Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks — I

First published in hardback and paperback on 21 October 1976, this novelisation opens with an attention-grabbing first paragraph:

“The tall white-haired man lay still as death. The girl leaning over him could find no pulse, no beat from either of his hearts. His skin was icy cold to the touch.” (p. 7)

This is the Doctor, near-dead on a couch in the TARDIS following the events of his previous, thrilling adventure. The girl — his friend Jo Grant — helpfully recounts for our benefit what’s been going on. Sometime “far into the future”, she and the Doctor had stumbled on,

“a plot to cause a space war. The Doctor discovered his old enemy the Master involved in the plot — and behind the Master were the Daleks. Although the Doctor managed to defeat the Master and prevent the war, he was seriously wounded in a Dalek ambush. I managed to get him into the TARDIS.” (p. 8)

There is no asterisk and footnote to “See Doctor Who and the Space War” by Malcolm Hulke, which was the Doctor Who novelisation published directly before this one — on 23 September. And that’s probably just as well, because Jo’s summary is not at all what happens at the end of that book. There is no Dalek ambush; the Doctor is in perfect health when he leaves in the TARDIS.

In part, I think the mismatch is because Mac and Terrance both worked from scripts, not the stories as broadcast. But working through this discrepancy is revealing of other things, too.

Doctor Who and the Space War is based on a 1973 TV story called Frontier in Space, which was written by Malcolm Hulke and script edited by Terrance. The Daleks appear in the final episode but depart long before the end. They are not even on the same planet when the last few scenes take place so there is not even a chance of an ambush. Instead, in the closing moments, the Master confronts and tries to shoot the Doctor. The Doctor switches on a machine that makes nearby Ogrons think that a monster is attacking. In the confusion, the Master’s hand is knocked just as he fires his gun.

In Hulke’s script for the episode, this meant that the Master entirely missed the Doctor. The Master then ran off, pursued by other characters. The Doctor, in perfect health, decided not to follow, telling Jo that they needed to prioritise going after the Daleks. We were to see them both enter the TARDIS, it would dematerialise and the credits would roll.

This was how the scene was recorded on 31 October 1972. But then producer Barry Letts decided that the end of the story needed reworking, not least because the monster had not been realised well. Terrance, as script editor, was tasked with reworking the sequence. He was able to add new material so long as it involved solely the Doctor and Jo. Actors Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning recorded this new material on 22 January 1973, on the same day as recording Episode One of the next story to be broadcast, Planet of the Daleks.

In the revised and broadcast version, when the Doctor switches on his machine and the Ogrons react, we don’t see to what. They bump into the Master but his shot now hits the Doctor, who falls to the ground. As the others rush off, Jo leans over the prone Doctor, amazed to discover that he is still alive; jogging the Master’s arm meant it was only a glancing blow. Jo helps the Doctor to his feet and into the TARDIS. We see the interior, with the gravely wounded Doctor on his feet at the console, sending a telepathic message to the Time Lords to ask for help in pursuing the Daleks.

In novelising his own TV story, Hulke worked from the camera scripts — ie the last versions used in recording of the episode in October 1972. But these, obviously, included the monster, and the Doctor not being hit. What’s more, Hulke further amended the closing moments of the story to address something else. 

Due to the untimely death of actor Roger Delgado in June 1973, Frontier in Space had been his final onscreen appearance as the Master. On screen, he is rather lost in the confusion of the amended scene, but it wasn’t much of an exit for such a significant character, played by such a well-liked man. In the novelisation, Hulke gives Delgado a proper send off.

As per the script, the Doctor working the machine makes the Ogrons see a monster — Mac describes it as a “giant, Ogron-eating lizard, rearing up its great head”, not the pink fabric bag featured in recording. The Ogrons rush off, bumping into the Master so that he drops his gun — which the Doctor now picks up. The Master, his “face contorted with fear”, asks if the Doctor will shoot him. Jo says he can’t, not in cold blood, but the Doctor ushers her into the TARDIS. He has to tell her twice before she complies.

The two Time Lords are now alone, one at the mercy of the other. The Master thinks the Doctor will shoot. It’s a tense moment as we turn to the very last page of the book, where the Doctor says that he won’t kill his old enemy. He should really take him prisoner but has to get after the Daleks. So he throws the gun harmlessly to one side.

“The Master grinned. ‘Perhaps we shall meet again, Doctor.’

‘Yes, perhaps we shall.’

The Doctor closed the door of the TARDIS. The Master watched as it dematerialised. Then he went back to his big table and started to collect his star charts and other papers. ‘Oh well,’ he said to himself, ‘there’s always tomorrow.’” (Doctor Who and the Space War, by Malcolm Hulke, p. 142).

It’s a lovely send-off, perfectly capturing Delgado’s Master and the relationship with Pertwee’s Doctor. That last line is funny yet bittersweet if we know that there wasn’t a tomorrow, and the two never met again. What a deft bit of writing. 

Of course, it doesn’t match what happens at the start of Planet of the Daleks — on screen or in the book. As broadcast, the first episode begins by reprising the closing moments of Frontier in Space, ie the revised ending that Terrance wrote. Our first sight is of the Doctor lying on the floor outside the TARDIS having just been shot, with Jo leaning over him. Amazed he is still alive, she helps him to his feet and through the door. Inside, he sends his telepathic message, then collapses across the console. Jo finds him somewhere to lie down: a pull-out bed rather than a couch. 

Terrance keeps that opening shot — the Doctor lying prone, Jo leaning over him — but simplifies the action by having this happen inside the TARDIS, the telepathic message already sent. This means he doesn’t have to explain where the TARDIS is when the Doctor is lying outside it. He can quickly bring us up to speed on what’s happened and concentrate on what happens next.

This simplification of action may explain why he has the Doctor wounded by an ambush of Daleks — the antagonists in the story to follow — and not being shot by the Master, who doesn’t feature in what’s to come.

