by Graham Wellfare and reproduced on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2. 

As I said in my post on that book, this list sadly isn’t dated but the first title given is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published “Aug 75” at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August 1975 but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, on 15 May.

The title was also “Cybermen Revenge” in Terrance’s handwritten notes for Chapter 10 of the in-progress novelisation. The three pages of notes are undated but were written between dated entries on other projects on 6 September and 6 October 1975. 

Therefore, I think Terrance wrote and delivered the manuscript for Doctor Who and the Cybermen’s Revenge in September 1975, under that title. My guess is that the production team then wanted to retain the title used on screen, as would be the case for all Doctor Who books from pretty much this point on (Doctor Who and the Space War, published 23 September 1976, was the last novelisation to rename a story). The awkward step of deleting “and” from the front cover of this book but not from the spine or title pages suggests that the change was made late in the process.

That original title for the book would have made this a closer match to Doctor Who and the Cybermen by Gerry Davis (published 19 February 1975), adapted from the TV story The Moonbase (1967), which Davis co-wrote with Kit Pedler. I think that may be part of a wider, conscious effort to link these two novelisations.

For the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen, Chris Achilleos produced a stippled, black-and-white portrait of the Second Doctor, including his collar and bowtie, framed by an image of the Moon (the setting of the story) with a flaming and dappled black border suggesting outer space. 

A Cyberman in the lower left of the frame stares impassively back at us. It’s the wrong Cyberman for the TV story, based on a photograph of the redesigned Cybermen from 1968 story The Invasion. But perhaps that was on purpose, to align more closely with the versions seen on TV in Revenge of the Cybermen, broadcast just weeks after this book was first published.

When producing cover artwork for Doctor Who The Revenge of the Cybermen, Achilleos seems to have had this earlier artwork in mind. Again, there’s a stippled-black-and-white portrait, this time of the Fourth Doctor, including the top-most part of his scarf. He is framed by an image of fiery space bordered by nebulous black. It’s not space station Nerva or the rocky asteroid of Voga that are the settings in the story; I think that makes it closer in style to the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen. Again, there’s a Cyberman in the lower left of frame. This time he faces another alien creature, a Vogan.

The big difference between the two covers, I think, is that the Second Doctor looks serious, suggesting a serious story, while the Fourth Doctor is beaming. The portrait is based on a photograph of Tom Baker on location for The Sontaran Experiment (1975), but in that photograph Baker’s expression is a bit more determined and grim, teeth gritted rather than smiling. Achilleos has also made the Doctor's hair fluffier and more bouffant. It’s a gleeful Doctor, not one fighting for his life.

Tom Baker filming
The Sontaran Experiment
c/o The Black Archive

There's something similar going on in the depiction of the monsters. On TV, the Cybermen tower over their victims — Terrance refers to them more than once in this novelisation as “silver giants”. But the Cyberman and Vogan here are the same height; indeed, the relative positions of eyes, mouth, chin and shoulders suggest that the Vogan is actually taller. 

There’s little sense that these two figures are deadly enemies; they seem to be smiling at each other. It doesn’t help that there’s something about this particular Vogan that’s a bit Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army…

As a whole, the composition lacks the dynamism and excitement of other work by Achilleos, such as Omega’s hands burning into the foreheads of the Three Doctors, or the kklaking pterodactyl of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion. By placing the Cyberman on the left, as per Doctor Who and the Cybermen, and the Vogan on the right, the latter’s arm and body obscure much of the two-handed sci-fi raygun he is holding. For ages, I thought he was proffering some kind of ornate gift or bit of technical apparatus: a friendly gesture, not a threat to kill. Again, there’s no sense of him fighting for his life.

All in all, it’s a rather jolly-looking cover, at odds with the grim tone of the novel inside.

Before we get into the contents of the book, there’s one more thing to address about the cover which has a bearing on the words inside. The name given under the title is Terrance Dicks, not Gerry Davis.

