Star Trek 2, by James Blish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is dedicated,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

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

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

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

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

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

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

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…

Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

“It’s all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No  wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.” (p. 323)

This is a compelling, sometimes difficult read and I’ve had to stop and start a few times to process some of what it says. Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, keeps being mistaken for the conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and becomes obsessed with trying to understand her double, the journey she has taken in the past few years and what it can all mean. In the process, she grapples with Covid, the history of anti-Semitism, the situation in Gaza and a whole load besides.

I’m haunted by the radio interview with Wolf, which I heard go out live on the evening of 21 May 2019. Presenter Matthew Sweet (my mate!) asked her to explain the thesis of her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, and then, at 21:20, said words to chill the blood of any writer.

“I don’t think you’re right about this.”

What follows is polite, curt and utterly devastating. When Matthew then turns to the next item in the programme, and another guest, you can hear their nervousness. You can still hear the whole programme, if you dare.

Klein charts how Wolf got there and what happened next, but really this is a book about how we respond to extremism of one kind and another without becoming extremists ourselves. That entails some self-examination and scrutiny of the structures we so often take for granted — Klein has a lot to say about capitalism as a whole.

Much of this will linger with me. I was especially taken with what she says about the response from John Berger to her previous book, The Shock Doctrine, where he said shock can make us lose our identity and footing. Berger concluded that, “Hence calm is a form of resistance.”

“I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock included a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and—I hope—in the minds of my readers as well. The information [of the sort she reports on] is always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.” (p. 227)

At the end, we’re told Klein invited Wolf to respond, to have a conversation, but never got an answer. One question Klein wanted to ask was whether Wolf might remember her from the one time they met, when Klein was still a student and Wolf was promoting The Beauty Myth. Klein admits she was dazzled by Wolf, was probably influenced by her as she started as a writer — in effect, she might be the doppelgänger, not the other way round.

But there’s another devastating sentence, on p. 345, when Klein repeats the first thing Wolf ever said to her. I felt that, in just those few words, it unlocked so much about her.

In the Wet, by Nevil Shute

This is an odd and very racist novel, first published in 1953 but largely set 30 years later. The reprint I read is from 1982, with cover art by George Sharp that conveys a scene in the opening pages but doesn’t really give a sense of this peculiar book at all.

How racist can it be, you ask, given that I often delve into old books (and films and TV shows) that can contain unwitting and/or witting prejudice. In fact, I came to this by chance having read a bunch of books from the same year: Farewell Crown and Good-bye King by Margot Bennett, Hackenfeller’s Ape, by Brigid Brophy and, less recently, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

Well, In the Wet features a fair amount of casual racism littered through its pages - more, I think, than those other novels. But on top of that, of the novel’s two protagonists, one insists that his friends, employers and love interest address him by a nickname, which is a word beginning with N.

His (white) love interest, Rosemarie Long, is initially wary of using this nickname. “It’s pretty mean to call you that,” she says. “Not many people do that, do they?”

“Everybody,” responds the man born David Anderson, the name that I’ll use here. “I rather like it.” 

David’s grandmother, we learn, was an Australian aborigine from the Kanyu tribe, who “ruled the Cape York Peninsula before Captain Cook was born or thought of.” David is proud of being a “quadroon”, and would rather people called him by the nickname and so acknowledge the colour of his skin, “than that they went creeping round the subject trying to avoid it.” (All quotations from p. 82) Better, it seems, to address the thing head on, in a plain-speaking, no-nonsense way.

Except that one of the first people to refer to David’s skin colour doesn’t realise he is not white. 

“You don’t look coloured. You look a bit tanned, that’s all.” (p. 70) 

That may account for why David has experienced little in the way of racism in is life, saying that just once, aged 18 and in Sydney, he experienced, “waiters being rude in restaurants, people refusing to sit at table … But it could still happen at any time” (ibid).

We don’t witness racism towards David — in fact, many white characters insist to him that his colour and background are not an issue. But he has internalised prejudice, I think. Now aged 30, he remains unmarried because “the colour makes that a bit difficult” (p. 71). He also assumes that it will bar him from working as a pilot for the Queen. David’s boss, Group Captain Frank Cox, counters that,

“As for the colour, you can put that out of your mind [as] we aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family” (ibid).

Which would be, it seems, unthinkable.

The upshot is that the only prejudiced person we meet is the character of mixed heritage, who insists on being addressed by the N-word. That word therefore features frequently, more often than I think I’ve ever seen in one book, in a novel written by a white emigrant to Australia, lecturing us on race and democracy and a whole lot besides. 

Shute does this through parable or satire, in rather the style of News from Nowhere by William Morris (in which a character from 1890 traipses into the 21st century). The mechanism Shute uses to jump 30 years into the future from his own time is quite peculiar.

The novel opens from the perspective of our first protagonist, 63 year-old Father Roger Hargreaves (no, not him from the Mr Men), who was born in Portsmouth in 1890, ordained in 1912 and has been in Australia on and off since just after the First World War. He’s a no-nonsense vicar, living a meagre existence in a town in the midst of nowhere, North Queensland, tending to lost souls. When an old drunk abuses him, Hargreaves offers the man his own modest home for a wash and shave, and then buys him a drink.