The alternative is that Terrance didn’t recall his own rewrite of the closing scene of Frontier in Space. Hulke — his friend and sometime neighbour — might have reminded him, if they’d consulted one another in writing their novelisations. But it doesn’t look as though they compared notes. Other examples include the fact that Terrance is vague about the setting of his novelisation beyond it being, “far into the future”  (pp. 7-8), while Mac’s opening sentence is definitive: “The year 2540.”

But then why wasn’t the discrepancy between the end of Hulke’s novelisation and the start of Terrance’s picked up by the editorial team at Target? 

I wonder if, in fact, the brief from the publisher was not to collaborate, to ensure that each book could stand on its own. Neither book features a plug for the other, either in a footnote or among back-page ads. 

On p. 2 of my first edition of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks, the preceding Doctor Who and the Space War is cited last in the long list of other novelisations available, but with no indication that it has any particular link with this book. (Poor Doctor Who and the Giant Robot is still absent from the list.)

Nor is there anything in the cover art of these two books to suggest a link between them, though they are by the same artist and presumably completed one after the other.

1982 reprint of Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks;
1984 reprint of Doctor Who and the Space War

Doctor Who and the Space War is the first novelisation to feature the Third Doctor where he doesn’t appear on the cover. The focus is an Ogron, all the more imposing for being seen from below and dramatically lit, and more detailed than the photograph on which it is based:

Reference photo used for the cover of
Doctor Who and the Space War
c/o Black Archive

Behind the Ogron is a vista of planets and twinkling stars. The planets are lit from one side, the crescent of the light making them three dimensional. We can see the traces of craters and other surface detail.

Below this are two inset images: the head of a Draconian and a spacecraft in a cloud of steam. The Draconian is pale green — matching the logo of the first edition. The rest of the image is in tones pink and purple-brown. The muted colours, the fine linework and airbrushed colour are, I think, in the style of grown-up science-fiction titles of the time. Not quite Chris Foss, but in that direction.

By contrast, the cover for Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks is in a much more comic-strip style, with the blasts of energy, thunderbolts and stippled effects characteristic of Achilleos’s early work for the series. Instead of looking up at a single central figure, we look straight on at a Dalek framed on either side by the Doctor and the Thal called Taron. The Doctor is leant forward, face in profile; we see more of Taron’s agonised face. It’s a much more dynamic composition, the Doctor’s posture leaning into the Dalek, as well as the direction of the sucker arm and gun stick, giving a sense of movement from left to right.

ETA Richard Long on Bluesky suggests the photograph that Achilleos worked from, as below. We can see how Achilleos has reworked elements of the composition, notably the eyestalk. Also, compared to what we see on TV, where this moment happens in a beige-coloured quarry in winter, it’s all much richer and brighter. 

The bright red logo is in contrast to the blue background (for some reason, we can’t see the blue through the middle of the “O” in “Who”). The illustration is otherwise variously brown, green, orange, purple, red, yellow, as well as grey, black and white. It’s full of colour and there are details to pick over — such as the orange sparks dripping vertically from the Dalek gunstick as it fires a blast of energy off the right of frame. Yet above Taron’s head, a planet is depicted as a simple red spot.

The difference in styles between the two covers is, I think, comparable to the difference between the work Achilleos did on the first 12 novelisations for Target and the new look brought in my Peter Brookes. It has to be conscious, doesn’t it? Why would the artist — and publishers — want to keep these two books separate?

I think we can understand why. It’s one thing to say at the end of Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, when the Cybermen have been entirely defeated and the story wrapped up, that the Doctor’s next adventure will take place in Scotland, with a footnote “See Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster” — a wholly new adventure. Likewise, the first edition of Doctor Who and the Giant Robot contains a footnote referencing the as-yet unpublished Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. This directly precedes the events of the Robot story, but each book is its own, self-contained adventure. You don’t miss anything by reading just one of the books.

The TV stories Frontier in Space and Planet of the Spiders are something different: two halves of a an epic single story. In commissioning them in the first place, Terrance partly had in mind the example of the 12-episode The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66), also written by two writers taking half the episodes each.

That was fine on TV, where no further payment was required. But I can see why the publishers might have been nervous about conveying any sense that a book, or two books, contained just 50% of a story. These were novelisations that children bought for themselves, often from their own pocket money. It would not do to be seen to exploit that. 

One other thing to note about Doctor Who and the Space War before we dig into the book that Terrance wrote: it is the last novelisation to change the title of the story as used on screen.

Now, Frontier in Space is perhaps not the most thrilling title, and a frontier is steeped in old-fashioned ideas of empire. But the story, notably, doesn’t feature a space war — it is threatened but avoided. As we’ve seen, previous changes to the titles used on TV emphasised the names of the monsters in the story. So why not call this “The Ogron Plot” or something similar?

In the handwritten list of forthcoming novelisations included on p. 92 of Keith Miller’s The Official Doctor Who Fan Club vol. 2, and written a little before August 1975, the story is listed as “The Frontier in Space” — apart from the “the”, as on screen. It had changed by the following year, when it was listed as “The Space War” in the July 1976 issue of fanzine TARDIS.

By then, there was news of a big-budget science-fiction movie being filmed in the UK for release the following year. For example, the London Evening News reported on 24 March 1976 that,

“one of the most expensive films ever to be made in Britain begins shooting this week — at a cost of more than £7 million. … The title: Star Wars. The theme: a war between three worlds [sic].” (p. 5.)

The same paper had another story on the film on 19 April (p. 15), and I’ve found accounts in other papers. There was, to some degree, hype. 

And note that detail in the new report about the war between three worlds. That’s also the plot of Frontier in Space, with a conflict between planets Earth and Draconia being plotted from the planet of the Ogrons. Did the publishers, or the canny Malcolm Hulke, make that connection? If so, was the title and style of cover art used on Doctor Who and the Space War an attempt to cash in on Star Wars — more than a year before its UK release?

It would be very Doctor Who to pinch ideas from the future...