Davis seems to have written the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cybermen around the same time as he wrote the scripts for what became Revenge of the Cybermen on TV. The two stories share a number of elements. For example, both feature what was then a new class of Cyberman — a “Cyberleader” (sometimes, in the novel, also a “Cyber-leader”). Both stories involve a “virus” that the Doctor is able to show is not a virus at all, but a toxin spread by the Cybermen as a prelude to taking control of a remote, human-crewed outpost in space. 

In both stories, the human crew are sceptical of the Doctor’s claims, believing that the Cybermen died out long ago. In Doctor Who and the Cybermen, the silver giants exploit human weakness for sugar and are themselves vulnerable to nail-varnish remover; in Revenge of the Cybermen, they exploit human greed and are vulnerable to gold. The implication, surely, is that in revisiting the older TV story for his novelisation, Davis found some of the structure and plot elements for the new TV adventure.

At that stage, it would also have been logical to assume that Davis would novelise his new TV story in due course. For one thing, of the various Doctor Who stories that Davis worked on over the years, this is the only one on which he received sole credit as writer.

Soon after publication of Doctor Who and the Cybermen and broadcast of Revenge of the Cybermen, Davis tackled the very first Cyberman adventure, Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, published on 19 February 1976. In previous posts, I’ve estimated a lead-time on these books of 7.5 months; if that applies here, then Davis delivered Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet at the end of July 1975. Just as he finished that book and needed a new assignment, we see that, as per the list of books in preparation cited above, The Cybermen’s Revenge was added to the schedule. 

He retained copyright on the scripts of the TV story, so his permission must have been sought and given for this novelisation. But he didn’t write the book. Instead, he went on to novelise other TV stories he had worked on as co-writer and/or story editor, with his next one, Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, published on 18 May 1978. 

The reason, of course, is that the version of Revenge of the Cybermen that made it to the screen is very different from what Davis wrote — as we can hear in the audio version of the original scripts. The production team felt there were numerous problems with this version and the scripts were extensively rewritten by Robert Holmes in his capacity as script editor, on staff at the BBC. Davis was not happy with the revised version; the upshot was that he retained sole credit and copyright on a story he largely hadn’t written and really didn’t like. Understandably, he didn’t want to novelise this version of “his” story.

That is significant because it means that Terrance Dicks was commissioned on the specific understanding that he would novelise Revenge of the Cybermen as broadcast. This in turn presented him with a challenge I don’t think he’d faced before. 

Up until now, he’d novelised Big Event Doctor Who stories: the Third Doctor’s debut, his first encounter with the Daleks and the Master, and his death; the Fourth Doctor’s debut, the Second Doctor’s first encounter with the Great Intelligence, the Three Doctors all meeting up. Even Doctor Who’s encounter with the Loch Ness Monster is a big, iconic moment. These are all good, strong stories, too.

With Revenge of the Cybermen, Terrance was presented for the first time with a TV story that, for all I enjoy it, is fundamentally flawed. When he had been script editor, it was his job to fix problems in storylines and scripts. Here, the brief was to not fix the story but match what went out on screen. At times, I don’t think he could help himself, whether in trying to correct faults or in offering wry comment on illogical proceedings.

The three pages from his notebook relating to this novelisation give some sense of his approach. They cover events in Chapter 10, which is the end of Part Three and start of Part Four of the TV story, with a line break for the cliffhanger.

“Kellman killed

Harry sees K dead

Doc knocked out —

Harry sees Doc — goes to unstrap b[omb]

Commander — stop! Explain [that undoing the strap will set off the bomb]

Doc survives — Harry idiot

Doc says Commander keep on — rest of u will get grd + attack”

There’s no reference here or in the other pages of notes to what we see on screen, such as what people are wearing or what things looks like. That suggests Terrance worked from the words in the camera script — stage directions and dialogue — rather than from a screening of the episodes, which would have provided visual details. The notes are a summary of plot, Terrance establishing for himself the overall thrust of the action before translating each scene into prose.

(ETA: Nicholas Pegg told me on Bluesky me that “A further indication that Terrance was working from the scripts rather than from the TV broadcast is his retention of ‘cobalt bombs’. On screen they became ‘Cyber-bombs’, which [director] Michael Briant told me was part of a general decision ‘to make everything Cyber’.” Thanks to Nick, who knows a surprising amount about Cybermen given that he is Dalek.) 

