The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

This is the first of 10 novels to feature the “Baker Street Irregulars” — not the street gang who assisted Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four but four modern-day schoolchildren (and their dog) who solve mysteries by applying the methods of the (to them fictional) Holmes.  

Published in hardback in May 1978 and later reprinted in numerous editions, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece was the first original novel by Terrance Dicks since the last of the Mounties trilogy, War Drums of the Blackfoot, two years previously. The Mounties series had been conceived and commissioned by Richard Henwood at Target Books; when he moved to Blackie & Sons as group publishing director, he invited Terrance to Glasgow to meet with his team and come up with a new line of adventures.

The result was originally called “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as per the title page of the surviving manuscript in Terrance’s archive. By the time of publication, that had been changed to make the link to Sherlock Holmes more explicit.

In the book as published, the gang is referred to, once, as “Robinson’s Irregulars”, as well as “The Magnificent 3½” and “The Frightful Four” (p. 21), which may mean those were other working titles, too. One is clearly a reference to The Magnificent Seven (1960), Terrance a big fan of westerns; the other is clearly a reference to Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, which is also a range of adventures involving four children and a dog. That gives us a sense of what Terrance was stirring into the mix: a mash-up of Holmes, westerns and Blyton.

The book begins with a prologue in which two villains we can’t see because of their stocking masks — but who in stature resemble Laurel and Hardy — steal a painting from a posh house, and brutally cosh the man who tries to stop them. They bind and gag the poor man but, notably, the Laurel-like burglar then goes back to remove the gag so the man doesn’t choke. It’s an intriguing bit of kindness.

The story proper then begins in what Terrance calls an ordinary London school, as if that’s something to which all readers will relate. It’s not a very racially mixed London school judging by the names and descriptions — something Terrance would be better on in his later books. But I love the description of the chaos of the school yard, the kids,

“all fizzing like shaken-up Coke bottles” (p. 11).

Amid this, Dan Robinson sits quietly reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. Tall, skinny, bookish and a loner, Dan is rather modelled on Terrance as a schoolboy. When the book is taken from him by a bully and ruined, Dan immediately fights back — and calls the bully a “moron” and “stupid cretinous spastic stinking twit” (p. 14). Later, Dan also pulls at his eyelids to affect being Japanese (p. 79). This is our hero!

When the fight is stopped by a teacher (“Potty Benton”), the bully challenges Dan to a wager: he can have a new copy of the tattered Hound of the Baskervilles if he can solve the real-life case of the stolen painting, in the week that they’re off school. Dan accepts.

He’s joined in his task by three friends. Best mate Jeff Webster is a stocky, sensible boy. Liz Spencer, we later learn, works on the school paper and is the daughter of a journalist. To begin with, we are told that,

“Liz was a keen supporter of Women’s Lib. She was a tough, wiry girl, who had dealt out many a thick ear as a practical demonstration of her principles.” (p. 17)

From this, I suspect Liz was named after Lis Sladen, who’d played plucky journalist and women’s libber Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, a character Terrance helped to create. Finally, there’s Mickey Denning, younger than the others, dead keen to help and liable to get into trouble. When he goes to spy on the villains later on, he is quickly caught — fulfilling the kind of plot function of Jo Grant in Terror of the Autons.

The four friends start by visiting the house from which the painting was stolen — which is open to the public. As luck would have it, the eccentric Sir Jasper, who owns the place, is also an aficionado of Holmes and gamely recreates the burglary and his being coshed on the head for the benefit of the children. He also shares with them the words of a rude song involving his own name, “Oh Sir Jasper, Do Not Touch Me!”, which isn’t exactly suitable for children. Today, they’d be on to the police about him.

Then Terrance does something brilliant: on the basis of their conversation with Sir Jasper, Dan tells the others what is going on, as a cliffhanger. We have to read the next chapter to discover — always the best bit in a Holmes story — how he’s put this together from a series of logical deductions.

This is swiftly followed by another great moment, when Dan declares that instead of acting like characters in a mystery story, they’ll go straight to the police. Again, the details of routine police work seems a bit odd for a children’s story — we’re told it consists of dealing with flashers, knicker nicking and dog mess (p. 45). But then there’s another great twist: Mickey goes off on assignment to investigate a clue, and spies two men who turn out to be brothers. That doesn’t mean anything to him but it does to us, as readers, because we’ve already heard that the Hardy-like villain from the prologue is working in league with his brother.