*

In Part II, I dig deeper into what Terrance wrote in Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks. There is swearing, fleshy parts that spit milky liquids, and also an orgy…

The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman

What bittersweet pleasure it has been to immerse myself in this last volume in The Book of Dust trilogy, and perhaps the last ever visit to the world(s) of His Dark Materials. 

As with La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth before this, it’s a rich, compelling adventure story in which we follow various flawed heroes and villains through a world not quite like our own. These various factions are heading for the mysterious “red building”, located somewhere east of the Caspian Sea, which seems to the source of the precious, rare commodity rosewater, which is in turn linked somehow to the properties of Dust. 

Lyra and her daemon Pan, the protagonists of these stories, suspect the red building is a window to another world, like the ones in His Dark Materials. And, of course, they were told at the end of that trilogy that such windows imperilled the world and had to be sealed for ever. Is that really true?

Along the way, there are battles, explosions, a riot, murders, the loss of the alethiometer and some revelations about Malcolm Polstead’s sex life. It is an enthralling read, difficult to put down — as with the second volume, I rattled through all 600+ pages in just a few days. 

But it’s also much more than a rollicking adventure, with plenty to say — or at least worry at — about the nature of imagination, the importance of personal connection, and the destructive effect of capital on creative life. As before it’s good on the pernicious way authoritarianism takes hold. Interviewed In that sense, it’s an angry book, or despairing — a novel about another world or worlds, that is directly about our own as it is now.

Brilliantly for a book about the imagination, it doesn’t tie things up too neatly at the end, leaving some questions hanging and a sense of much more possible beyond the last page. In fact, with 100 pages to go I thought I was pretty much on top of the myriad characters, motives and plot threads. And then, on p. 532, a new character is introduced. Tamar Sharadze is a catalyst for change, leading innovations in the way trade is conducted — simply with the introduction of paper money. Pullman has deftly, without clunkiness, shared with us the mechanics of trade up to this point, so that we can see the enormous change coming as a result of this innovation. I hoped to learn more about her and the changes wrought — but that can all play out in my head, along with other thoughts about who gets together with whom, and what happens next.

And yet by the end of this novel the big plot threads are concluded, there’s a definite sense of an ending, at least of this particular story. We learn why Lyra and Pan had their split at the beginning of the previous book, and the forces — or ways of being — at play. We even gain a sense of what Dust is, and its interplay with the Secret Commonwealth and Rose Field.

It’s hard to say more without spoiling things, but my heart was in my mouth for the last few pages, fearful of some last, brutal act. But the closing moments are entirely fitting: despite everything that has gone on before, two people make a connection. It’s a satisfying conclusion; my only disappointment is that I yearn for more.

Barry Cryer Same Time Tomorrow, by Bob Cryer

This is a lovely, funny and often moving biography of the comedian Barry Cryer (1935-2022) written by his youngest son. Each chapter is preceded by one of Cryer’s well-worn jokes, which I could easily hear in his distinctive, warm gravel tones. There are more great jokes peppered through the text, as well of bits of showbiz history and gossip. 

There are, too, some shocking moments such as the time Cryer tried to end his own life and was saved by his neighbour Douglas Camfield — then assistant floor manager on TV shows such as Garry Halliday and later a celebrated director on Doctor Who and other drama. But really this is a history of a hardworking, professional writer and performer plugging away at his trade as the entertainment world changed around him.

In early 1961, while still relatively green, Cryer and his friend Ted Dicks (no relation to Terrance, though their credits sometimes get muddled up) began writing for revue show This is Your Night Life. The show was headed by Danny La Rue, who we’re told described himself as a “female impersonator” rather than “drag artist”, and it was performed at Winston’s nightclub in London where La Rue had been in residence for some years. 

“Shows usually started at 12.45 am, meaning they often finished around 3 am. Almost all the performers, including Danny, had jobs in other West End shows and came to Winston’s afterwards” (p. 108)

The cast of This is Your Night Life included Terry Donovan, who Cryer married in 1962. Their son describes them cycling from their home in Maida Vale to rehearsals for Danny La Rue during the day. Terry would then cycle to her evening show in the West End and her husband would be off to a stand-up gig at the Players’ Theatre. They’d then head to Winston’s for 11 pm for their next performance, get home in the not-so-small hours and then do it all again, night after night after night. It’s exhausting and thrilling and mad. You can smell the cigarette smoke and tiredness.

Cryer Jnr says his dad was an almost perfect match for revue shows of this kind, given the OED’s definition of revue as “a light theatrical entertainment consisting of a series of short sketches, songs, and dances, typically dealing satirically with topical issues.” The fit was almost perfect because, “to my knowledge Strictly Come Dancing never called” (p. 78). 

To Cryer Jnr, that’s because revue matched his father’s love of “professional amateurism”, that mix of spontaneity and chaos where it seems as if the wheels might come off at any moment. I know exactly what he means, having grown up on Cryer Snr’s work with Kenny Everett on TV and hearing him on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on the radio. In fact, Cryer Jnr is good on why the late-night revue show on stage morphed into the panel show on radio and TV.

“The Theatres Act of 1968 meant that the Lord Chamberlain no longer had the power to censor the West End and a new kind of liberated and more confrontational voice was now being heard. Innuendo, that great staple of cabaret and Danny’s nightclub shows, not to mention one of Dad’s great weapons (if you pardon the, ahem, innuendo), was now seen as quite quaint.” (p. 174) 

The panel show, and Kenny Everett, allowed the informal, wheels-coming-off to continue in new guise.

Given Cryer Snr’s prolific career, of the many shows in different media mentioned in the book there’s a single, brief reference on p. 182 to Better Late…, a revue show broadcast over nine weeks on BBC Radio 4 in the summer of 1970, filling the gap while Any Answers? was on holiday. 

By Cryer Jnr’s reckoning of revue shows as given above, that mean it was a bit quaint, though BBC audience research reports from the time suggests that listeners were still uncomfortable — even outraged — to hear politicians being very lightly mocked.