But there is more than that going on here, too. This page of notes includes the word “gyroscope”, which isn’t used in the scripts or the story as broadcast. I think the word was prompted by something else in the script at this point: the machine that the Cybermen use to track the progress of the Doctor as he carries their bomb is a “radarscope”. The word is used in dialogue at other points of the story but it’s also in the stage directions of the script just after the Doctor insults Harry. And I think that word prompted Terrance to use “gyroscope” in a completely different moment in the novelisation, as an apposite word for the very opening sentence:

“In the silent blackness of deep space, the gleaming metal shape of Space Beacon Nerva hung like a giant gyroscope” (p. 7).

The model used in the TV story (and in The Ark in Space) looks a little like the kind of gyroscope that children have as toys, but that single word also conveys a spinning, moving, mesmerising instrument. We do more than visualise the shape; we can feel its intricate, automated workings. It is tangible and a wonder — all from a single word.

There are plenty of other well-chosen words: p. 49, for example, boasts “imperious”, “melodious” and “ostentation”.  The explanation of the “transmat beam” vital to one part of the plot is told from Harry’s perspective, so it is at once conversational, easy-going and fun:

“His travels with the Doctor had familiarised him with this latest triumph of man’s technology, an apparatus that could break down a living human body into a stream of molecules, sent it to a predetermined destination by a locked transmitter beam, and reassemble it unharmed at the other end. With transmat you could send a person as easily as a telephone message” (p. 38).

That page of notes above has another well-chosen word, when the Doctor calls “Harry [an] idiot”. He uses a more offensive term on screen and then falls back unconscious. In the book, he follows the rude comment with something kinder:

“Nevertheless I’m very glad to see you again” (p. 102).

The Doctor is nicer than on TV, Harry is not so undermined; both are more heroic.

In opening the novel, Terrance describes Sarah as a “slim, dark pretty girl” (p. 7), by which he means white but brunette. Her “exceptionally good peripheral vision” (p. 17) explains how, on TV, she alone dodges a Cybermat that has killed more than 40 other people. But when she screams, we’re told it’s in “true feminine style”. That’s the view of the omniscient narrator because Harry, from whose perspective this is sometimes told, knows better. For example, he knows that Sarah “always refused to accept the role of the helpless heroine” (p. 90).

Harry is the same “broad-shouldered, square-jawed young man” (p. 7) as in Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. He has the same vocabulary as in the former, referring here to all the “ruddy gold” (p. 47) on Voga. But there’s a steely side to Harry that we don’t really see on screen, such as when the villainous Kellman is killed in a rockfall that’s partly Harry’s fault.

“Harry felt no sympathy. As far as he was concerned, Kellman had been luckier than he deserved.” (p. 100).

The Doctor, meanwhile, is a “very tall, thin man whose motley collection of vaguely bohemian garments included an incredibly long scarf, and a battered soft hat jammed on top of a mop of wildly-curling brown hair” (p. 7). It’s the first time in print, I think, that this incarnation is described as “bohemian” — though note in this case that it is only “vaguely”.

(For all his love of specific, well-chosen words, Terrance can also often be vague. On p. 64, two things in quick succession are described as “some kind of”…)

That opening page of the novel also introduces the lead character as “that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known as ‘the Doctor’”, repeating the phrase from The Doctor Who Monster Book and Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster; less description now as slogan. 

There’s also a reference to the Doctor’s “habitual cheery optimism”, which seems more Terrance than the TV story, and at odds with the lofty, “Olympian detachment” Tom Baker was told to convey by producer Philip Hinchcliffe. It is, I think, a sense of the Fourth Doctor had Terrance stayed on as script editor beyond Robot.

Speaking of which, we’re told it’s been a “few weeks” (p. 8) since that adventure. On TV, the first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen aired 13 weeks after the last part of Robot. Working solely from on-screen evidence, has such a lengthy period really elapsed for our heroes? I would have said it was days.