This old drunk is “Stevie”, who lives an even more remote existence with a man called Liang Shih, who grows vegetables for the community and shares his opium with Stevie. One day, Liang Shih comes into town to report that Stevie is seriously ill. Hargreaves joins local nurse Sister Finlay in heading out to see the patient. It’s a perilous journey through rain and flood, and Hargreaves is anyway suffering the after-effects of malaria. They find Stevie on death’s door and, unable to do anything themselves for his pain, let Liang Shih feed him a pipe. A feverish, smoke-addled Hargreaves sits with the dying man in the dark and listens to him murmur something about his life…

We segue, seamlessly, from Hargreaves telling this story on page 60 to the third person account of David Anderson, the man who likes to be known as N—. Hargreaves thinks this is Stevie’s real name. But we are gifted clues over the next 15 pages that something else is going on, before on page 75 there’s a reference to a coin dated 1982. This is all a vision of things to come.

It’s an odd future, one in which the Labour government have been in power in the UK continuously since the end of the Second World War. All buildings are government owned and many houses stand empty because there has been so much emigration to Australia, Canada and other parts of the world, much of it after the stock market crash of 1970.

David Anderson is a pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force who, while stopped off in the UK, is asked to take a posting to fly the royal family wherever they might want to go. It turns out that the RAAF and Australian government are picking up the tab for the Queen’s air transport because the UK’s mean-spirited Labour lot won’t pay. We come to realise the nightmare prospect — has there every been anything so horrific in all fiction? — that the Queen and her family might be happier living abroad (following the example of the author, who emigrated to Australia in 1950).

The whole thing is a very strange right-wing fantasy of grievances against the left, blaming Labour for post-war austerity — and not, er, the Nazis. Rationing is still in place in this 1983, so English people are amazed by David’s access to ham or pineapple, which he gets via airline connections. And yet in this bleak dystopia, posh grocer’s Fortnum and Mason is still open (p. 203), which is convenient when David wants to buy his love interest a treat. By which he means South Australian sherry.

This imagined austerity is all the odder because Shute must have known while writing this that rationing would soon end in the UK. In fact, bread came off the ration in 1948, clothes in 1949, sweets and sugar in 1953, the year In the Wet was published. All other rationing was ended on 4 July 1954, but it had been a pledge of the Conservatives in the 1950 and 1951 general elections — the latter returning them to power.

When In the Wet was published, Labour had been out of office for two years. That this novel is railing against a demonstrably unfounded fear is fascinating in the context of having just read How They Broke Britain by James O’Brien, and its account of scaremongering by media and certain politicians in the lead up to the referendum on leaving the EU.

There’s something, too, in the fear of a population of hard-working, aspirational Brits being dogged by the edicts — whims! — of the civil service. I can see echoes of that fear in things being said in the US at the moment as a reason for cutting public services, that idea of government as something that gums up rather than lubricates the workings of the economy. Somehow, despite this, British engineering, radio and TV are still the envy of the world (p. 75), the latter presumably still being made by the bureaucracy of the BBC.

The Labour government seen here, largely in the person of Prime Minister Iorweth Jones, MP for South Cardiff and a former miner, are variously petty, parochial and paranoid. For all they have, for decades, imposed their dreary ideology on the poor people of the UK, they also don’t stand for anything. We’re told that since,

“Communism was no longer politically expedient in England since the Russian war” (p. 93),

the Prime Minister and his party have abandoned it.

His bureaucrats ensure that one flight David pilots — with the Queen on board — is redirected from her usual airport at White Waltham to one in Yorkshire because they don’t have quite the right papers. The monarch suffers the indignity of being sent to the north and then having to catch a train home.

The Queen — newly crowned when the novel came out — is stoical and modest throughout. Among the privations suffered over the years, she has given up Balmoral and Sandringham to the Labour regime (p. 101). This is all in sharp contrast to the accommodating Canadians and Australians who indulge her every need. When her plane stops to refuel on Christmas Island, she admires the single large house there and arrangements are quickly made to build her one of her own. (Christmas Island, we’re told, transferred, along with all Line Islands, to Australia in 1961 (p. 154).)

The “Prince Consort” (p. 113 — and never the “Duke of Edinburgh”, though given that title in 1947) is blond, practical and itching for independent adventure, envious of David’s life and background. When David replies that he was “born in a ditch”, the Prince Consort responds:

“I still say you were born lucky [because] you could choose your life, and make it what you wanted it to be.” (p. 133)

The Prince of Wales — confirmed as “Charles” on p. 115 — is, like his father, a practical sort, an expert on planes and a veteran of the world war against Russia. He’s married with two boys (p. 124), not a bad prediction for 1953. The Princess Royal is married to the “Duke of Havant” and they have a daughter, “little Alexandra” (p. 124).

David and love interest Rosemarie, both working for the royals, repeatedly tell each other that they won’t gossip or talk politics — but do little else. From this, we glean that Australia is thriving thanks to a modified system of voting where citizens can qualify for as many as seven votes.

First there’s the basic vote for everyone at age 21. There’s a second vote for anyone with a university degree, for solicitors, doctors and commissioned officers. A third vote can be claimed by working outside Australia for two years, presumably acquiring a wider outlook in the process. A fourth vote can be won by raising two children to the age 14 without getting divorced. There’s a vote awarded for anyone earning an income above £5,000 a year, and a vote for officials of the recognised Christian church including wardens — we’re not told which denominations, and it doesn’t seem to include leaders from other religions. Lastly, the Queen can grant an extra vote, rather like an honour.

David is a three-vote man when we meet him and earns a fourth while in service (guess which one he gets). He insists that this system is far superior to that in the UK (not that he ever talks politics), ensuring a better class of MP — “real men in charge” (p. 89), with less influence from trades unions. The result is a society in which, “everybody’s got the chance to make a fortune and spend it” (p. 72), but there’s no safety net. David says proudly of enterprising souls that might come from England to Australia, “if he fails he may be much worse off” (p. 100).