Cryer didn’t write for the series; he was one of the performers led by Peter Reeves. Reeves also co-wrote the scripts with his friend Terrance Dicks — NB not, this time, Ted.

So, here’s some of what I can add about this long-forgotten revue show:

Better Late… was a kind of summer holiday for Terrance, who’d just completed work as script editor on Jon Pertwee’s first series as Doctor Who — the final episode of closing story Inferno, directed by Douglas Camfield (and, uncredited, by Barry Letts) was recorded on 29 May and went out on 20 June. Terrance duly commissioned scripts for the next series of Doctor Who and must have co-written this revue show while waiting for those scripts to come in. 

On Tuesday 7 July, Robert Holmes delivered his scripts for what was then called The Spray of Death, the debut story of Doctor Who’s 1971 series. The following day, Reeves, Cryer, Elizabeth Morgan and Bill Wallis, with producer John Dyas and I assume co-writer Terrance, rehearsed the first episode of Better Late… ahead of recording in the Paris studio at BBC Broadcasting House that evening, accompanied by the Max Harris Group and announcer David Dunhill. The show went out at 7.30 pm the following evening.

The pattern was basically the same for the next eight weeks.

Sadly, Better Late… no longer survives in audio form but the scripts are (mostly) held by the BBC’s Written Archives Centre. Since the revue show was topical, a lot of the material must have been written the week of recording and transmission, and skips in page numbering on surviving script pages suggests that a lot more material was written than used. The scripts also include many handwritten rewrites — refinements and rephrasings, whole jokes added or cut, the swapping of roles between performers. The sense is of a lot of work, right up to the last possible moment.

Terrance formally accepted draft scripts from Don Houghton for what was then called The Pandora Machine — the second story of the 1971 run of Doctor Who — on 2 September, the same day he was in rehearsals on the ninth and final episode of Better Late… The following week, finished on Better Late..., he completed edits on the scripts for The Spray of Death so it could go into production, received a storyline from Malcolm Hulke for the third story in the run, and commissioned Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write scripts for the fourth story.

So, he finished work on the 1970 series of Doctor Who, which had been something of an ordeal, plunged into this demanding radio series and then went straight back to Doctor Who. Exhausting, thrilling, mad! 

Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks

“In this, the first adventure of his third ‘incarnation’, DOCTOR WHO, Liz Shaw, and the Brigadier grapple with the nightmarish invasion of the AUTONS — living, giant-sized plastic-modelled ‘humans’ with no hair and sightless eyes; waxwork replicas and tailors’ dummies whose murderous behaviour is directed by the NESTENE CONSCIOUSNESS — a malignant, squid-like monster of cosmic proportions and indescribably hideous appearance.”

John Grindrod’s excellent talk at the Target Book Club event last month made me revisit the blurb on the back of this novelisation, the first* of more than 200 books by Terrance Dicks, originally published simultaneously in hardback and paperback on 17 January 1974. That blurb, a single, thrilling sentence chock full of adjectives, was probably written by commissioning editor Richard Henwood.

Heywood’s brilliant instincts for what would appeal directly to his readership of 11-14 year-olds also included changing the titles of stories to focus on the monsters. The TV story Spearhead from Space thus became Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion. 

Published on the same day was Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of his own TV story, Doctor Who and the Silurians. This already had a monster-focused title but “Silurian” is a technical word referring to a specific period of geological time. Henwood went for something simpler and more vivid, a title to immediately conjure a mental image: Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (with hyphen). The cover, by Chris Achilleos, promises monsters plural: a T-rex and a Silurian.

Of course, these new titles also fitted with those of the first three Target novelisations, published on 2 May 1973 and all reissued versions of books originally published in the 1960s. Two were originally published with snappy, simple titles focused on the antagonists: Doctor Who and the Zarbi and Doctor Who and the Crusaders. Henwood changed Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks to Doctor Who and the Daleks to match (though only on the front cover; it retains its original title inside).

As John Grindrod pointed out in his talk, these three Target reissues were published as part of the wider “Target Adventure Series”. The inside cover of each lists the other two Doctor Who books and also a non-Doctor Who adventure story called The Nightmare Rally. Written by Pierre Castex, this was again a reissue of a book originally published in the 1960s, which the new cover proclaimed was “Now an exciting Walt Disney film, Diamonds on Wheels”; the reissue was published ahead of the film being released in cinemas later that year.

Also listed as part of the Target Adventure Series in these first Doctor Who books was a non-fiction title, Wings of Glory — written by Graeme Cook and about the history of war in the air. Another non-fiction title, None but the Valiant, about war at sea, was,

“to be published in Target Books, September 1973”.

Note that there was no mention here of further Doctor Who books as “in preparation” — a feature of later Doctor Who novelisations. Henwood had written to the BBC on 3 November 1972 expressing a wish to novelise further Doctor Who stories beyond the three reissues but it seems he and the team at Target waited to see how those sold before formally committing to more.

They sold extremely well: The Target Book by David J Howe with Tim Neal, which is essential reading on this stuff, estimates an initial print run of 20,000 copies per title, a reprint within six months (October/November 1973), and again three months later (January/February 1974). One of the books, Doctor Who and the Daleks, reached no. 6 in the WH Smith top 10 on 20 July 1973. 

By this point, with the books clearly a success, six new Doctor Who titles had been commissioned. As well as Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, there were to be novelisations of the following TV stories:

• Day of the Daleks (published as Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks on 18 March 1974)
• Colony in Space (published as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon by Malcolm Hulke the same day)
• The Daemons (published as Doctor Who and the Daemons by Barry Letts on 17 October 1974)
• The Sea Devils (published as Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, with hyphen, by Malcolm Hulke the same day)

At this stage, Mac Hulke was the backbone of the Target range, writing half of the new books — all based on his own TV serials. To begin with, all his books were to be renamed with punchier titles: Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils was originally going to be put out as Doctor Who and the Sea-Monsters (as per the “in preparation” list in the first editions of Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon). The changed title and hyphen were surely to help indicate that this was a direct sequel to Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters. 