Things move swiftly. At one point, Dan and Jeff are trapped on the roof of the villains’ headquarters, the villains climbing up to get them. Then, the villains get hold of Dan’s address and lay siege one evening when he’s home alone. It’s all brilliantly tense — and the solution is ingenious, even if the police arrive very quickly. Still, it seems nuts that the police then leave Dan in the house alone for the rest of the night, assuming the villains won’t return. Also, why don’t the police insist on speaking to Dan’s parents, who would surely come home when they heard what had happened?

Next morning, the nice detective Dan has met, Inspector Day, gives the boy a stern talking to.

“It’s not like in books. It isn’t suspecting, it isn’t even knowing whodunnit that counts. It’s proving it.” (p. 110)

He advises Dan and his friends to give up the case and lie low. Of course, they do no such thing and — by somehow identifying a splash of mud on the side of a van briefly glimpsed as it sped past — they head by train to the Essex marshes for a final showdown.

This is clearly based on the real-life village of Althorne, the battered old houseboat that the villains use as a hideout just like the one where Terrance and his family had regular holidays. Terrance may well have written this section of the book there, his own children fizzing like Coke bottles around him. (I think the nature reserve as described in Doctor Who and the Three Doctors is the same spot.)

There’s other stuff of this sort: Dan’s room at the top of his old, terraced house, complete with office and sloping ceilings, is very much like the top floor of Terrance’s house in London, including the office where he worked. Mickey’s large Cockney family is very much like Terrance’s family, on his mother’s side. 

By peppering the book with such real details and observations, the more outlandish bits of adventure are kept grounded. It’s obviously a much more relatable story than the Mounties novels, and more real than Doctor Who. It is of its time but a cracking adventure, and leaves us wanting more. 

Art by John Bolton

The back cover promises two further titles: The Fagin Foundation and The Blackmail Boys, which were published in November 1978 and sometime in 1979, the suggestion being that, like the Mounties, this was commissioned as a trilogy. 

But the idea for the Mounties came from Richard Henwood. I think this is something different; it’s very much Terrance’s book: what he wanted to write, rather than what people wanted from him, for the first time since he became a novelist.

For more, see my list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts on them. You might also like my 2015 article “My Immortal Holmes” for the Lancet Psychiatry on the appeal of Sherlock.

Fools, by Pat Cadigan

First published in the US in 1992, and in the UK in 1994, Fools by Pat Cadigan won the Clark Award for best science-fiction novel in 1995. My SF Masterworks edition is from 2019 and features an introduction by Tricia Sullivan, another Clark Award winner.

The blurb on this edition is as follows:

“When Marva, a Method actress, wakes up in the hologram pool of a private club, dressed head to toe in expensive new clothes, and carrying more money than she’s seen in years, it’s clear something has gone very wrong.

The murder she now remembers can’t be good new either.

Finding herself pursued by deadly assassins, and starting to question evert facet of her identity, Marva must venture deep into the Downs of the city to unravel the mystery of what is happening to her. One thing, though, is abundantly clear:

This will be her most difficult role yet.”

That makes it sound relatively straightforward, but the book itself plunges us into a dizzying, noisy world where people can swap memories and so alter their personalities and who they are. There’s also a trade in emotional states such as paranoia, and a whole load of weird subcultures and fetishes, like the “onionhead” couples who beat up people they think have intruded on their own relationships. 

As we navigate all this, and the twisty plot, our narrator’s different personae are indicated by different typefaces. The mystery that unfolds is them trying to piece together the jumbled fragments of memory to suss out who they really are. 

The book is divided into three sections, and for much of Part 1, “Fool to Remember” (pp. 1-156) I struggled to keep up with all the mind-switching, and the densely rich cyberpunk setting. I think that’s rather the point — we’re as much lost as the protagonist.

In Part II, “Fool to Believe” (pp. 157-251), our protagonist receives a set of memories to change her persona, enabling her to go undercover in the mean streets of the Downs. Code words and getting hit can trigger a switch to the primary persona, so we flick back and forth between the two  personalities as things get more tense and dangerous. It builds and builds, and pays off really well.

Part III, “Nobody’s Fool” (pp. 253-299) is almost a coda, picking up on events some time later, but reveals things are not quite as we’d thought. It’s difficult to say more without spoiling things.