Whatever the fate of such failures, this is all presented as a great success story — a utopia. Did that really seem viable in 1953? There’s not much of the usual trappings of science-fiction in this future but technology, briefly, gets a mention to magically solve the issues of overpopulation.

“When I was a boy people were still saying that twenty-five million [people in Australia] was the limit. But in my lifetime the Snowy irrigation scheme has been completed, and the Burdekin, and half a dozen others, and now they’ve got this nuclear distillation of sea water in the North, around Rum Jungle, and that’s getting cheaper and cheaper.” (p. 220)

If only we leave things to the engineers...

At the end of the book, the Queen appoints a governor-general of England, a move that so horrifies the British public — who still love the royal family really — that the long Labour government is at last overthrown. It is, paradoxically, a revolution in which the status quo is confirmed. It looks as if the UK will adopt the Australian system of voting, too. David is delighted:

“This is the end of something that began in 1867, when a lot of generous idealists gave one vote to every man.” (p. 229)

So this awful dystopia is not just the fault of the post-war Labour government but stretches back almost a century further to the Second Reform Act which extended the right to vote from 1 million to 2 million of the estimated 7 million working men in the country. Too much, too soon, and the wrong sort of chap getting a say in things, plainly. (But I'm reminded of similar anti-democratic feeling in Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming (1958), in which we learn that giving women the vote has, er, made them gay.)

Anyway, the result is that Rosemarie is no longer rushed off her feet with official duties so can no longer put off David’s advances… Jut as things get going between them, on p. 261 we segue back to Roger Hargreaves and dying Stevie.

Over the next 20 pages, Hargreaves comes to realise what seems so obvious: that Stevie died and was born again, and had a vision of his next life. Hargreaves is then called out to baptise a baby born in a ditch, one David Anderson… 

We were told that David has been known by his nickname since he was a boy. So I’m left wondering if stoical, practical Father Roger Hargreaves is the one who first furnishes him with it. 

The Masquerades of Spring, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is great fun - a Rivers of London novella set in New York in the Jazz Age, narrated by the woosterish Augustus Berrycloth-Young. Gussie has fled London and the stern wizards of the Folly because he's been using magic for daft pranks. Then Thomas Nightingale turns up on his doorstep, seeking help to track down a magic saxophone...

It's a fast-moving, quick-witted caper, full of pithy one-liners but grounded in the real history of the jazz and drag scene, prohibition, racism and homophobia. That makes it sort of Dashiell Hammett as written by PG Wodehouse, with some magic mixed in - and not nearly as easy to pull off as Ben makes it look. 

Of course, he has form here. That use of a specific time and place to add some heft to the adventure is the same trick as in Ben's Remembrance of the Daleks (which I adore). Just as that story hinted at hitherto unknown secrets in the Doctor's past, this novella provides some tantalising clues about the early life of Thomas Nightingale.

There's another link to Ben's TV Doctor Who in that Peter Walmsly is, here on p. 29, a reverend who led prayers at Casterbrook school of wizardry, decades before his stint as an archaeologist for the Carbury Trust.

I found it compelling and read it in a day. It closes with the prospect of many more such adventures for some of the principal figures here. Yes, please.

Rivers of London novels I've also blogged about:

• Lies Sleeping
• False Value
• Amongst Our Weapons

Rivers of London novellas:

• What Abigail Did That Summer
• The October Man

Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time, by Justin Blake

I'm ploughing on with my episode guide to the BBC children's serial Garry Halliday (1959-62), and ahead of an entry there on the fourth of the eight serials, here are some thoughts on the novelisation.

At the end of the third Garry Halliday novelisation, airline pilot and adventurer Garry skis down a mountain in Switzerland in time to catch the elusive criminal mastermind known as the Voice. Until now, no one - not even his own henchpeople - have seen his face. The Voice is sent to prison - and then promptly escapes.

In this next adventure, the Voice aims to deal with the 10 people who clapped eyes on him during his short time as captive, and thus regain his anonymity. The Swiss police inspector, the pilot of the plane who flew the Voice from Switzerland back to London and some prison staff at Pentonville each go missing for a week or so, and then are found with their memories wiped. As Garry, his trusty co-pilot Bill Dodds and their friend Inspector Potter from Scotland Yard investigate, they too face capture and the same sinister process.

This fourth Garry Halliday serial - broadcast over seven weeks between 5 November and 17 December 1960, never repeated but published in book form around September 1963 - taps into a contemporary fear. Brainwash Culture, Daniel Pick's 2016 documentary for Radio 3, is very good on the history of this, in real life and popular culture (and very useful when I wrote my book on 1967 Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks).

In short, during the Korean War (1950-53), reports emerged of coercive techniques being used by Maoist forces. This "brainwashing" was cited to explain why western prisoners of war had apparently aided their captors and why 21 American soldiers asked not to be repatriated. Whatever the truth behind these claims, they informed Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, in which a loyal American soldier undergoes conditioning that makes him commit treason. An acclaimed film version starring Frank Sinatra was released in 1962, the same year that Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File were published, both exploring the disturbing ways in which such techniques might be exploited.

We can see similar ideas being explored in such fare as the 1963 film The Mind Benders, the opening of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (when James Bond is the victim of such techniques!) and lot of early Doctor Who. It's a particularly effective wheeze in TV and film, where we can see the conflict of "good" characters struggling to fight the conditioning.