My guess is that the title was changed back to Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils following the last-minute decision to repeat the omnibus version of The Sea Devils on TV on 27 May 1974, a few months ahead of publication. Perhaps it was also to ensure the title matched the list of all Doctor Who TV serials given in the Radio Times special marking 10 years of Doctor Who, published in November 1973. Another title listed as “in preparation” in March 1974, Doctor Who and the Yeti, was also changed back to its TV title and published as Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen.

However, before Target abandoned this policy of changing titles to make them more simple, vivid and monster-focused, this approach seems to have had a profound effect on Hulke and others working on the TV show. On 2 July 1973 — around the same time that these first six new novelisations were confirmed — Hulke was also commissioned to write the scripts for a new six-part Doctor Who story on TV called Timescoop. By early August, that name had been changed to Invasion of the Dinosaurs. TV story Death to the Daleks, commissioned the same day, already had this kind of title but Return to Peladon, commissioned on 12 July from writer Brian Hayles, became The Monster of Peladon (Hayles was also soon commissioned by Target to novelise his first Peladon story). 

Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts had originally planned to end the 1974 TV series of Doctor Who by killing off the Master, as played by Roger Delgado, in a story to be called The Final Game. When Delgado died and then star Jon Pertwee decided to leave Doctor Who, the finale became a story to kill-off the Third Doctor, now with a monster-focused title: Planet of the Spiders. In the following season of TV adventures, the titles of all but one story — The Ark in Space — include the name of the monster.

The books introduced other stuff that found its way into the TV show, too. The Making of Doctor Who (1972) by Hulke and Dicks revealed that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart’s first name is “Alastair”. This fact is given again in Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, published months before studio recording of the name’s first use on screen in Part One of Planet of the Spiders.

Then there’s this, from the climax of the Auton invasion book, as one of the monstrous shop-window dummies is caught in the blast of a grenade.

“An Auton arm blown clear from the body continued to lash wildly around the room, spitting energy bolts like a demented snake.” (p. 146)

It’s surely the inspiration for what happens in the TV episode Rose (2005).

(ETA clever Nicholas Pegg points out what goes through the mind of the policeman facing, in the novelisation, the Auton invasion of Oxford Street:

"Students, he thought vaguely. They'd gone too far this time. That thought was also his last." (p. 134)

Rose's response to encountering the Autons for the first time, in a department store in "central London", is that they must be students...)

I’ve much more to say about what Terrance does and doesn’t do in his first novelisation, but I’ll save it for my forthcoming biography of him...

* Terrance was credited as co-writer of The Making of Doctor Who (Piccolo, 1972), but Mac Hulke did the bulk - probably all - of the actual writing, and took 75% of the royalties. "The Auton Invasion was the first book of any kind I'd written," Terrance told the authors of the Target Book (p. 19). Years later, he alone carried out the rewrites on the updated edition of The Making of..., published by Target in 1976, but reused some of the material originally written by Hulke.

Further reading:

• Me on Terrance's next book, Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks
• Richard Benson, "Mark Gatiss, the boy that Dr Who books made", in the Bee - this new interview includes the influence on Mark of Spearhead from Space on TV and Terrance's novelisation of The Three Doctors
• Matthew Michael on Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
• Jim Sangster on Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
• More by me on Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who Magazine #620

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today and includes After Image by me, in which I look again at recent TV episodes Lucky Day, The Story & the Engine, The Interstellar Song Contest, Wish World and The Reality War.

I, in turn, get reviewed, with Jamie Lenman casting his critical eye over Smith and Sullivan: Reunited, of which I wrote one episode. He says Blood Type is "complex and nuanced", which is nice.

There are lots of other goodies this issue, not least Gary Gillatt's lovely piece about the war service of the actors who played the first three Doctors Who. 

Anyway. I'm on deadlines so must dash. Will write up notes on some recent books read and post them here asap.

Stone & Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch

This is the tenth full-length novel in the Rivers of London series about a London copper who is also a wizard, and it is a delight. I bought it for the Dr when she was feeling a bit low and it worked its magic.

Peter Grant and his extended family are in Scotland on holiday and to look into alleged sightings of a huge panther - or, melanistic leopard to be precise. As well as liaising with the local police to investigate this “weird bollocks”, Peter must also wrangle his parents, his toddler twins, his river goddess partner, and apprentice Abigail — who tells half of this story herself.

It’s smart and funny, and kept be guessing to the end. As always, I’m in awe of Ben’s ability to create such a vast range of rich characters, and how he grounds the fantastic elements in the mundane. The details — from the stone which built Aberdeen to the differences in police procedure and legislation once you cross the Border, are exemplary. I’ve been learning lots about scuba diving over the last year (as the Lord of Chaos is doing a course in it) and so found the threat at the end particularly tense. 

There are loads of nerdy references, the Doctor Who ones including Daleks (p. 26), Peter’s explanation of his job,

“I deal with the odd, the unexplained, anything on earth…” (p. 108).

and what might be a reference to one of Ben’s own Doctor Who stories, in using the word “obstreperous” (p. 153). I wonder, too, if there’s an echo of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils by Malcolm Hulke in some of what goes on here.

It’s fun to pick up on this stuff and the other nerdery (such as Abigail working out the physics of mermaids). And it’s fun following character’s personal lives — the impact on Peter of being a dad, the love lives of Abigail and of Indigo the fox, the hints we get about Dr Abdul Walid’s early, wild years.

So many detectives have terrible personal lives and rub people up the wrong way. Peter is a charmer (literally!) and peacemaker, and it makes him and his world very engaging company. 

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
• The Masquerades of Spring

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

I first read this an age ago, before I had children or that much knowledge of autism. It's been a strange thing to revisit now I have more experience. 