Along the way, there’s lots of stuff about the logistics of swapping and stealing memories. For example, there are mindwipes available for purchase to free people of difficult memories. But there are also predatory kinds of mindwipe, and the narrator likens this “mindsuck” to a kind of living death:

“A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that has been, as though the suck has freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanation.” (p. 161)

More than anything, Fools sparked my own vivid memories of the 1990s when I read loads of science-fiction of this kind, eating up the shared consciousness stuff in books by Philip K Dick and the VR puterspace that was prevalent in the Doctor Who New Adventures. Small details here and there are evidence of the time in which it was written: there’s a character told he can’t smoke in a theatre (p. 87) and a reference to “net-mail” (p. 89). It’s a story set in a near-future that is now a 30-year-distant past.

In her introduction, Tricia Sullivan asks why this and Cadigan’s other work haven’t been made into blockbuster films when “so many lesser works [of science-fiction] have” (p. xi). I’m not sure how you’d make this kind of story work on the screen given that it’s all about being in the head of the main character, or characters (but all in the same head). 

But I think it could work on audio, with different actors playing the different personae inside the same head.

Me on some other Clarke Award winners:

• Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (winner 2025) 
• Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (winner 2023) 
• The Animals in that Country, by Laura Jean McKay (winner 2021)
• The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell (winner 2020) 
• Rosewater, by Tade Thomson (winner 2019) 
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (winner 2017) 
• The Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (winner 2016) 
• The City & the City, by China Mieville (winner 2009)

(I’ve read much more of them, but don’t seem to have posted my thoughts. What a villain.)

New short story in What The World Needs Now, ed. Martin Edwards

I have a short story in the forthcoming anthology What The World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach, edited by Martin Edwards and with an introduction by Rupert Holmes. 

It’s being published by Level Best Books to raise money for autism charities in the US and UK. What The World Needs Now will be published on 30 June in the US and 7 July in the UK, and is available to preorder on Kindle at Amazon:

• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.co.uk
• What the World Needs Now on Amazon.com

I’ll share the title of my story and more details in due course. Blurb for the book as follows: 

What the World Needs Now is a book of brand new mystery short stories written by leading crime writers from around the world, inspired by the music of Burt Bacharach, to raise funds for autism charities in the US and UK.

Burt Bacharach is popular music’s closest equivalent to Agatha Christie, a hugely successful and innovative composer whose work is loved by millions across the world and continues to influence countless songwriters to this day.

Edgar and Diamond Dagger award-winning author Martin Edwards has put together a collection of hugely entertaining new mystery stories, each taking a title (and often much more than that) from a Bacharach song as the starting point. The result is a fascinating anthology that will appeal to mystery lovers everywhere.

Charles Todd, Mark Billingham, Ragnar Jonasson, and Abir Mukherjee are among the bestselling contributors to a book that is not only unique but dedicated to a truly worthwhile cause. 

All proceeds from What The World Needs Now will be donated by the publishers to autism charities in the US and UK.

Martin posted last month that other writers include Sarah Hilary, Rhian Waller and me. 

It’s been a delight to get to know Martin — and go for lunches — as I’m a big fan of his work. I’ve previously posted about his epic The Life of Crime and he is consultant on the British Library Crime Classics, including the following ones I have wittered about:

• Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (1944)
• The Widow of Bath, by Margot Bennett (1952)  
• The Man Who Didn’t Fly, by Margot Bennett (1955)
• Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett (1958)

A Riot of Writers, by Terrance Dicks

First published on 16 July 1992, this was the second of a series of illustrated, non-fiction comedy titles written by Terrance Dicks for Piccadilly Press. 

Terrance had written numerous children’s books for Piccadilly since it was launched in 1984, and before that worked with the company’s founder, Brenda Gardner, at both Target Books and Pepper Press. This run of comedy titles seem to have been a conscious effort to try something a bit different, aimed at a broader and more grown-up audience than the usual fare. 

The first, Europe United (published 10 October 1991) was well timed given the imminent signing of the Maastricht Treaty, and was well received, too. In the Sunday Times, Harry Enfield called it, “The best Eurobook … bright and amusing … intelligent and great fun.” In the Guardian, Stephanie Nettle said it had, “A snappily amusing style”. They’re cited on the back of this follow-up.

As with Europe United, A Riot of Writers was illustrated by Ray Jelliffe, a former creative director in a large advertising agency who now, in his retirement, kept busy illustrating books and greetings cards. My suspicion, based on previous books by Terrance, is that the writer didn’t brief the illustrator. Instead, Jelliffe would have received the manuscript and then devised his cartoons, as a sort of commentary on the text.