Garry Halliday was tapping into the zeitgeist and was perhaps even a bit ahead of the game. But it's odd that the characters we see brainwashed are mostly those we don't otherwise know - the Swiss inspector and prison staff. Inspector Potter, who is also subjected to the technique, featured in the previous serial but played by a different actor, which may have lessened the impact of seeing him "turned" to work for the villains. At one point, Garry Halliday succumbs to the drugged water that begins the brainwashing process but we don't see him act out of character. Bill Dodds is also unaffected. It felt to me as though an obvious bit of drama had been missed.

Then there's the sense of the novelisation patching over holes in the storyline, for example why the Voice can only be recognised by the few people who saw him, rather than from a mug shot when he was arrested.

"What records there were of him had disappeared. There was one newspaper photograph. Even the Voice couldn't get rid of every copy of a newspaper with a circulation of four and a half million. The newspaper picture was blurred and grey on bad paper. It showed a bulky man with an arm over his face. Such as it was, it had been circulated to the police of every country in the world. Most of those to whom if had been circulated had replied, more or les politely, that it seemed useless as a means of identification." (p. 19)

The not quite stated implication is that he has people in the police and in newsrooms who have disposed of the original photographs. The irony, of course, is that very little in the way of visual or written records survive related to Garry Halliday.

That makes it difficult to grasp exactly what this serial would have looked and felt like on screen. As on previous serials, the location filming featured in publicity. In the story, the Voice is working from the fictional state of Balakesh, a short distance from real-life Tripoli. Producer Richard West says in his memoir The Reluctant Soldier & Greasepaint and Girls that he, co-writer Jeremy Bullmore, lead actor Terence Longdon, cameraman Tony Good and West's assistant (which may have been Jean Hart) flew out to Tripoli to film picturesque shots on location, without any idea what the story would entail. The plot would be devised around whatever they shot.

In fact, West says, not having prior permission to film outside the American-run Wheelus Air Base, they were all arrested. On another occasion, locals interrupted filming by throwing rocks. The suggestion is that the guerrilla crew didn't get as much footage as they'd have liked and these frustrations may have coloured the way that Balakesh was depicted.

There had been criticism of previous Garry Halliday serials for stereotypical depictions of silly foreigners. The Arabs here are by turns parochial, corrupt and greedy. Bill Dodds at one point adopts a disguise, half naked and blacked up. The novelisation tells us, not very convincingly, that this was,

"not in the hope of being taken for an Arab but simply so as to make it more difficult for anyone to see him" (p. 105).

Halliday expresses horror at the death penalty being used in Balakesh, though capital punishment wasn't abolished in the UK until 1965 (and not until 2000 for all circumstances). But I think the harshness of the regime is all set-up for the end of the story. The Sheikh allows the Voice to escape into the desert, which is effectively a death sentence. The Voice is last seen wandering lost in the sand with nothing to drink.

There's no mention in the surviving sources that actor Elwyn Brook-Jones was part of the crew out in Tripoli, so I wonder how this haunting scene was conveyed on screen. As with the ski chase at the end of the previous serial, it has the potential for arresting visuals if filmed out on location, and for something much less exciting if realised in studio.

On TV, this wasn't the end of the Voice. Yet by the time the book was published, Brook-Jones was dead and Garry Halliday was no longer being made or repeated. The authors therefore tell us in a foreword that this is the last of Halliday's encounters with the Voice and provide some background to the character. They say this is what Halliday subsequently learned - suggesting that this information was not given in the TV version.

Bill Dodds and his fiancee Sonya Delamare, played by Terence Alexander and his wife Juno, had also left the series, their last appearance at the end of the fifth serial. In this, their penultimate adventure, Sonya has relatively little to do, and based on the novelisation it doesn't look as though the couple were involved in location filming. Oddly, whereas the previous three novelisations were narrated by Dodds, here the story is told in the third person, as if preparing the way for his exit. We're told Bill and Sonya are now happily,

"settled down to domestic life and two kids (at the present count)" (p. 11)

But I wonder how happy things really were as the actors left the series.

Yellowface, by RF Kuang

Bestselling author Athena Liu asks her friend June Hayward to look over a manuscript she has written using an old, manual typewriter - the only version of Liu's new novel. When Liu suddenly dies, Hayward must decide what to do with a book that no one else knows even exists. The draft isn't good enough in its current state, Hayward decides, so begins to revise it. Soon she has claimed the work as her own and things begin to snowball...

This fast-moving satire of the issues of racial diversity in publishing and on social media kept me entertained as I drove to and from a work thing this week. It reminded me a bit of Patricia Highsmith, though here the narrator not so much unreliable as unobservant, failing to pick up on things that made me gasp or cringe, often because she's too eager to defend her actions and motives. She details her own anxiety, triggered by hostile behaviour experienced in person or online, but often misses the impact of her actions, such as in complaining about a junior member of publishing staff or harshly critiquing the work of a high school student.

Our narrator isn't the only character to behave badly; it's a world of self-interested, prickly people with fixed smiles (in that sense, the other thing it reminded me of was the recent Doctor Who episode, Dot and Bubble). I've seen a few reviews claim Yellowface is too on-the-nose or that June Hayward's character lacks depth - and then miss some elements that are not spelled out. Hayward's relationship with Liu is complex; Liu is herself a complex and sometimes disquieting figure. It's continually, compellingly not straightforward.

Uncivilised, by Subhadra Das

“The museum is a powerful and extraordinarily malleable cultural sorting house. [Museums] are places for demonstrating that the West is best, regardless of what the West has actually been up to. For example, when we hear the story of how Napoleon’s troops in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century resorted to using dynamite to blow up a large, basalt statute of Rameses II, we needn’t worry in the way we do about the Taliban [destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas]. Even if they did blow up the Egyptian sculptures, Napoleon’s motive was to get them into the French national collection. They would be safe there.” (p. 188).