This audio version is largely narrated by Ben Tibber as 15 year-old protagonist Christopher Boone from Swindon, but with a full cast playing the other characters. That works very well. We see (or hear) events as Christopher understands them. He has an eye for and takes satisfaction in detail, and we often get raw, unembellished facts, whether about his own anxieties and bodily functions or grown-ups' sex lives, swearing and violence. 

His hyper-focus on particular things - prime numbers, colours, smells - and his bluntness are often funny. I've seen some readers object to this, feeling that we are led to laugh at Christopher. But I think something else is going on; we laugh because we understand the way he sees the world. It comes about through empathy.

That, I think, plays off against the more disturbing stuff. The world is a scary place. A whole load of things terrify Christopher (noises, strangers, things that are brown) and sometimes leave him unable to speak (except to us). There are also a whole load of things that he doesn't quite comprehend - but we do as readers. 

Reading the book again now, what strikes me is how many of the characters are cross, impatient, at the end of their tether and sometimes downright cruel. That's in direct contrast to us as readers, comprehending of and amused by this boy. We embrace the ways he thinks differently; they just lose their tempers.

Christopher can certainly be exasperating and exhausting, and the grown-ups are fallible, flawed people. There are things here I recognised as the parent of an autistic child. But the over-riding sense, I think, is one of sadness because Christopher is not exactly surrounded by kindness. There's a lot of chaos and argument (which I can empathise with) but not a lot of joy. As a result, I think we judge his parents, his neighbours, his teachers, the police... The empathy for him is not extended to them. And I think that's an an issue given that some of their bad behaviour is rather contrived.

I keep picking over a key element of the plot. As Christopher determinedly investigates the murder of his neighbour's dog, he unravels an audacious falsehood that has been told to him and others for some time. Yes, I can see how Christopher would be duped because he takes what he's told at face value. But that doesn't apply to anyone else: have they really not questioned or checked what has been said about something so fundamental? When the lie is exposed, is there no consequence for the liar? The school, the police, the neighbours... no one seems very bothered.

At the end, Christopher seems liberated by a number of things that have happened over the course of the story: his schoolwork, his trip to London, his unravelling of the mystery. He's written this account - this book - and feels he can achieve anything. I'd like to believe so but I'm not sure surviving an ordeal is the same as learning from it. What will he and those around him do differently to avoid another crisis, or deal with it better when it comes?

But I'm not sure if that's a criticism of the book or a sign of how much it got under my skin.

Earthrise, by Robert Poole

I read an earlier version of this book more than a decade ago as prep for The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, and it's never really left my imagination. Poole, who is emeritus professor of history at the University of Central Lancashire (where I was an undergraduate, though I don't think we've ever met) recounts how the space programme affected our sense of ourselves by focusing on the famous "Earthrise" photograph, snapped by William Anders on Christmas Eve, 1968 while on Apollo 8 - the first crewed mission to the Moon.

To place this in context, we begin with the history of conceptions of what the Earth would look like seen from space from before we could take pictures from orbit. The same characteristics recur in old pictures and descriptions: the prominence of landmasses, the lack of cloud, the theory that there would be blinding glare from reflected sunlight in the sea. As I said in Scientific Secrets, we're familiar with this kind of vision of the Earth in the logo of Universal Pictures, with rich green and brown land forms dominant over oceans of deep blue. A fixed shape and structures with no sign of change other than the globe slowly turns.

Instead, with Earthrise and subsequent images, we now know a bright, white-blue world with swirling, active clouds. No two pictures of the Earth from space are ever the same because those clouds are constantly moving, and - as Poole delineates - because the planet is in flux. More of that in a moment.

Before getting to Earthrise, Poole details the efforts to get the first cameras into space, and the perhaps greater challenge of doing something counter-intuitive and pointing them back towards the Earth. The politics or scientific merit of that is just one issue. Poole also explains the complex physical and chemical processes involved in ensuring a camera can survive spaceflight, and a picture can be taken and developed - in the days before digital - and then communicated back to Earth's surface. Thanks to him, a blurry, streaked image of cloud becomes an object of wonder when we understand how miraculous it was to capture any image at all.

How fascinating to learn that there is no consensus on the first photograph to show the curvature of the Earth. As Poole says, the round Earth was known to the ancients. It's an observable phenomenon by watching boats on the sea: masts appear first over the horizon, then the hulls, rather than the whole boat appearing at once in the distance as it would if the sea were flat. I remember standing at Logan's Rock in Cornwall as a kid, looking down on the seaward horizon, and holding up a ruler to better see the curve of that line of sea. Are there really no early photographs of such vistas?

According to Poole, though, "the first photograph clearly to show the curvature of the Earth" (p. 34) was taken by the aeronauts on board Explorer II on 11 November 1935, which launched from the "Stratobowl" in the Black Hills of South Dakota and reached an altitude of 13.6 miles (22 km). The photograph they took was published in National Geographic the following year.

Another notable early effort was took place on 24 October 1946, when a V-2 rocket launched from the army's White Sands proving ground in New Mexico was fitted with a 35mm movie camera. The resulting images, from some 65 miles up, made the papers and newsreels. 

I thought this might be the footage used in the opening moments of The Quatermass Experiment (1953), but checking Toby Hadoke's book reveals this was from a later V-2 launched at the same site on 17 February 1950 (see Hadoke, p. 133).

A set of photographs taken by a V-2 camera on 26 July 1948 were stitched together to create two panoramas of the curving Earth, released to the press on 19 October. Poole says that this, "was accepted in the press and the archives as 'man's first view of the curvature of the Earth', an official position it has held ever since" (p. 37). But, as he continues, the fact that there's any doubt at all is evidence that these different images, for all they were published to some acclaim, didn't quite catch on as later images did.

Various factors explain why the Earthrise image had the impact it did. It's a good quality, high resolution image, for one thing, which reproduces well. While there's no "up" or "down" in space, it's usually presented with the lunar landscape in the lower part of the frame, creation a boggling inversion of our usual view of the Moon in the sky above our own horizon. There's also the juxtaposition of the bright, coloured Earth with its whirling, active cloud and the grey, desolate Moon. 