The book is a guide to what Terrance calls “Eng Lit”, as though this is revision for an exam. It provides potted biographies of 30 writers, from Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), or to JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) if reckoning by the subject latest to die. Of this 30, there are four entries on women: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters (sharing a chapter), George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 

It’s interesting to compare Terrance’s choice of canonical authors with the much shorter list compiled by FR Leavis, Terrance’s tutor at Downing College, Cambridge, in the 1950s. In The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis decided that the canon of Great Authors comprised Austen, Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, though he also allowed a single book by Dickens, Hard Times. Terrance skips James and Conrad entirely, and clearly doesn’t think much of Eliot, though conceding that Middlemarch is a “masterpiece”.

Throughout, the style is chatty and irreverent, reminiscent of the later Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary (the initial pair of which were first published a year after this book, in June 1993). The humour is a bit end-of-the-pier, akin to Terrance’s early days in radio comedy, and sometimes a bit bawdy. For example, in the entry on Byron, we’re told:

“Fashionable hostesses were delighted to have him — and not just for dinner” (p. 46).

There are jokes, too, about bisexuality and homosexuality (the Bloomsbury group, for example, had enjoyed a “gay old time”), which all seems a bit mature for a title from a children’s publisher by a well-known children’s author, even if this isn’t explicitly marketed as a children’s book. It’s a kind of humour, and a book, from another time.

Terrance acknowledge’s Kipling’s chauvinism, and provides examples, but his attitude to Carrie Kipling is a bit judgemental.

“Kipling married Carrie — or perhaps she married him. She certainly ran his life from then on, doing his accounts, fixing his appointments, protecting him from visitors” (p. 120).

The sense is of a domineering figure, rather than this being something Kipling might welcome, or need. There is something similar going on in descriptions of both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (p. 3) and Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth (p. 7) as being “an early feminist” — the gag feels all the more condescending because it’s repeated so soon. 

The only mention of Henry James in the whole book is his reference to George Elliot as “magnificently ugly” (p. 83). Yes, this is Terrance reporting what was said at the time, but other authors are are not judged on their looks. In his entry on George Bernard Shaw, for example, he could have cited the famous story about Isadora Duncan suggesting that a child of theirs would inherit her beauty and his brains; Shaw quipped that it might be the other way round.

Terrance mentions that The Invisible Man by HG Wells was adapted for television, but not that he worked on this production. Several of the authors in his canon here were dramatised under Terrance’s era as script editor then producer of the BBC-1 Classic Serials: Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Doyle, Kipling and Wells. 

I’ve seen paperwork in which Terrance says he didn’t think Austen was suitable for the Sunday teatime serial, so it’s interesting to see here his evident admiration of her work. He also admires Shaw for the strident women at the forefront of many plays. Terrance, of course, borrowed from Pygmalion in Doctor Who, with the character arc of Jo Grant. Like Eliza Doolittle, Jo outgrows her tutor and leaves him heartbroken. But Terrance often downplayed his role in that and the creation of Sarah Jane Smith, who began life stridently championing women’s lib to sisters in the middle ages and in outer space. 

He also quotes a line from Shaw’s Arms and the Man with approval — it’s a very Terrance sentiment:

“You can always tell an old soldier … The young ones carry pistols and cartridges, the old ones grub” (p. 108)

There’s a joke on p. 10 at the expense of Jonathan Miller, who had repeatedly criticised the Classic Serials, Terrance apparently still rankled about it. Some of what’s here helpfully confirms my theories about Terrance’s views on particular authors or modes of writing. I’m delighted to find, for example, that he did have a contemporary drama in mind when commissioning his first Classic Serial, Kipling’s Stalky & Co:

“The Grange Hill of its day, it was severely criticised for the ‘horrible vileness’ of its picture of English public school life” (p. 121).

His thoughts on other writers are interesting, too. While Terrance was at Cambridge, his tutor FR Leavis published DH Lawrence, Novelist (1955), and I’ve evidence that Leavis passed on his enthusiasm for Lawrence to his students. Yet Terrance was not persuaded, or reassessed Lawrence in the years afterward.