Page 8 has two footnotes, each referring the reader to other novelisations by Terrance: Doctor Who and the Giant Robot and Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks. The latter was the next of his Doctor Who books to be written and published, so had clearly been scheduled at the time he wrote this — begging the question: why didn’t he write that one first? It’s as if these books were purposefully published in reverse of the order of broadcast so that readers had to puzzle out the correct sequence, encouraging them to be active collectors.

On TV, Revenge of the Cybermen begins with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah finding themselves back on space station Nerva and referring to the previous time they were there, in The Ark in Space. A novelisation of that story had not yet been scheduled, so Terrance omitted these lines and instead makes reference, in his narration, to the adventure they have just concluded, and their efforts to “prevent the growing menace of the Daleks” (p. 8). The continuity references are to Terrance’s other Doctor Who books.

There are a couple of further examples of that: the Doctor uses an eye glass (p. 40 and p. 59) as per Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, and there is a reference to Harry Houdini (p. 121) as per Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. In Terrance’s most recently completed novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, there’s reference to the Brigadier’s “recall device”. Here, it’s the “Space-Time telegraph” (p. 127) as per dialogue in the script — where it is “space-time telegraph”, lower case. The book ends with a scene inside the TARDIS, the Doctor tracing the signal to Loch Ness, nicely cueing up the next / previous novelisation.

The continuity of the Cybermen is interesting. Terrance knew the history of the silver giants, having detailed it in The Doctor Who Monster Book, but there’s no reference to their previous encounters with the Doctor here. Humans, on Nerva, have only vague recollections of the Cybermen (p. 30), just one of several species to attack Earth in its early space-faring years. Again, that is as per The Moonbase.

These Cybermen wear “clothes” (p. 64). We’re told several times that they’re emotionless and without feelings, which is a fundamental characteristic, sort of Cybermen 101. But on TV, the Doctor taunts them:

“You've no home planet, no influence, nothing. You’re just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship.” (Part Three)

What is that all about?

In the novelisation, we’re told that when the Doctor says this, he “seemed to be determined to be as tactless as possible” (p. 76) and “seemed to be set on provoking their captors”, after which “it seemed almost possible to detect the overtones of hate in the Cyberman’s voice”, as the Doctor continues in the same way, “infuriatingly”. It is not clear if this narration is from the perspective of one of the human observers, but the repeated use of “seemed” is Terrance suggesting an explanation for what happens in the script, without imposing his view.

Responding to the Doctor, the Cyberleader’s voice rises in volume and intensity. The Doctor continues being annoying and,

“For some reason this childish insult finally broke through the Cyberleader’s control” (p. 77).

It lashes out, exactly as the Doctor has planned; he uses rage against the machine.

I don’t think a Cyberman losing its temper is inconsistent with it being emotionless. It’s sometimes said of the Cybermen that they’ve had their emotions deleted or surgically removed — but what bit of the brain would that be, exactly? 

The academic paper that first coined the term “cyborg” and which I think is key to the original conception of the Cybermen, “Cyborgs and Space” by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline (1960), suggests the use of “an emergency osmotic pump containing one of the high-potency phenothiazines together with reserpine” to automatically respond to abnormal “thought processes, emotions, or behaviour” in the human test-subjects surgically altered for work out in space. The idea was to chemically suppress the emotions.

If the same thing is happening with the Cybermen, they can be emotionless and yet capable of emotion. The Doctor just has to find the right means to trigger them. Note to anti-Cybermen forces: being infuriating and childish works, as here; but don’t waste your time wanging on about sunsets and nice meals, as in Earthshock (1982).

Less fathomable is the sequence in which the Cybermen strap bombs to the Doctor and two humans, then insist that they carry these into the depths of the asteroid Voga. The Cybermen say that, once in the right position, the bombs will begin a 14-minute countdown, allowing the Doctor and the others time to escape with their lives. The Doctor thinks but does not say,

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on” (p. 82). 

So why does he then do as instructed? Well, with the Cybermen using a radioscope to monitor the humans’ progress, and able to detonate the bombs remotely if they veer off course, the Doctor feels he has no other option to escape than to do as bidden, then use the 14-minute countdown to defuse the bombs (p. 83). But we are then told that the Cyberman have anticipated exactly this response; in fact, there is no 14-minute countdown and the bombs will simply explode when they reach the right position. The Cybermen have lied to the Doctor so that he unwittingly does what they want (p. 85).