Subtitled “Ten lies that made the West”, this insightful and often funny book is full of historical details that challenge all kinds of presumptions. The ancient Athenians, for example, wouldn’t recognise our political system as democracy. Their whole system was about governing themselves; we elect other people, usually from the elite, to do so on our behalf.

Or there’s what Magna Carta did — or rather didn’t — do to fundamental rights here and abroad. I’d never even heard of the contemporaneous Charter of the Forest, which now seems a far more radical document, providing rights for ordinary people to land and resources; some of its provisions were still in force until 1971.

Over the course of 10 chapters, Subhadra unpicks a series of assumptions about the “civilised” and the “savage”, such as the superiority of the written word over the spoken, or the roots of political frameworks or psychological insights. In doing so, she shows how art, science and history are bound up in and blinded by a constructed, self-aggrandising narrative. 

Subhadra addresses numerous elisions from the historical record that serve to feed this false story. Repeatedly, women and non-white people and cultures have been left out of the story. I was fascinated to learn that Abraham Maslow’s work on the hierarchy of needs and on self-actualisation, which I studied as part of my training to be an adoptive parent, owes a great deal to his time among the Siksiká people in Northern Alberta — now the Northern Blackfoot Confederacy. Maslow later said he’d been inspired by news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour; Subhadra uses Maslow’s own work and accounts from women who knew him to set the record straight.

I should declare an interest in that I know Subhadra and get a credit in the acknowledgements (I had to check with her what for). The Dr is also cited as a source at one point. Some of what’s covered here I’d already heard, having seen Subhadra’s stand-up comedy act and heard her Boring Talk for the BBC on Jeremy Bentham’s “Auto-Icon”.

But there’s a great deal here that was completely new to me — a richer, stranger more diverse history than the one I thought I knew. What a delightful way to discover the myriad ways in which I’m wrong.

Roger Moore as James Bond

"The frank, uncensored story of what really happens in the making of a super-film," promises the back-cover blurb on Roger Moore as James Bond (aka Roger Moore's James Bond Diary). The star takes us through his 84 shooting days on his first Bond film, Live and Let Die, from Sunday 8 October 1972 when he leaves England for New Orleans to being told, if the rushes turn out okay, that he is done. 

On 14 October - Day 2 of shooting - Moore turned 45, the age I am now. There's a lot here about his aches and pains, his need of dental work, the various therapies employed and it's odd to think of myself, old and broken as I am, in better fettle than  Bond. There's also his anxieties and homesickness, and all the business that goes alongside making the movie itself.

"Daily more of the mechanics behind the mystique that is Bond become clear. The actual shooting, the rapport between my countenance and the camera, forms only a fraction of a field of operations which is a constant source of surprise." (Day 10, p. 27.)

The extra-curricular work includes endless press interviews, Moore is increasingly impatient when asked the same question each time: how will his Bond be different from Sean Connery's? There are endless photoshoots, appearances, charity galas, bits and pieces. Then there's the pop concert he goes to, where its announced to the audience that the new Bond is in their midst - and no one seems to care. He's self-effacing about this, and often very funny.

Yet Moore's wife Luisa is annoyed by how much this all encroaches into time he could spend with his children. Then there's the awkwardness of his various love scenes: how Luisa treats him on the days he's got sex on the schedule, the etiquette of what you say to the other actor during and after this stuff. It's Moore's diary, his version of events, but I often found myself wondering how it was for them. 

There's lots, too, that is amazing to see in an official, licensed release. In that sense, the book reminds me of Alan Arnold's absolutely extraordinary Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back which I now want to read again. Moore is candid about other actors fluffing their lines, mucking up shots or weeping. He cites various mistakes made by producer Harry Saltzman (such as, on page 32, making the wrong call on what the weather would be like, and so losing a day's shooting). There's stuff about Moore's children, such as his son needing an enema for trapped wind, that is personal, embarrassing and hardly relevant to the making of the film. But Moore seems to delight in this kind of thing: the gulf between movie fantasy and prosaic reality.

I wonder how much the cast and crew really enjoyed his constant pranking, which sometimes seems a bit cruel. I'm surprised, too, how little the other producer, Cubby Broccoli, features. Is that because he wasn't on set, or because he kept out of Moore's way, or because Moore had nothing funny or scathing to say about him, or because he knew better than to do so? Again, that's what make this so intriguing: Moore is sometimes brutally candid but we're not getting the whole story.

As early as day 5 we're told of plans afoot for the next Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, to begin shooting 18 months later in August 1974, and we really feel the weight and power of the Bond machine. But there's little on how much of a risk this all was, Moore the second attempt to keep the franchise going with a new leading man after George Lazenby had not turned out as hoped.

"The build-up of publicity and advertising for the film is fascinating. I was asking Harry [Saltzman] about the sort of money the Bonds have made in the past and he told me the biggest grosser was Thunderball which has done 64 million dollars to date. Diamonds are Forever, the last before Live and Let Die, had already grossed 48 million and it is only on its first time round [the cinemas]. OHMSS was the lowest and even that grossed 25 million dollars. I just hope ours will be as successful." (Day 52, p. 132.)

There's little sense he felt under pressure, I think because he could see the script and production were all good. But I wonder how Saltzman and Broccoli were feeling, especially given other tensions in the air. This is a film tapping into something of its moment. For example, early on, Moore was horrified to hear Saltzman shouting the N-word on set.