He speaks — presumably from first-hand experience — of the “well-thumbed, smuggled-in copies” of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that were all that were available until Penguin published its paperback edition in 1960. Then he shares his judgment: 

“Lawrence describes their love-making in graphic detail, using well-known four-letter words in the process. Despite its lurid reputation Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a worthwhile attempt to describe physical love in plain and honest language. To be honest, it doesn’t really work. Tweeness keeps creeping in. The couple refer to their respective naughty bits as ‘John Thomas’ and ‘Lady Jane’ and there’s an incident with a daisy-chain you’ll never see demonstrated on Gardeners’ World.” (p. 145)

Then there’s his assessment of Lawrence as a whole:

“He was a genuine pioneer, and his reputation has suffered ever since. Despite some weird, almost fascist ideas about the deep dark stirrings in the blood, and the need for an intellectual elite, Lawrence at his best is a wonderful writer. The characters he creates, their emotional relationships and the worlds they live in are real and solid, completely convincing.” (p. 144)

There are several places here where I disagree with Terrance and a couple of occasions where he’s misremembered the details of a classic text (he says, of The Time Machine, that the Eloi prey on Morlocks, not the other way round). But this is a fascinating account of what Terrance thought constituted great writing: basically, a good story grounded in real characters and real situations. For example, he suggests that the power of The Hobbit, and why it still sits above its many imitators, is not the epic imaginative fantasy, but the relatable stuff.

“Small, tubby and timid, caught up in the wars of great men and magical beings, the hobbit makes the most reluctant of heroes. All he asks is to survive and to get home to a blazing fire, a pipe, a flagon of ale and four square meals a day.” (p. 149)

It’s exactly what I’ve seen in his Doctor Who novelisations. You can judge the best of English literature by its meals.

***

For more of this kind of thing, see my big list of the 236 books written by Terrance Dicks, with links to posts about them. My biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be published by Ten Acre Books later this year.

Here are some posts about books by authors in Terrance’s canon of Eng Lit:

• Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
• Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
• The Sign of the Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
• Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
• A Short History of the World, by HG Wells

A Hard Day’s Night, by Samira Ahmed

I really enjoyed this engaging insightful study of the first Beatles movie, filmed and released in 1964. It’s the first book written by my friend Samira, with whom I’ve made various documentaries for the BBC, and it’s amazing what she packs into the 128 pages. I thought I knew the film pretty well, but now want to watch it again to pick up on the little details and big connections.

In her “Introduction”, Samira explains some of the cultural context from which the film came, and her own relationship with it. In “Watching A Hard Day’s Night”, she recounts what happens on screen. This is much more than a summary of the plot, chock full of insights about what we see, and things for us to go back and spot, like the cameo by Bob Godfrey (p. 56) — he of Roobarb (1974), Henry’s Cat (1983-93) and the Academy award-winning musical animated biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Great (1975).

“Making A Hard Day’s Night” is, as you’d expect, a history of the production, again full of great detail, like the fact that John and Paul so enjoyed the TV play No Trams to Lime Street (1959) by Alun Owen, who wrote the screenplay for this Beatles film, that they wrote four pages of a script in the same style, called Pilchard (pp. 72-73). I was particularly struck by what inspired Owen in setting out to write a film about the Beatles: seeing them in Dublin, he had a sense of them trapped by their commitments, their public, the whole machine (p. 73). 

“A Hard Day’s Night and TV” is about what the film shows us of (fictional) live TV broadcasting, and a kind of light entertainment line-up that was once a staple of telly and is now historical artefact. “Women in A Hard Day’s Night” is a compelling chapter on representation, with particular focus on Millie (Anna Quayle) and the unnamed Secretary (Alison Seebohm). I’m really taken with Samira’s idea of a movie telling the Beatles’ story from the perspective of their wives and girlfriends.

“Reception and What They Did Next” explores the critical response to the film and then what followed: another Beatles movie, Help!, also directed by Lester, and then more disparate projects. The sense is that A Hard Day’s Night was made and released quickly to cash-in on the popularity of the Beatles, assuming that the bubble wouldn’t last, but the film helped to establish them as something more than a flash-in-pan pop sensation. Then there’s a concluding chapter on “Legacy”, which ends on a poignant note.

Samira thinks a key moment in the history of all-things Beatles is the “Beatles at Christmas” season on BBC Two over Christmas 1979, not only because it’s when she discovered them but because it presented a body of work by artists. I looked up the details on Genome and Magical Mystery Tour (1967) was shown at 6.10pm on 21 December; Help! (1965) at 6.35 on 22 December; The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1965) at 5.30 on 23 December, Yellow Submarine (1968) at 5.40 on Christmas Eve and A Hard Day’s Night at 3pm Christmas Day. That they weren’t shown in chronological order suggests a value judgment; they’re in order of ascending quality, A Hard Day’s Night the best.

