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)

War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget glands or golf; it's the Skylon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bookish, by Matthew Sweet

This is a novelisation of the first series of the TV drama of the same name, created by Mark Gatiss and co-written by Matthew Sweet (both of whom I know). The titular Gabriel Book runs a bookshop, Book's, at 158 Archangel Lane, WC2, his wife Trottie running a wallpaper shop next door. Book has an encyclopaedic memory of everything he's read and a great interest in the strange and macabre, consulting for the police when they have unusual cases. He also seems to have done some kind of intelligence work in the war and has his own secrets...

Sometime around February 1946, a young man called Jack Blunt is released from prison and finds himself offered a job assisting Book. Jack's an orphan, left with only a photograph of his father and not even his name. Soon he's caught up in the Books' lives and their investigations of murder.

The novelisation largely follows the events of the three two-part TV stories but its peppered with additional details. For example, it is bookended by letters from 1962, 14 years after the events seen on screen and giving some hints about what is still to come. We also glimpse a bit more of Trottie in the war and Book takes a haunting journey on a train. 

When books are mentioned, we often learn their publisher and bindings - and so gain something of the way Book classifies his world. We're told the second adventure takes place in August 1946 six months after the first (p. 129), and that the third story occurs "weeks" later, so in September.

It's also peppered with bits of real history, such as the other roles taken by film extras Linda and Barbara:

"The David Lean Great Expectations condemns them to the cutting-room floor." (p. 160)

As with the TV series, it's all good fun but the cosy crimes are given an edge by the real social history. In that sense, it's got something, I think, of the feel of Call the Midwife: just the thing for a Sunday evening in front of the box. A second series is now in production and I hope it can be seen more widely than on the relatively limited channel U&Alibi because it is a delight.

See also:

• Me on The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

The wife and children were generous with my annual appraised (or "Father's Day"). I got a lie in, a badge of a smiley fried egg, a copy of my friend Matthew Sweet's new novel and - best of all - the chance to sit and read it. What joy.

"There is a village in England that all us know, even if we have never set foot there. The village that comes to our minds when we think of cricket on the green on a Sunday in July; when we see a honeysuckled cottage painted on the lid of a tin of biscuits; when we put our hands together and say, 'Here's the church and here's the steeple.'

"It really exists." (p. 125)

This village is in the New Forest, near where I grew up. Characters speak of the bright lights and bustle of Southampton, where I went to school. But this particular village is familiar from a whole load of other sources, too - Larkwhistle here in 1944 owes something to Bramley End in Went the Day Well (a film released in 1942 but set after the end of the Second World War, so told to us from the future). Meanwhile, local pub the Fleur-de-Lys is straight out of Doctor Who and the Android Invasion (1975), in which the real-life East Hagbourne doubled for fictional Devesham.

It's a mix of spy story, murder mystery and romance, neatly acknowledging its sources from the dog called Wimsey after Dorothy L Sayers's detective to more than one Sherlock Holmes reference. 

"That's a bit dog-that-didn't bark, isn't it?" (p. 154)

The blurb of the book says it is "perfect for fans of Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime". The church of St Cedd surely owes something to Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, and at one point there's a joke from Doctor Who and the State of Decay; I think the author of that story, Terrance Dicks, would have loved this. 

As for the plot: it's 1944 and Normandy has been invaded, the last act of the war under way. But Jill Metcalfe and her father then receive bad news from a rather good-looking American officer, Jack Strafford. While they're reeling from the shock, word comes of a dead body under a tree. It's not just any body, or just any tree - and soon Jack and Jill are working together to solve a murder and to catch a spy, which may or may not be related...

The book rattles along - I finished it in a day - by turns funny and real and harrowing. You feel the loss, and the great depths of emotion in this apparently quiet, conventional setting. Oh, and the back-flap tells us what is surely another influence on this: Matthew's forthcoming book The Great Dictator (haha!) is a biography of Barbara Cartland.

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey

We know from the off that Bartholomew “Brat” Farrar is a crook. He’s a young American hustler, sometimes working as a groom or blacksmith, or anything else to get by. Importantly, he’s also got good manners, thanks to having been brought up in a better kind of orphanage. 

A nefarious friend thinks Brat looks rather like Simon Ashby, the heir to a great estate in England who is just about to come into his inheritance at the age of 21. Simon was a twin, but his slightly older brother Patrick disappeared at 13, apparently taking his own life soon after the tragic death of the twins’ parents in a plane crash. The nefarious friend knew this family and — for a fee — provides Brat with all he knows about them, meaning Brat can pretend to be the long lost, prodigal heir.

Some people believe at once that Patrick has walked back into their lives. Others don’t and are hostile. Several people aren’t sure. As Brat inveigles himself into the family, he convinces at least some of the doubters — but also starts to form attachments with these likeable people. Can he go through with defrauding them? 

It’s all brilliantly suspenseful, even before an attempt is made on Brat’s life. And then he starts to suspect a dark secret at the heart of this respectable family, a longstanding injustice that he alone can uncover. Only he can’t do that without exposing the truth about himself…

Its ingenious and effective, making a compelling protagonist out of the most unscrupulous rogue. Unlike Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley the interloper here is not a monster. There’s something more nuanced and interesting going on, and we’re rooting for Brat all the way.

The characters (expertly realised in this audio version by Carole Boyd) and their world are vividly realised: Brat (and we) must negotiate the complex web of connections between this rich family, their staff and the local community. There’s a lot about horses, on which the estate’s fortune depends. It’s quite a trick to make this so utterly compelling to a reader who has never been in the saddle. The different personalities of horses, the psychology of getting them to do what the rider wants and the thrill of competition are all used to great effect. And in the understanding of horses, we come to understand these people — and uncover the long hidden secret.