"He was not trying to start a race riot but simply calling to our English props man [by the] nickname he has answered to since the days of silent cinema. I pointed out that it might be better to to find him another name here in the racial hotbed of Louisiana so we have settled on 'Chalky'. As Bond, I make love to Rose Carver, played by beautiful black actress, Gloria Hendry, and Luisa has learned from certain Louisiana ladies that if there is a scene like that they won't go to see the picture. I personally don't give a damn and it makes me all the more determined to  play the scene." (Day 11, p. 31.)

There was more on this the following day: 

"Paul [Rabiger, supervising make-up] agrees with Guy [Hamilton, director], Tom Mankiewicz [writer] and myself that it would have been more interesting if Solitaire, our present leading lady, had been black as she was in Tom's original screen play, but United Artists would not stand for it." (Day 12, p. 33.)

A few days later, Moore reports on an argument on set, the black stunt team having objected to scenes being shot with white stunt performers blacked up (Day 17, p. 44). Two days after this, yet another photocall was the cause of further disagreement when Yaphet Kotto - the actor playing the villainous Mr Big - raised his fist in a black power salute.

"Whether he was serious or not I don't know but the sequel was a scorching row. [Publicity director] Derek Coyte pointed out that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and could be seen as an endorsement of black power by militant blacks. We are making anything but a political picture but Derek said the photographs syndicated far and wide would involve us in a controversy which could do nothing but harm. Yaphet was incensed. At midday he and the black stunt men lunched together and during the afternoon Derek Coyte was ostracised by blacks who had previously been pally." (Day 19, p. 50.)

The next day, the black stuntmen were airing their grievances on local TV (p. 51). And these tensions were not confined to Louisiana. Returning to the UK, Moore shares a letter sent to him by a woman from North Wales, outraged by the sight of him pictured with Gloria Hendry as seen in the Daily Express (Day 54, p. 136).

Moore is unapologetic. It strikes me that George Lazenby had seen Bond as reactionary, but there's something here of Bond as progressive, just as they've tried to push things in the recent Daniel Craig films. Hardly perfect, but attempting to steer the juggernaut. 

I think there's something in that, too, when Moore first hears the theme tune for the film. In Goldfinger, Bond mocks the Beatles. Now a Beatle has written his title song, and Moore's response is telling:

"It is a tremendous piece of music and I will stick my neck out and say that three weeks from its release it will be number one in the charts. It's not last year's music, it's not even this year's music, it's next year's." (Day 66, p. 154.)

HV Morton's London

Having read Michael Bartholomew's biography of HV Morton, I'm now on to Morton himself. HV Morton's London is a collection of three earlier books, The Heart of London (1925), The Spell of London and The Nights of London (both 1926), first published together in 1940. Mine is an 18th edition from 1949.

Basically, they're vignettes from all round the capital, edited versions of Morton's column for the Daily Express. He visits Big Ben, goes back stage at the Old Vic, sits on more than one night-time riverboat on the look-out for suicides. There are flea markets and dances, a tour of the Royal Mint, a boxing match, a gambling den and much more. At one point, he's in the tower at Croydon Aerodrome, gazing across the Surrey fields to the twin towers of Crystal Palace - and somewhere in between, my old home.

At his best, Morton has access and insight so that it feels authoritative. Quite often, though, he gives full rein to whimsy, allowing himself to imagine the conversations - the whole lives - of people he merely glimpsed in passing, many of them salt-of-the-earth Londoners he names "Alf". More than once I was left thinking, 'But how could you know this?' or 'How could you have overheard?', so it lacks the authenticity of my friend Miranda Keeling's observations of real life.

At worst, Morton is misogynist and racist. His wandering eye falls, for example, on a pretty girl, but he assumes she is Jewish and will therefore soon grow fat. Another time, he describes the Chinese community in Limehouse as monkeys and is baffled by evidence that the men might be good to their wives. They allow him into their homes and bars; the threat of violence is all imposed by Morton. All of this stated quite openly, and shared in the popular press. It's not merely shocking; it is not the London I know.

Morton's is a strikingly dirty and polluted London, full of junk markets and rag fairs, worthless rubbish even sold from the windowsills and steps of the crumbling tenements. Almost every description of a landmark is shrouded in mist. One particular smog comprises,

“Many flavours. At Marble Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon; at Ludgate Hill I taste coke. … Everywhere the fog grips the throat and sets the eye watering. It puts out clammy fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a ghostly grip.” (p. 25)

The landmarks, too, are sooty. Viewed from the clock tower that houses Big Ben, he spies Nelson's column,

"stood up jet black like a cairn above the mist of a mountain top" (p. 160).

This juxtaposition of the modern and the mythic is a favourite trick of Morton's - wowed by a room in which Dickens once stood, or sounds that might have been familiar to Romans. It can get a little repetitive and yet his interest in the ancients can often provoke his most evocative writing, such as this from a visit to Cleopatra's Needle:

"Did you know that beneath the famous stone is buried a kind of Victorian Tutankamun’s treasure, placed there to give some man of the future an idea of us and our times? Did you realise that the London municipal authorities could do anything so touching? … In 1878 sealed jars were placed under the obelisk containing a man’s lounge suit, the complete dress and vanities of a woman of fashion, illustrated papers, Bibles in many languages children’s toys, a razor, cigars, photographs of the most beautiful women of Victorian England, and a complete set of coinage from a farthing to five pounds. So the most ancient monument in London stands guard over this modernity, rather like an experienced old hen, waiting for Time to hatch it.” (p. 78)

Again, he can't resist playing this against aching modernity:

"I stood there with the tramcars speeding past and the criss-cross traffic," (p. 79). 