More of me on Beatles books:

• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
• Love and Let Die by John Higgs 

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

This second volume of prose adaptations of TV episodes was first published a year after the first, in February 1968. So says the indicia of my 3rd printing of the US edition, which is marked 50 cents on the spine but bears a sticker giving the UK price of 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in this form in the UK in August 1969, a month after Star Trek starting airing on the BBC — and three years before Corgi printed the first UK-specific editions of these Star Trek anthologies.

It looks quite different from the first Star Trek anthology, which boasted artwork by James Bama which had been commissioned to promote the TV show. Rather than commission — and have to pay for — new artwork, this volume features a photograph of what were surely considered the two leads of the series: Mr Spock and Captain Kirk (in that order). The photo is small, contained within a vertical strip of black down the centre of the otherwise white frame. The black strip includes the title “ALL NEW STAR TREK 2 adapted by James Blish”, the photo, and then the boast, 

“THE ULTIMATE TRIP! WORLDS BEYOND TIME! WORLDS BEYOND KEN! BASED ON THE EXCITING NBC-TV SERIES CREATED BY GENE RODDENBERRY”.

The back-cover blurb of the first book focused on three leading characters (Kirk, Spock and Rand), but the back cover here doesn’t name anyone:

“A GALACTIC TICKET TO INFINITE ADVENTURE! Eight journeys into the unexpected with the crew of the starship Enterprise. Travel to the unexplored reaches of outer space, to worlds where Humans are an alien race and the unusual is routine. Astonishing new worlds of strange beings, bizarre customs, unknown dangers and awesome excitement. * A world where war is fought by computers! * A world inhabited by great lizard-like creatures of conquest! * A world ravaged by a relentless plague of madness and death! * A world where life has developed beyond the need for physical bodies! * TRAVEL NOW TO THE BOLD NEW WORLDS OF TOMORROW.”

There’s a second blurb, inside the front page, largely cribbed from the first volume, but now the three leads are Kirk, Spock and Lt Uhura. The latter has usurped Yeoman Janice Rand in her shipmates’ affections but is described in almost all the same words:

“Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly ‘out-of-this-world’ female has drawn the important assignment of scan engineer on her first mission in deep space.”

There’s no mention that she’s black, or Bantu (the word used repeatedly about her in the first book). Did the publishers fear that mentioning this, or showing the third-lead on the cover, might affect their sales?

The book is dedicated,

“To my new-found relative BARBARA BESADNY and all the other Star Trek fans who wrote to me about the first book”

In later books, Blish referred to extensive correspondence he received about Star Trek, not least once the TV series was cancelled. The first book had been dedicated to Harlan Ellison, a writer on the series, but from now on when Blish dedicated a book it was to female fans. Spock Must Die! (1970) is dedicated “to Kay Anderson”, Star Trek 4 (first published in the US in July 1971) is dedicated.

“To DONNA WOODMAN and the the other new English Star Trek fans”,

Star Trek 9 (1973) is dedicated “To Maire Steele” and Star Trek 10 (1974) “to KARIN who also wanted to set Spock to music”. It gives the impression, at least, of an active, engaged and female-led fandom.

Star Trek 2 boasts the same page count as the first volume (128pp including unnumbered pages), but comprises eight stories rather than seven. They are: Arena (12pp); A Taste of Armageddon (13pp); Tomorrow is Yesterday (15pp); Errand of Mercy (15pp); Court Martial (16pp); Operation — Annihilate! (18pp); The City on the Edge of Forever (17pp); and Space Seed (17pp). 

The original plan had been to pack eighth stories into the first volume, too, and I wonder if Blish and the publishers felt it represented better value to feature more stories. The result, of course, is that the adaptations here are even breezier than before.

The running order seems determined by ascending page count rather than broadcast order or the continuity of the TV series, such as in the use of star dates. Even so, Blish includes a few references in later stories to earlier ones (and to events in the first volume), so there’s a sense of a continuing saga. 