It’s a clever bit of psychology. But then, almost immediately, one of the other humans asks the Doctor if he really thinks there will be a 14-minute countdown. “I doubt it,” says the Doctor (p. 85). He doesn’t believe the Cybermen’s story, and the humans are at least suspicious. The Cybermen’s clever bit of psychology hasn’t fooled anyone.

So, er, why then is the Doctor willing to carry the bombs into the depths of the asteroid? Well, he says Micawberishly, that he is hoping for something to turn up (p. 86). It’s all a bit woolly and confused, the Doctor relying on luck. We can see that Terrance tried to make sense of it as he wrote this section, but not entirely successfully — because, I think, he couldn’t veer too far from what had been broadcast.

As on screen, Voga is both an asteroid (p. 18) and planet (p. 30), the idea being that the new asteroid is the last-surviving fragment of the planet. On screen, it is also described as a satellite  — ie moon  — of Jupiter, to which the Doctor responds:

 “What, do you mean there are now thirteen?” (Part One)

Terrance cut this line, perhaps because he knew that a 13th moon of Jupiter had already been found by the time of publication: Leda, discovered on 14 September 1974. A 14th moon, Themisto, was spotted in 1975 but not confirmed until years later. But Terrance also refers to Voga as a meteorite (p. 43), suggesting his knowledge of space science was on a par with his knowledge of cars. 

The plot hinges on Voga being an asteroid/planet/satellite/meteorite comprised largely of gold, which is immediately lethal to Cybermen. We see the evidence of this on screen: throw a bit of gold in their general direction and they choke and die. Yet Cybermen can also teleport into the caverns of Voga, stomping around and battling Vogans there with no perceived adverse effects. I suppose Terrance could have fixed this by suggesting that the gold must be forced into their breathing systems, and in sufficient quantities, to be deadly. Perhaps that would only have served to highlight this basic flaw in the story.

But I think the fundamental problems of Revenge of the Cybermen are the structure and the tone. Let’s start with the structure.

The blurb lays out the stakes:

“A mysterious plague strikes Space Beacon Nerva, killing its victims within minutes. When DOCTOR WHO lands, only four humans remain alive. One of these seems to be in league with the nearby planet of gold, Voga… Or is he in fact working for the dreaded CYBERMEN, who are now determined to finally destroy their old enemies, the VOGANS? The Doctor, Sarah and Harry find themselves caught in the midst of a terrifyingly struggle to death—between the ruthless, power-hungry Cybermen and the desperate determined Vogans.”

A central part of the story, then, is who Kellman really works for. Yet I think, ironically for a story about Cybermen, that it is difficult for us to care.

The trouble is that Kellman is, when we meet him, a sardonic, mean-spirited character. There is no great mystery about him being involved in the “plague” that has killed more than 40 people. This horrible fact is not mitigated by the discovery that he is really working for the Vogans, not least because it seems he does so because they will pay him in gold.

Villains in other stories, such as Broton or Davros, present articulate reasons for the evil they do, challenging the Doctor. Kellman offers no such challenge. In fact, he speaks in cliches — at one point using what Terrance calls, “one of science fiction’s immortal cliches” (p. 65). There is no redemption: he proves to be a bit cowardly and is then killed in a rockfall. The usually kind-hearted Harry has no sympathy at all. Kellman deserves only scorn.

That is unusual for Terrance, who so often in a conflict endeavours to see the other point of view. And I think that is the fundamental problem here: there is no depth to or interesting aspect of Kellman. I find myself wondering what Terrance would have done had he been allowed to fix this.

My sense, from the notes he gave as script editor to writers on other stories (available in the production paperwork included on the Blu-ray boxsets), is that he would have wanted to simplify unfolding events and concentrate on revelations of character. So, with that in mind…

At the start of the story, Kellman should be the last person we’d suspect of controlling the Cybermats or working with the Cyberman. A kindly, warm-humoured character, to whom our heroes — and we — take a shine. Only later, when he’s exposed, should we see his colder, more ruthless side, as when James Bond shifts from charmer to hitman. That, in turn, would give the actor a bit more to work with.

