Missing Believed Wiped 2025

I had a happy time on Saturday at the BFI’s annual Missing Believed Wiped, where we get to see clips and full episodes of old TV recently returned to the archives by teams of ruddy heroes. Last year, I wrote a post on what was shown and a pal asked if I could do the same this time for those who couldn’t attend. So…

The first session began with a trailer, originally shown on BBC One on Thursday 15 December 1966 between the end of The Illustrated Weekly Hudd (of which we saw a closing bit of credits) and Sports Review of 1966. The trailer was for a thriller series called Vendetta, but Presentation clearly had no footage from the series, or wanted a generic trail for the whole series not just a given episode. Instead, specially shot material shows a hand with a syringe, a hand with a knife, a letter in which “Vendetta” is written in cut-out letters from newsprint. How amazing to advertise a series with, “This is roughly the gist…”

That was followed by a full episode of Vendetta, The Running Man, originally broadcast on 30 December 1966. It wasn’t at all what I’d expected from doing some reading in advance. The Radio Times of 27 October previewed the first episode of Vendetta with a profile of the series’ star, Italian actor Stello Candelli. His character, Danny Scipio, is a Sicilian who,

“fights the Mafia with his own methods … In the course of his unending vendetta Scipio will be confronting the Mafia in places all over the world: in the American south, in France, in Sicily, and in metropolitan Italy. But for tonight’s opening episode, written by the originators of the series, Brian Degas and Tudor Gates and called The Sugar Man, he travels to London.”

Scipio is not in or even mentioned in The Running Man, which is largely set on the Devonshire moors, with a bit of action in Cornwall. Agent Angelo James (played by Australian actor Neil McCallum) goes to Dartmoor Prison to bully prisoner Johnny Barbiere (Sebastian Breaks) into testifying against one of the notorious Pulito brothers. But Johnny is in prison with the other Pulito brother, who then tries to kill him. Johnny escapes and goes on the run — there’s quite a lot of location filming as he runs about the scenery and scrambles over stone walls, while stock footage shows groups of policemen on what are clearly different hills.

Johnny then breaks into the house of Patricia Rattan (Janet Munro), just as she’s leaving a note for the husband she is walking out on. Against her will, she must now drive Johnny out of the area and through the police checks, pretending to be his loving wife. Things don’t go to plan, and they end up having to spend the night together…

Janet Munro — who I knew from playing opposite Sean Connery in the Disney musical Darby O’Gill and the Little People — is amazing in this, with a lot of wide-eyed close-ups as she is variously terrified, brave or intrigued. There are some nice visual touches, such as the way the runaway sequence involves handheld shooting to give Johnny’s point of view. 

Sometimes the writing is deft. Johnny tells Patricia that he wants to get to the Isles of Scilly, where he can sit and watch the few boats coming in and — if he sees anyone that concerns him — lie low for a bit. Later, agent Angelo says pretty much the same thing, independently: he had effectively deduced Johnny’s motives and movements.

Yet we’re led to believe that the story will hang not on whether Johnny can escape but who will catch up with him first — the ruthless but good-guy Angelo or the ruthless, deadly Pulitos. The latter get largely forgotten. Johnny shares with Patricia how he got mixed up with the Pulitos — the vital evidence agent Angelo needs — but this isn’t picked up at the end, either. It’s as if a chunk of plot got left out. I wonder how much the logistics of filming on a ferry for the climax determined what featured in the resolution.

After Vendetta, Chris Perry from Kaleidoscope shared some fun stuff. First, a cinema trailer for a 1964 stage pantomime starring Cliff Richard as Aladdin, with the Shadows, Arthur Askey and Vanessa Howard.

Then there was a reconstruction of the dramatic final moments from the first season of Doomwatch, with material from the otherwise missing episode Survival Code (11 May 1970) recovered from the recap at the start of the next episode and from an edition of Blue Peter (where it could be seen on a screen in the background of an item about the band, the Scaffold). The editing was done by Jon Coley and gives a good sense of the mounting tension — and the shock twist ending, decades before similar stuff in Spooks and Line of Duty. It’s good, too, to see something of Hugh David’s tense, enthralling work as director (all 10 Doctor Who episodes that he directed are missing). 