But Apollo 8 as a whole made people sit up and take notice. As James Burke recalled in Our Man on the Moon, suddenly people realised, "Hey, they're really going to land on the Moon!" Burke was swiftly told to swot up on rocket science so that he could present the BBC coverage. So I think Earthrise was also emblematic of the Moon landings becoming, well, real.

Poole then charts the impact that Earthrise had on Earth, galvanising the environmental and ecological movements and having a direct influence on the first Earth Day, held in 1970, and conceptions of Earth as either spaceship or mother-Gaia. This is the stuff I really remember from reading this last time and - as I argued in Scientific Secrets - is all over the Doctor Who of this period. In fact, the first Doctor Who story shown after the Moon landing, and ushering in a new era of the series, begins with a view of the whole Earth from space, the first to appear in the series, and in colour, too. That's made me think about the mechanics of replication: how much the impact of Earthrise owes to good quality colour print in newspaper supplements and magazines, and the spread of colour TV.  

All in all, this book presents a fascinating, wide-reaching history, full of tenacious characters, not all of them heroes. I didn't know, for example, that Fred Hoyle was an anti-environmentalist who even accused Friends of the Earth of operating on behalf of "their Russian paymasters" to deprive the west of energy (p. 4); he had to withdraw the allegation. 

It's a self-published book, and there are typos and artefacts littered through the text. Perhaps a judicious editor might also have questioned the description of those suggesting that the Moon landings might have been faked as "fuckwit denialism" (p. 76) - though I can imagine other science writers putting it in similar terms. Really, all I mean is that this compelling book deserves another, more polished edition, perhaps including colour plates of the images under discussion.

Last time, what hit me about this book was the way leaving Earth - and looking back at what we left - transformed our sense of and relationship to our planet. That's still here, updated to include William Shatner's response to his own real-life trek into orbit in 2021. He was profoundly moved, and saddened, by the fragility of Earth in a universe of cold, dark nothing. What hits me reading this edition is the same profound sense of loss. The images of Earth from space taken since Earthrise show the damage we have inflicted in the intervening years: the melting ice caps, the loss of vegetation on vast scales, the ferocity of the weather we once never even thought of in our conceptualisations of Earth.

"Humankind now appears to be both the product and the custodian of the only island of intelligent life in the universe that we will ever encounter. Whether that vision has been timely enough, and powerful enough, for homo sapiens, the most successful of all invasive species, to reverse its own devouring impact on the Earth, will be known soon. Perhaps we know already." (p. 177)

More space stuff by me:

• Carrying the Fire, the autobiography of astronaut Michael Collins 
• On 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon
• Moondust, by Andrew Smith
• Apollo, by Fitch, Baker and Collins
• Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
• Ad Astra, by Dallas Campbell
• My trip to Kennedy Space Center
• On Yuri Gagarin's autograph in Croydon

The New Forest Murders, by Matthew Sweet

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

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

"It really exists." (p. 125)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke

This comprehensive plunge into the sci-fi horror TV serial from 1953 has been a joy to read. I should declare right away that it’s written by my mate, with whom I’ve just made a documentary for the forthcoming deluxe Blu-ray of the film version of the same story, out next month. But then the reason Toby fronts the documentary is that he’s the go-to guy for this stuff.

The book is him sharing what he knows, the facts gleaned from decades of research and some shrewd deductions, plus his analysis based on long years of consideration. I especially like how good he is at probing sources: he says when he thinks an anecdote has been embellished; he also says when he isn’t sure what to conclude.

There’s lots of factual information here that I didn’t know and there are lots of fresh insights that open up this old TV show. It’s also very engaging — for example in Toby’s increasing exasperation with the Daily Mail’s TV journalist of the time, Peter Black. (By chance, I once gave Toby a copy of Black’s book, The Mirror in the Corner; I wonder what he made of it.) 

The serial was broadcast live in six episodes. The first two episodes were recorded and survive; the rest went out once and were then lost to the ether. What hadn’t occurred to me before I read Toby’s book is that at least some of episodes 3 to 6 were recorded — even if those recordings have now been lost. They each featured a small amount of pre-filmed material, detailed by Toby. It also seems that producer Rudolph Cartier filmed a little of each instalment up to episode 5 to act as a “trailer” or story-so-far at the start of the subsequent episode (pp. 168-9). 

The chances of this material having survived are next to zero, but sometimes — just sometimes — this kind of thing turns up. 

Indeed, Toby has turned up a load of archive material never seen before, including a roll of film from studio rehearsals on episodes 1 to 5, the images in very good condition and presented beautifully here. Reader, I have pored over these thrilling, vivid glimpses of what is otherwise lost to us. I should also like an illustrated version of the script - or even a whole comic strip - done by Robert Hack, whose artwork features here.

Toby has also gathered a wealth of sources to tell a detailed story. What we learn is set nicely in context — how this serial compared to other TV productions of the time, how people watched and engaged with it, and where it sits in the history of science-fiction and horror. Much is made of the fact that nothing like this had been seen on television preciously. That meant I was struck by the line at the end of Episode 1, when a reporter responds to the sight of astronaut Victor Caroon emerging from his rocket,

“That suit they wear, it is like the comic magazines after all,” (p. 70).

That is surely a reference to the Eagle and Dan Dare, pilot of the future, who dons a kind of diving gear in space. His comic strip adventures launched in 1950 but he perfectly exemplifies the kind of “New Elizabethan” hero referred to and then undercut in the serial. Quatermass is, I think, a kind of anti-Dan Dare.

Later, Toby notes that in L’esperimento Quatermass (Mondadori, 1978) — an Italian translation of the script book of the serial — a small change was made to the spoof, 3D sci-fi film playing in the cinema visited by Victor. 