But it's a spot I know very well, and those tramcars are from a lost world.

In describing how omnibuses have changed within his own memory, Morton reveals what else is different (as well as his usual predilection for women's underthings):

“In 1925, when this was written, London omnibuses had open roofs, and the seats were protected by black tarpaulin covers which travellers could adjust in wet weather. Nowadays the London omnibus is an enclosed juggernaut and wet seats are things of the primitive past. Also, the Strand has changed since 1925. It has been widened in parts, and it is no longer an exclusively masculine street. Silk stockings are probably now more in evidence there than pith helmets and spine pads [from the imperial outfitters].” (p. 34n)

This throng of Londoners heading out into the Empire he finds straightforwardly heroic, but anything of that world coming into London is straightforwardly threatening. In Morton's view, all foreigners are at best suspect; often they're also monstrous. Then, while out on the Thames at 2 am, he spots, “a queer fleet at anchor” in Limehouse: 

“‘The smallpox boats,’ said the sergeant [giving him this tour]. ‘They are always fitted up ready to take patients [arriving in ships] down to the isolation hospital in the event of any outbreak.’” (p. 400)

It's not as if the capital is otherwise a bastion of good health. There are no gyms or joggers in this London. Morton's description of conditions in the few free hospitals in a time pre-NHS is gruelling, for all he admires the good-hearted people running such charity. He also visits St Martin's by Trafalgar Square, where the homeless men offered shelter are divided into three types: ex-prisoners with a grudge against the world; those who won't work; and,

"those who went to the war as boys and came back men with boys’ minds" (pp. 42-43).

There's pity for these wounded men, but no sense that they are owed something more by a grateful nation. That contrasts with the dead of the same conflict. Morton passes the six year-old Cenotaph, that "mass of national emotion frozen in stone", where,

"A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle van takes off his worn cap [as he passes]. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms, attache and despatch cases in their hands—and the business of life—bare their heads as they hurry by." (p. 19)

That's all the more poignant given when this edition was compiled. Morton's first introduction to these three books was written in August 1940, addressing fellow imperilled Londoners. His theme is the pride and interest the Second World War has ignited in their city as it faces devastation.

"Men who in former years hardly knew where their town hall was to be found, now sleep there regularly, and have become familiar with many a municipal mystery. Men and women, to whom a fire hydrant was once a technical term which cropped up occasionally in the newspapers, can now draw you an accurate map of the water-supply of their district. Countless diligent wardens know by heart streets which, until recently were an untracked wilderness to them, although they lived just round the corner." (p. vii)

A second introduction, written in February 1941, is for American readers. London, he informs them gravely,

“has experienced the mass raid; the single nuisance raider; the high explosive raid; the fire raid; the mixed h.e. and fire raid; the raid directed against docks and warehouses; and the raid directed, apparently, against Wren churches and hospitals.”

But there are broadly two types of air raid: day and night.

“When London is raided by day, people no longer rush into shelters and cellars at the first note of the siren, as they used to when they were new to bombing.” (p. viii)

Instead, Londoners look around for signs of alarm or haste, but the traffic otherwise continues. Yet, hyper-vigilant to all sounds and senses, they will suddenly scatter. Night raids are another matter - altogether more tense and exhausting, even before the bombs come.

"As darkness approaches people become restless and begin to think of getting home before the black-out. Shops and businesses close early in anticipation of ‘siren time.’ Dusk falls, and the streets empty. It is not a pleasant experience to stand, say, in Bond Street, the pavements deserted except for anxious groups round the bus stops, every taxi-cab either occupied or else driven by a man who cannot take you back where you wish to go because he is himself trying to race the black-out to the other side of London." (p. ix) 

Despite the hardships, Londoners have met hardship - says Morton - with their usual stoicism and good cheer. He tells us about ordinary City clerks who've been transformed into lions, the "man of books" who became a man of action. There's a mug of tea with the wardens, sharing tales of their modest heroism night after night. It's all good propaganda, these honest, good people remaining quietly dignified despite the ravages of war.

"The task of such civilians in war is infinitely more difficult than that of the soldier, who is a single-minded man trained to fight with others and untrammelled by any struggle to maintain the normalities. … Most gallant, and tragic, are those others who have been bombed out of flats and houses, some of them losing everything they possessed. The ability to ‘double-up’ with relatives and friends in times of misfortune, formerly an exclusive habit of the poorest classes, is now a general tendency. Admiration for those who have no homes, who spend their nights in other people’s shelters, and turn up at their offices in the morning to carry on as usual, is beyond expression.” (p. xix)

But one line is haunting. It's surely meant to reassure, yet in a book that is testimony to all that stands to be lost.

"The result [of the Blitz] is a grim city, a shabby city, a scarred city, but not a devastated city, except round and about Guildhall, where several famous streets have been burned to the ground.” (p. x)

In Search of HV Morton, by Michael Bartholomew

This is a very good biography of a very successful writer and pretty awful human being. Michael Bartholomew brilliantly teases out the real man from the literary persona, effectively providing biographies of two people: the real Harry Morton and the invented HV.

Morton's most famous work is In Search of England (1927), in which he escaped London for excursions in a bull-nosed Morris. Bartholomew makes the point that the title suggests this England had become hidden or lost and so had to be sought through its countryside and history. He goes on that this struck a chord in a nation still reeling from war. He also points out that the final destination in the book, a village in which Morton finds this England, is almost certainly a fiction. As he says, there's a subtle but important difference between a myth and a lie... I'll return to this when I reread In Search of England.