We gain some new information, and some corrections to statements in the first volume. We’re in the 23rd century (p. 114) not the 27th and we’re told more than once that the Enterprise can’t land on planets (not the implication in the first book). Blish also moves events of Tomorrow is Yesterday from the 1960s, as on screen, to 1970 — which he gives as the year of the first Moon landing (p. 28). The same story, but the setting bumped along so it is / was still in the near future.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (p. 1), where before the figure was a vague 400+. A quarter of the crew are female, and there are 12 ships like Enterprise in the fleet (both facts from p. 30). Warp Four is 64 times the speeds of light, or “64c” (p. 26), while,

“Warp Eight [is] two factors above maximum safe speed” and “over a hundred times the speed of light” (p. 2).

However, Warp Eight is used only in emergencies and not for long, as it would damage the ship (p. 38).

In one story, Scotty refers to the Enterprise’s protective “screens” (p. 22), but in the next story it’s the more familiar “deflector shields” (p. 31). A single star date is given in the whole book: Lt Col Ben Finney “died” in 2947.3 (p. 59).

Not everything is taken from the TV episodes, or from draft scripts containing extra or contrary details. It’s been fun to spot things that are surely all from Blish. Tomorrow is Yesterday features a character called John Christopher; here, Spock refers to the “popular author” or the same name (p. 33), whom Blish surely knew in person.

Later, in Space Seed, Kirk is annoyed at being asphyxiated twice in the same hour (p. 120), Blish rather hanging a lantern on the repetition in the TV story. He also gives Kirk’s perspective a wry humour, such as his response — in the narration but from his point of view, when Spock tries to use telepathy on a guard holding them both prisoner:

“Nothing seemed to happen for at least five centuries, or maybe six” (p. 16).

I’m sure that scholars before me have dissected these anthologies by what’s in the TV episode, what in a draft script and what Blish threw in for his own amusement. He opens City on the Edge of Forever with a seven-line footnote explaining that it draws from both TV version and draft script (p. 89), apparently the only example where he consciously mashed up the sources. 

My suspicion is that the TV episodes are riddled with continuity errors, where a fact given in one episode doesn’t quite match a fact given in another. We might not notice on first viewing, not least with a week between each episodes. But the brevity of the adaptations here, the speed we can hare through several episodes at once, means we’re more likely to pick up on this stuff. 

The most striking bits of continuity, for me, are those that overlap with the later Star Trek movies of the 1980s — the bits of Trek with which I’m most familiar. In Tomorrow is Yesterday, the suggestion that a pilot from 1970 could travel with the the Enterprise into the future is quickly dismissed as he would be,

“archaic, useless, a curiosity” (p. 35).

But that’s in no way the fate of cetologist Dr Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), who finds a useful role in the future. That’s all the more striking because that film clearly drew directly from this episode in its method of time travel by flying the Enterprise close to the Sun (p. 36).

Likewise, in Operation — Annihilate!, the Enterprise fires “two fully armed planet-wreckers” that explode with “atomic fire” and destroy a whole plant, leaving behind a nebula (p. 87). This seems to be standard if rarely used artillery on board but in another episode, The Doomsday Machine (adapted in Star Trek 3) and the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the very idea of a planet-destroying weapon is a new, horrific kind of menace.

The final story here is Space Seed, which ends with Kirk sending a gang of villains to settle a new world. He worries that this crop from this seed (his words) might one day come looking for him again, which is exactly what happens in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But in that, the villains are found dwelling on the planet’s surface in their old ship Botany Bay. Here, Kirk sends them down to the planet without their ship, and keeps Botany Bay in tow, thinking it might be of interest to historians. 

Space Seed, of course, involves villainous eugenicist megalomaniac who hails from the 1990s, here called Sibyl Khan Noonien— Blish working from draft scripts — and “dictator of his own breed” (p. 116). Our first sight of him presents an exotic mix of different racial characteristics:

“bathed in a gentle violet glow was a motionless, naked man. He was extremely handsome, and magnificently built. His face reflected the sun-ripened Aryan blood of the Northern Indian Sikhs, with just an additional suggestion on the oriental. Even in repose, his features suggested strength, intelligence, even arrogance.” (p. 108)

Here and elsewhere, what a person looks like is an indicator of their character and inner thoughts, which is all a bit racist for a story about eugenicists being bad. Blish also uses “oriental” as a synonym for “alien”:

“The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock” (p. 44). 

That surely implies they originated on Earth. In the next book Spock’s quarters are “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental” (Star Trek 3, p. 106) and here, at the end of Tomorrow is Yesterday, in a sequence not in the TV version, he quotes from “Omar” (Star Trek 2, p. 39); Spock is not only familiar with the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but on first-name terms with its author.