Then, over time, we come to learn his vital but morally difficult mission: sacrificing the crew of Nerva to gain the trust of the Cybermen so that he can destroy them and in doing so save countless more lives. Just as Harry learns that he’s got Kellman completely wrong, that the man is a hero, they are both caught in a rockfall. Kellman dies. And Harry realises that he will have to complete the mission, no matter the cost…

Something along those lines. But I think if you can fix Kellman, you fix much of what’s wrong in this story.

Then there’s the tone. The story begins with the Doctor and his friends returning to Nerva to find, instead of Vira and their other friends from The Ark in Space, something out of a horror film for grown-ups. Terrance acknowledges the effect:

“For the rest of her life Sarah Jane Smith was to be haunted by the memory of that nightmarish stumble down the long curved corridor filled with corpses” (p. 14).

It is not a moment of peril in a science-fiction adventure, where our heroes are at risk. It is them stalking their way through the carnage of something brutally realistic that has already taken place and so they are powerless to stop. It is horrific because it is hopeless.

Later, Harry witnesses the brutal death of someone at first hand, and we’re told “it remained for ever photographed on his memory” (p. 107). Then, the Cybermen are defeated and Nerva and Voga are saved, but on screen there's barely time to draw breath or acknowledge what our heroes have been through before they head off to their next adventure.

Terrance adds a brief moment of reflection, addressing the oddness of this, with Sarah,

“surprised to find herself as calm as she was. She supposed so much had happened recently that they’d both lost the capacity to be surprised” (p. 127).

It’s a damning diagnosis. The implication is that Sarah and Harry are both suffering from PTSD… Either that, or from bad writing.

*

These great long posts take time to put together and incur expenses. I’ll keep doing them while I can afford to, so do please support the cause if you are able.

Next time: the last of the Mounties books, War Drums of the Blackfoot, which borrows some of the plot of one of the Doctor Who stories on which Terrance was script editor. And then it’s Genesis of the Daleks…

The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol 2, by Keith Miller

This second volume of correspondence and fanzines covers the period 1974 to 1978, and most but not all of the era of Tom Baker as the Doctor. It also charts the burning out of the author's passion for Doctor Who, increasingly frustrated with the direction of the series, the more strained and/or “business-like” attitude of the production team towards him, and the activities of other fans.

As with the first volume, it is absolutely fascinating, sometimes very funny and sometimes cringe-inducing. The best thing about it is how honest and raw it all is, the source documents reproduced in full.

There are reports from the set of three Doctor Who stories - Genesis of the Daleks, Terror of the Zygons and The Masque of Mandragora - as well as various bits of interview with cast and crew, alongside letters they sent Keith. We hear what he thinks of episodes and novelisations as they came out, and follow the exhausting business of running an officially sanctioned fan club that the BBC continued to support but at ever more of a remove.

For my purposes in researching the life and work of Terrance Dicks, a number of things are really striking. First, there's Keith's description of the Doctor Who production office in Room 505 of Union House, Shepherd's Bush Green, on 16 February 1975. Keith had been there several times before (as detailed in the first volume, the last occasion in April 1974), when it was the domain of producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance. 

The scene he describes here gives a vivid sense of the dramatic change brought in under new producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes:

“The whole place looked totally different. Gone were the piles and piles of paper. Where walls had once been covered in newspaper-clippings, notes, white-boards etc, now there was barely anything covering them. All the props had been removed. The office reflected the new occupant — very business-like. Ordered.” (p. 18)

What paperwork I wonder, what treasure, got chucked in the bin? 