Tey tells us from the start that Brat is not Patrick Ashby but towards the end she withholds key information to keep us in suspense. It’s cheating, I think, but of the best kind — like a conjuring trick. At the start, there’s little chance of a happy ending. Things then build and build until that prospect is impossible. 

And yet, with a flourish, the last pages neatly tie it all up. It’s a thrilling story, arrestingly told, and we leave it wholly satisfied.

One more thought: I wonder if this was an influence on Saltburn. 

See also:

• Me on The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Death at the White Hart, by Chris Chibnall

This is ideal holiday reading, a fast-moving, relatively concise murder mystery from the creator of Broadchurch and in a similar style. It begins with a man driving back home into Dorset at 2 am discovering a body on the road. This body is striking: a naked man in an old sack, trussed to a wooden chair with antlers fixed to his head. 

The discovery is made on page 3 but it's not until page 42 that we discover who has been murdered. The effect is to make us lean in, to read more carefully for clues about who this might be. We interrogate all that happens in the meantime as we meet a wealth of different characters from Fleetcombe and nearby Bredy - including a beleagured delivery driver, a trans barber and a refuge from Ukraine who has married one of the locals. As Russell T Davies says in his back-cover blurb, it "feels like it's set right now."

Detective Sergeant Nicola Bridge has her own secrets to be uncovered over the course of the story. Of course, she already knows them but we don't - another effective bit of suspense. Her relationship with eager-to-please young Detective Constable Harry Ward is immediately endearing. I suspect it's probably quite easy to write world-weary detectives with difficult home lives but it's quite a skill to write them with such warmth.

In fact, Chibnall is great on all these different characters - immediately real and distinct, and liable to clash. Often, people turn out to be more than they appear: the last person we'd expect turns out to have been having an affair with the victim, while another character who initially seems lazy turns out to be proactive in a particular way, greatly aiding the enquiry.

It's not exactly a cosy crime novel given the constant sense of threat in this quiet community, such as organised crime, domestic violence or when a convicted criminal catches up with a grass. One thread to the story is a century-old crime and gross act of injustice, but really the focus here is on what happens next, such as whether a relationship can survive or a character stay in their home. There's a constant, uneasy feeling of things about to kick-off.

Then there's the reasoning behind the murder itself, which is relayed over more than one chapter to give it full, devastating effect. I was completely blind-sided by the identity of the murderer and yet it all makes perfect, awful sense. In people's tragedies, in their friendships, in the bittersweet final pages, Chibnall is really good with people.

My one note is that what this lacks of the "right now" is any mention of the weather, so much part of daily conversation in real life and requiring last-minute changes of plan. How different things might have been for characters sneaking out at night and/or starting fires if there were torrential rain. Without enough rain, setting fires could quickly spread - as we've seen in recent days. I'm acutely conscious of this having read the book on holiday in Rhodes, where unseasonably cold, wet weather meant less time to enjoy this on the beach. I finished it in the dark on the flight home late last night, its effect very different out of the sunshine.

Space Security Service

Big Finish have announced that June 2025 will see the release of Space Security Service, a series of audio adventures produced by me and starring Jane Slavin and Joe Sims. Press release as follows:

The Space Security Service return!

Jane Slavin and Joe Sims star as Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven in two brand-new box sets of full cast audio drama from The Worlds of Doctor Who, coming soon from Big Finish Productions. 

They’re the guardians of the Solar System and Earth’s first line of defence. But now the agents of the Space Security Service face their greatest ever threat… 

Having joined David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in the popular Dalek Universe series, the heroes of the Space Security Service will soon defend the universe once again in their own exciting adventures. Jane Slavin will return as Anya Kingdom, a special agent from the 41st century, alongside Joe Sims as her android colleague Mark Seven. 

These star-spanning escapades will take inspiration from the imaginative creations of Terry Nation. Nation devised the Space Security Service for the 1960s Doctor Who TV serials Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and expanded upon them in the Dalek annuals and comics, as well as a never-made TV spin-off series, The Daleks. 

The fast-paced new adventures will see Anya and Mark encounter monsters from across the universe, from Voord in the Thames to a rogue Thal scientist. 

There are two box sets of The Worlds of Doctor Who – Space Security Service to look forward to, each comprising three thrilling episodes of full-cast audio drama. The first volume, The Voord in London, is due for release in June 2025; details of the second volume, due out in January 2026, will be announced at a later date.

Space Security Service: The Voord in London is now available to pre-order for just £19.99 (as a digital download to own), exclusively from Big Finish. But see the bargain offer below for both sets.

The three episodes in this first box set are: 

• The Voord in London by LR Hay 
• The Thal from G.R.A.C.E. by Felicia Barker 
• Allegiance by Angus Dunican 

Producer Simon Guerrier said: “This series has long been in the works – arguably since Terry Nation tried to launch his Daleks TV show back in the 1960s. We've taken that as our cue and come up with a fast-moving, fun series of adventures for Space Security Service agents Anya Kingdom and Mark Seven, who were such a hit in the Dalek Universe range. 

“We start with Anya back in London in the 20th century, working undercover as a police officer on the trail of one group of aliens - and then getting caught up with another. Soon the action moves to... well, just wait and see!” 

Big Finish listeners can save money by pre-ordering both volumes of Space Security Service in an exclusive multibuy bundle for just £38 (download to own). 

All the above prices (including pre-order and multibuy bundle discounts) are fixed for a limited time only and guaranteed no later than August 2025. 

The director of Space Security Service is Barnaby Kay, the script editor is John Dorney and the cover art is by Grant Kempster.