Dr McCoy refers to “basic humanoid stock” and to the “genetic drift” of a population of colonists who left Earth centuries previously (p. 95). He’s not exactly tactful in his choice of words: elsewhere, he refers to people afflicted by alien parasites as “vegetables” (p. 74). 

The same page features oddly vernacular phrasing from Spock, when he refers to the alien parasites:

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

I also thought Kirk saying “Blooey” and referring to “Miss Uhura” (both p. 27) oddly out of character. It’s from Kirk’s perspective that we first see Edith Keeler in The City at the Edge of Forever. 

“The girl … was simply dressed and not very pretty” (p. 96)

That’s extraordinary for a character played by Joan Collins and with whom Kirk is about to fall in love. Indeed, “No woman was ever loved as much”, we’re told at the end of the story. There’s a tender moment between Spock and Kirk, when the former offers to take his grieving friend to Vulcan, where the nights are long and restful. Kirk responds that they have “all the time in the world” (p. 105).

This isn’t in the broadcast version so must come from Harlan Ellison’s original draft. (I thought, initially, that “all the time in the world” might be Blish linking these tragic events to another grieving hero, but the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released in 1969, a year after this book. ETA Steven Flanagan points out that it is the last line of the novel, published in 1963, so perhaps Blish did have that in mind...)

Blish also says that these closing moments are the first time Spock calls Kirk “Jim” (p. 105), a key moment. It’s all a much more emotional scene between the two men than the TV version. I wonder: was Blish responding to those active female fans and what they saw — and wanted to see — in the relationship?

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

After delivering a manuscript a couple of weeks ago, I celebrated by taking the Lord of Chaos to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema, having heard good things. We loved it to pieces, and I was inspired to try the book on some recent long drives.

While following much the same plot, the book is markedly different from the film. There are some additional scenes in the book, and a scene in the film that lets us know the fate of one principal character that we don't get in the novel. 

The plot, for those that don't know - and without giving too much in the way of spoilers - involves an astronaut waking up with amnesia to find himself the sole survivor of a mission to deep space. As he figures out who and where he is, fragments of memory come back to him and we piece together his role in an ambitious global effort to save Earth's Sun. Then it turns out that it's not Earth involved...

I found the book version of Ryland Grace a lot more annoying than the one on screen. He's a bit of a jerk, for example publishing an academic paper in which he names all the academics with whom he has  quarrelled, or telling us that he wants to slap the parents of kids who don't know bits of physics he takes for granted. He refers to "manned" rather than "crewed" missions into space, and is pedantic about the continuity of Predator movies when there are other, more pressing matters (eg the extinction of all life on Earth). He's maverick, lone-wolf free-thinker or, in layman's language, a dick.

Effectively, the book and film are a series of puzzles to solve: who is this guy, why's he out in space, how does he (and humanity and someone else) answer an existential threat. Like The Martian (also by Weir and also a very good film), the effort to overcome disaster using science, courage and wit is really compelling. There's also a relationship at the heart of this story, two characters learning to understand one another, that makes the whole thing really sing.

But the wonders and emotion here are slightly constrained in the book version because Grace has such a limited vocabulary. Things are often simply either "awesome" or "bad", or in extremis really awesome or really bad. Like, really really bad. Have I told you how bad? I mean, really.

The result is that his - and our - encounters with extraordinary phenomena and the most profound experience can sometimes feel as though they're narrated by Steve from The Lego Movie. (The Lord of Chaos, overhearing some of Ray Porter narrating the audiobook, thought it might have been Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. Yes, there's an element of that, too.)

The point of the book, paid off in the closing chapters, is that this maverick selfish loner is ultimately faced with a dilemma that would require him to be selfless, entirely out of character. So yes, he's meant to be kind of a jerk. But I think that makes it harder to believe that, early on when he's teaching kids at primary school, they all seem to love him and eagerly play along in the physics quiz. Kids have an unerring eye for weakness or any kind of character flaw. Surely one of them would pick on Mr Grace having no friends...

Still, this jitter about the main character aside, it's a thrilling, smart book - and even more compelling film. And I'm haunted by the mention, in the book not in the film, that someone waits alone for 46 years before a auspicious meeting. Amaze amaze amaze.

See also: me on Artemis by Andy Weir