Then there was a full episode of legal sitcom AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases, this one The Negotiable Cow (20 June 1967). Roy Dotrice was — as ever — aged up, in this case to play Albert Haddock, an old pedant who objects to a bill from the Inland Revenue for £68, 1s and 3d. Reading up on obscure bits of old law, he decides to deliver a cheque in person to the bureaucrat in question. But he does not write the cheque on paper: he daubs it on the side of a cow.

The case as to whether he can pay by cow, and whether he can tie up said cow at a parking meter, goes to court, with Alastair Sim presiding. This was quite a coup, and Radio Times credited Sim first and ran a photo of him not Dotrice. On screen, Sim seems delighted by the daft, witty script, such as when he asks of this particular, unusual cheque, “Were you afraid it might bounce?” It’s all good fun. Plus, for Doctor Who fans there was the bonus sight of John Levene — just prior to playing a Yeti in The Web of Fear — as one of the jurors, seen clearly in one shot. 

Next up was a compilation of clips from Ed Stradling at the TV Museum, which included an unused take from Attack of the Cybermen (1985), a Top of the Pops performance of “Ships in the Night” by Be Bop Deluxe and a song from Play School (30 March 1983). You can see more from the TV Museum, and support its work, at https://www.patreon.com/TheTVMuseum

The second session began with The Best in TV, Michael Aspel presenting coverage of the Guild of Television Producers and Directors Awards held earlier the same day — 14 February 1969 — at the Dorchester Hotel in London. This forerunner of the BAFTAs had a chequered history. The bigwigs of the BBC were all at the event in November 1963 when news came in from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot. This meant there was no one senior enough on duty to authorise changing the pre-agreed TV schedule. I’ve read about the fallout from this in Competition by Asa Briggs and A Survey of Television by Stuart Hood.

At the awards in 1969, host Kenneth Horne suffered a heart attack midway through the show and died. The show continued without him, and the TV version still went out that evening, but the footage of the ceremony was kept noticeably brief. Instead, the programme showed extended clips from the winning TV shows — many of them otherwise missing. We got to see Marty Feldman as a policeman using his cloak to “bullfight” with cars, Max Adrian and Christopher Gable at the piano in a (surviving!) film about Delius by Ken Russell, and an aged-up Roy Dotrice — him again — tell bawdy stories about Sir Walter Raleigh in Brief Lives. The show ended with a standing ovation for the Czechoslovakian TV Service, awarded in absence. 

Afterwards, in the bar, I think this was the material shown to us that was mostly hotly debated. The strangeness of it, the ethics of carrying on with the broadcast after the death of the host, how posh it all was… I realised that just a month after this, the same venue hosted the Writers’ Guild Awards, which honoured many of the same shows and recipients. (You can see, in the opening moments of Marty Feldman: No, But Seriously… Feldman receiving his guild award from David Whitaker and Marius Goring.)

Next up, my pal Gary Brannan from the University of York presented footage from a videotape found within the archives of writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. This comprised brief fragments of programmes, some silent and in poor quality, including some of the fourth episode of Hancock’s, broadcast on 1 July 1967 with Vicky Carr singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on the nightclub set. The tape was intercut with brief moments from an episode of Hancock called The Bowmans, originally broadcast in 1960 but — thinks Gary — taped from the repeat on 16 March 1966, with glimpses of Tony Hancock fronting a campaign of (fake) adverts for Grimsby Pilchards, which young women seem unable to resist. By chance, there was also more from Christopher Gable, this time giving a ballet performance with Maryon Lane to Debussy’s “Petite Suite” as part of an episode of Melodies for You. (Thanks to Gary for correcting what I originally posted here!)

The date in question is curious. 1 July 1967 was the day BBC Two starting broadcasting in colour — some two years ahead of BBC One and ITV. It was also the day on which BBC Two broadcast the final episode of The Forsyste Saga in its original run. I know this because June Barry, who starred in Forsyte, hosted a party the same night at the home she shared with her husband David Whitaker, whose serial The Evil of the Daleks concluded that evening, too. Stars from both series attended, filling up their small mews home that looked out on to railway tracks and was illuminated by the lights from passing trains. So, as Hancock advertised Grimsby Pilchards, the Second Doctor and Soames Forsyte may have been out on the balcony, smoking.

The fragments on this tape also included some tantalising glimpses of Alan Bennett’s otherwise missing series On the Margin (1966), with Bennett as vicar giving a sermon, then breaking the fourth wall by removing his dog collar to one side of the set, as the studio lights went out. The sound held long enough for one good gag about the BBC closing down for the night— the make-up woman has put away her lipstick, the wardrobe man has just put on his. What a shame, though, not to have sight of one of his costars in the series, Prunella Scales.