Miller then shares a transcript of the conversation over lunch at the BBC restaurant, where he spoke to Hinchcliffe, his secretary Ann Burnett and actors Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter. In among the gems here, Hinchcliffe claims that Target books were at the time printing, “25,000 [copies of each Doctor Who novelisation], then a reprint of 50,000”, but that the publishing company had not been aware until he told them of the two Doctor Who exhibitions - at Blackpool and Longleat. This was missing a big opportunity to sell books as, according to Hinchcliffe, 

“Something like a quarter of a million boys and girls went through the exhibition [singular] last year!” (p. 22)

Miller responded to this by saying that Jon Pertwee had hired the London Planetarium a couple of years previously, for a well-organised event involving him answering questions posed by attendees. Hinchcliffe thought this was worth putting to Tom Baker (who Keith tells us was absent for this bit of the conversation, having gone to the loo).

But it seems that by this point Miller already had plans for an in-person event at the Planetarium, because he reproduces a letter sent to him that same year from Juliet Simpkins, Press Officer at Madame Tussaud's (of which the Planetarium was part), responding to “your letters [plural] of 12th February”. That is, four days before he raised the matter with Hinchcliffe (p. 45).

Simpkins had spoken to Hinchcliffe, who wrote to Miller on 22 May 1975, saying that both the Doctor Who production team and the Planetarium were too booked up through the summer to organise an event, but that he would consider the idea again either later in the year or perhaps in early 1976. Note the word Hinchcliffe used for any such event:

“I have heard that you have been in touch with the Planetarium about the idea of a Doctor Who Convention as we discussed when you came down earlier this year” (p. 46).

There had been science-fiction conventions for decades. But the idea of a Doctor Who event being called such a thing was surely inspired by the success of the UK's first Star Trek convention, held at Abbey Motor Hotel in Leicester over the weekend of 28-29 September 1974, with guests George Takei and James Doohan (source). 

In fact, that event directly inspired a group of other Doctor Who fans to organise something similar: the Doctor Who Appreciation Society '77 Convention was held on 6 August 1977, with both Pertwee and Baker in attendance (but not at the same time). It's interesting to see the idea for this first ever Doctor Who convention in the ether so early, and being considered by the production team.

I'll note two more things of particular interest to me. On p. 92, Miller reproduces a handwritten list of Doctor Who novelisations in preparation, supplied to him by Graham Wellfare. The first title listed is [Doctor Who and] The Green Death by Malcolm Hulke, to be published August 1975 at 35p [in paperback]. That implies that this list was written before publication of that book on 21 August but after publication of the previous Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons by Terrance Dicks, on 15 May.

At this point, 15 books were in preparation, with a schedule of monthly publication up to October 1976. (No book was listed for December 1975 but two were listed for February 1976, and no publication date was given for the last book in the list.) In fact, the books were published at a slightly less rapid rate, and not in the order given here. The suggestion is of issues with particular titles, and perhaps authors. I'll address some of this in my forthcoming post on Doctor Who [and the] Revenge of the Cybermen.

Lastly, thrillingly, Miller shares a letter from Liz Godfray, Children's Editor at Wyndham Publications, with responsibility for the Doctor Who novelisations. On 24 August 1976, she responded to a letter from Miller, answering his questions. That included a query about the author of the very first Doctor Who novelisation. She replied:

“David Whitaker has been in Australia for the last two or three years - in fact he was back on a visit to this country only two months ago, and he called in to the offices here” (p. 91).

Whitaker had been living in Australia for a little longer than that, since early 1971. But the mention of a visit to London matches another source. On 28 July 1976, the Daily Mail reported that Whitaker had been seen dining with his ex-wife, actress June Barry, and asked what his new wife might think. 

June lived in a large house on the Barnes side of Hammersmith Bridge. I'm struck by the thought of David seeing - perhaps even staying with - her, then ambling over the bridge to pop in and see the Target team at 123 King Street, on the off-chance of some work. 

On the way, he'd pass Riverside Studios, where lots of his BBC work had been made, including several Doctor Who stories. Among them were The Dalek Invasion of Earth, David's final production as story editor, and which he helped adapt for the big screen. Indeed, the TARDIS materialised under his feet, in the shadow of the bridge.

According to the “in preparation” list mentioned above, the novelisation of this story was due for publication in July 1976, the month David was in London. In fact, the book wasn't published until March 1977. 

So I like to imagine David turning up at Target, unannounced, and politely asking how the team were getting on. 

“Oh, fine, but we're having a spot of bother with one particular story...”

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...)