Bartholomew is aided by a wealth of evidence which any researcher would envy (me included). HV Morton published more than 40 books, almost all of them non-fiction, often recounting his adventures with wry, self-deprecating insight. Many of the books were collections of reports for newspapers (and, later in life, features for glossy magazines), with telling differences between what was originally printed and what was then revised. That would be quite enough, but Bartholomew also had access to a 200-page unpublished autobiography written in Morton's last years and a collection of diaries and correspondence ranging right back to his earliest days. This means the biographer is able to compare a diary account of a formative experience with how Morton chose to remember it a half-century later, and then contrast this with the version put in print. There is even a dated list of Morton's sexual conquests, totalling some 100 different individuals, with "wh" marking those that he paid for, which Bartholomew matches against the other details in his timeline.

There are plenty of gaps in the record - missing diaries, absences in what Morton tells us - and Bartholomew is good at deducing connections, motives, feelings. He also tells us when it's his own speculation by adding "I think", as well as saying when nothing firm can be said. Literary biographies can all too often be an annotated list of published works, reductively pinning down real events that inspired the writer, as if writing is little more than copy and paste. Bartholomew achieves something very different - and better. Morton is more than simply a witness: we come to understand the creative act, even in non-fiction. There is careful research beforehand, skilled observation at the time, a period of reflection to put things in perspective, and then craft in the actual process writing - from moulding loose events into a story, to the striking turns of phrase, the well-chosen idiom or analogy, and the deftly worked light humour.

A good example of this use of different sources is what Bartholomew can tell us about a particular photograph, chosen for the back of the dust jacket:

The photograph is also included in the plate section of the book, with the following caption:

"The opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1923 -- Morton's first big break as a reporter. The photograph was taken by the Times photographer. Under armed escort, treasures are being removed from the tomb. The figure leading the way is the official archaeologist, Howard Carter. The figure on the extreme right, furtively shadowing the party and taking surreptitious photographs, is Morton. When the photograph was published in The Times, Morton, the interloper, was cropped from the image."

The next plate is the front page of the Daily Express for 17 February 1923, with Morton's coverage - "Pharaoh's Coffin Found" - the first headline. Bartholomew follows the thread of Morton's early passion for archaeology and friendship with antiquarian GF Lawrence, how this helped him get the Tutankhamun gig (the Express determined not to let the Times have a monopoly on the story), the effect this trip had on Morton and how it all tied in to the historical perspectives in his later books.

It's interesting to read that, while waiting to be sent out to fight in the war, Morton was stationed in Colchester and involved in some excavations of Roman finds there. This was also true of the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler. There's no mention of Wheeler in this book, or of Morton in Jacquetta Hawkes' biography of Wheeler, and perhaps they never overlapped in life. Yet it strikes me that these womanising rogues had a lot in common, and Wheeler had a similar way of making direct connections to the ancient past. During excavation of Maiden Castle in the 1930s, Wheeler's brilliant deductions about the stages of a Roman siege were informed by his own battlefield experience in the war. Yet I wonder if the two men would have been at cross purposes: Wheeler using modern experience to unpick the truth of history, Morton looking to the past to provide a modern fiction... I'll keep an eye out for references to Wheeler in Morton's books.

Bartholomew has an eye for wry humour, such as when he details a break-in at the office young Morton was renting with a friend so that Morton could write a novel and the friend a play. 

"The project petered out, before Morton had completed chapter one, when a burglar broke in and made off with the kettle, tea and biscuits, but disdained to steal the manuscripts." (p. 82)

We also quickly get a sense of Morton's character, his presence in any room. While I envy Bartholomew his wealth of evidence, I wonder how much he enjoyed the time spent with his subject. Morton's insecurities and womanising are exhausting from the off but the racism creeps up on the reader. True, his travel writing is full of caricatures - there are often salt-of-the-earth yokels or idiot Americans for his narrator to converse with - but Bartholomew is good at showing how often Morton plays against easy stereotypes and presents a more complex view... at least in his published writing. In private, he's often shockingly racist, continually sympathising with the Nazis during the war and then emigrating to South Africa just as the apartheid regime came in.

Bartholomew confronts this head on and at some length: 

"For him to to have persisted with a rosy view of fascism, long after others had seen the light, indicates more than naivety." (p. 172)

He also points out the contradictions in Morton's prejudice: this man who made his name celebrating England actually despised much of its people and ways of doing things. Morton sympathised with and admired the Nazis and assumed they'd win the war, and yet was also a dedicated leader of a Home Guard unit, expecting to die with his men in token, doomed resistance to the inevitable invasion.

There are other ironies, such as - "improbably", as Bartholomew says - when the Labour Party published a pamphlet by Morton, What I Saw in the Slums (1933), with a foreword by party leader George Lansbury. Bartholomew makes the case that George Orwell surely read this ahead of his own, better known, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and even argues that of the two, Morton is the more sensitive and egalitarian.

"Morton's own descriptions of women are just as powerful [as Orwell's], and are less patronising. He writes, for example, of women who strive to put a symbolic barrier between their home and the even more squalid street beyond, by whitening the doorstep: 'Thousands of horrid doorsteps, worn as thin as wafers in the centre, are whitened or raddled. Every time a door opens you see a woman cleaning something.' What I Saw in the Slums is an impressive little book." (p. 147)

Bartholomew is no less impressive. There's lots that's uncomfortable in Morton's life - or parallel lives - but the story is well told. Note to self: this is how it's done.