Oh, and this stuff was introduced by a clip from some 30 years of Bennett saying there wasn’t much to miss.

Next was Hank Rides Again, a mix of puppetry and animation for children made by Francis Coudrill for Associated-Rediffusion. It concerns the adventures of a cowboy and his horse, and their battles with the villainous Pete. From what I’d read in advance — Hank features quite a lot in Paul Hayes’ forthcoming book, When Saturday Came (Telos, 2026) — I thought this was some kind of Western. But the setting is contemporary, the villain driving a modern car, so I think it owes more to Roadrunner cartoons, with the same kind of stylised backdrops of Monument Valley. We also got to see a documentary about the series, with Christopher Frayling as appreciative fan and Coudrill’s son demonstrating how he provided the sound effects for different vehicles on his trumpet.

I wrote quite a lot of notes about all this but, in the darkness of the screening, they ended up on top of each other so whatever insights I had have been lost. You are rarely so fortunate. Besides, episodes of Hank Rides Again are now being shown on Rewind TV so you can watch and judge for yourselves.

Lastly, those heroes at Film is Fabulous shared one of the 53 episodes of Emergency Ward 10 they’ve recovered, which includes all six episodes from 1964 in which Annete Andre plays an actress who is severely sunburned. We got to see the first of these (tx 7 July 1964), in which there was a lot going on. One big element was the aftermath of surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) walking out on dinner with Dr Giles Farmer (John White) and his father, after the latter said something inappropriate — presumably about her ethnicity. I’m not sure if this was just before or just after the couple were seen to kiss, which was only the second time a white actor and black actor had been seen to kiss on British television.

Then there’s the doctor who doesn't think the lamb chops served on the wards are good enough, the excitement of the imminent hospital fete, and the prospect of new uniforms for staff. But most of the episode is about old faithful Albert (Howard Douglas) having been electrocuted by touching a plug socket with wet hands. There’s a fun scene where the poor bloke struggles to tell the nurses that he wants something, and we realise he’s missing his ‘choppers’. One of the doctors is asked about this, acts surprised and then, er, remembers that he’s put the man’s teeth in a drawer. It’s an odd thing to forget!

Another plot involves a new locum with an eye for the nurses — though they seem excited by the attention, rather than warning each other about him. And then there’s Annette Andre, wheeled in face down wearing only her underwear and a smearing of dark make-up. Later, she’s topless. Although she’s always seen lying on her front, her bare back is a bit risqué for an early evening soap of the time — and pre-empts the notorious sunbathing scene in Triangle by almost 20 years.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger: Annette’s character has second-degree burns and has been told that she might be permanently scarred. In the closing moments, she has some kind of blob on her face. But what kind of blob? The credits roll…

Afterwards, Annette Andre was on stage to answer questions. She remembered one of her episodes of Emergency Ward 10 being broadcast live because something had gone wrong — implying that pre-recording was done very close to broadcast anyway. She also recalled a night playing poker with other cast members where she won £20.

And then out we tumbled into the bar, to compare notes and gossip.

Malcolm Hulke in the Telegraph

I've written a short piece for the Telegraph about writer Malcolm Hulke, "The communist who turned Doctor Who into an eco-warrior". It's behind a paywall but the opening line is,

"Last Sunday, as the whole world watched on tenterhooks, an ordinary man made an impassioned speech to a fish..."

(Yes, I then go on to explain that Salt is not actually a fish.) 

ETA: The piece was also published in the print version of the Sunday Telegraph under the title "The Left-wing writer who radicalised Doctor Who", 14 December 2025, pp. 14-15.

War Drums of the Blackfoot, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Oct 6th 1975

Mounties III Preliminary notes

1) Fake Mountie murders Indians

2) Missing uniforms

3) Yankee coats incident. Mounting hostility and hysteria

Climax — ‘The Treaty’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mounties trilogy by Terrance Dicks
Cover art by Jack Hayes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

• Me on The Jungle Book by Kipling

Massacre in the Hills, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later, we learn that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confronted by Rob, Potts gives a laconic response: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

The Great March West, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

When exactly did Terrance write this book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put all of this together and my working theory is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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