“The Space Girl (Ragazza Spaziale) doesn’t call the Lieutenant ‘Chuck’ as in the UK version, but ‘Jim’,” (p. 269).

That’s a random change, I thought. Unless it’s a reference to the well-known Jim Kirk from Star Trek, updating the allusion to (what was seen as) a contemporary example of hokey sci-fi.

Toby is especially good at keeping the focus on the people involved, the contributions made by cast and crew to both the original production and recounting how it was made. A last section, detailing what they all went on to do after Quatermass, is compelling — like the serial itself, Toby gives them a last bow.

But what I was most taken by, I think, was what the leading man — the first Quatermass — brought to the role in particular.

Toby tells us that Reginald Tate made his TV debut in March 1937, which was less than six months after the start of the BBC’s regular TV service. He appeared in an exact from the stage version of Jane Eyre in which he was appearing at the time in London’s West End. Tate played Mr Rochester, a role he’d had since the stage production began in Malvern the previous year. Toby tells us he played Rochester again on stage in Leeds in 1946 (p. 65) and on TV in 1948 (p. 66). He then performed as Rochester once more, for BBC Radio, at the same time as he was in production on The Quatermass Experiment. He told the Evening Standard at the time that, 

“The transition [between the two roles] is not very great. The two seem to have characters in common” (p. 70).

Toby describes Quatermass as a troubled, guilt-ridden figure, trying to put right what he got terribly wrong — in this case, sending three men into space to devastating effect that now imperils the whole Earth. I don’t think writer Nigel Kneale had any thought of Mr Rochester when he wrote it; but that’s what Tate brought to his performance.

It’s another example of how the leading man of this new kind of TV drama — a pilot of the future, in his own way — is anchored in the past. The ideas are new but the emotional heft of the serial is an echo from the past…

• Buy The Quatermass Experiment, by Toby Hadoke, from Ten Acre Films

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.

Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also:

• Me on The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Death at the White Hart, by Chris Chibnall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Martian Conspiracy, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Hello from the island of Rhodes, where we are having a short break, retreading the footsteps that the Dr and I took 25 years ago on our first ever holiday together, and also tracing the path of Mary and Charles Newton, the artist and archaeologist who were here in 1863, as detailed in the Dr's exhibition.

I shall post a bit more about what we've been up to but the weather has been odd. We left bright, warm sunshine in Macclesfield (!) to find it grey and rainy here. It's raining again as I write this but he sun has been out pretty solidly, if often accompanied by an icy breeze. The guy serving us in the nice restaurant we went to last night pointed out the snow-topped mountains across the water in Turkey. Until a couple of years ago, he said, that would have been unthinkable in April. Now it seems to be normal, and the locals and the tourist trade are adjusting.

That chimes with this 'ere book that I bought specially for the holiday, the fourth instalment in the Lady Astronaut series I have avidly followed from the start (see my posts on The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon). In the first of these, in 1952, a meteor strikes Earth and obliterates Washington DC. In this new book, we've reached 1970 where there is ever more evidence of massive, devastating change to the climate as a direct result of the blast and all the material thrown into the atmosphere. A powerful lobby tries to downplay the evidence and just continue as before.

This is all in the background as the new novel is set on Mars - and in Martian orbit - with the now 48 year-old Dr Elma York and her husband Nathanial part of the crew working to establish the first permanent settlement in time for more arrivals.

A lot of the story here is about the logistics of the operation - the priority list of tasks that need doing, ensuring people get fed when there are limited resources. There are also the interpersonal politics of lots of gifted, ambitious people from different countries and cultures. Elma must navigate one character's odd, awkward sense of humour, another's preferred pronouns and the objections of some fellow crewmembers to being referred to as "colonists" given the precedent set on Earth. There are competing egos, and the issue of how much independence they all have from their supposed line of command back home - if Earth even is home any more.

There's also an ongoing mystery about what exactly happened on the First Expedition to Mars, involving some of the people Elma lives and works with who really don't want to talk about it. As Elma worries at that, there are plenty of new challenges: her period is late, then a change of leadership on Earth wants all  female crewmembers to leave the Martian surface, then there's a serious incident that risks lots of people's lives...

It's largely another engaging, emotional and thrilling read. What a delight to be back in Elma's company again and catch up with her various friends and colleagues. I was fascinated, too, by the notes at the end explaining what the fiction owes to fact, in both real space history and ideas about future missions to Mars.

It's interesting, too, to revisit this alternate history of the space programme in the light of the TV series For All Mankind, which does a number of similar things, such as giving real people from our own timeline more to do in space. I think the big difference is that the Martian residents here comprise a lot of married, heterosexual couples. In all the discussions of birth control and non-penetrative sex due to limited numbers of condoms, there's very little about what crewmembers might get up to if they're not married or don't have their spouse with them in space. What if someone is gay or has an extra-martial hook-up? The crew are diverse but the sex, apparently, isn't. 

Now, Elma - who narrates the story and provides our frame of reference - admits to being a bit naive about some stuff relating to sex. Indeed, her advice to other couples turns out to be medically wrong and causes something of a crisis. So the absence - the blindness - is in character for the narrator. I can also see it being addressed in subsequent instalments, as more and more people reach Mars. 

At least, I hope it is. Because with Earth facing catastrophe, it's not just a question of who is deemed fit - and by who - to go to Mars. It's about who gets to have a future.

Cinema Limbo: Observe and Report

I'm the guest on the latest Cinema Limbo podcast, this time - for my many sins - to discuss the 2009 black comedy Observe and Report, starring Seth Rogen and Ray Liotta. 

Spoiler: this is not exactly my cup of tea.

• Cinema Limbo: Observe and Report (2009)

You can also listen to the previous episodes I've been on:

• Cinema Limbo: The Last Wave (1977)
• Cinema Limbo: Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984)
• Cinema Limbo: The Wicker Man (2006)
• Cinema Limbo: Smoke (1995)
• Cinema Limbo: King Kong (1976)
• Cinema Limbo: Ryan's Daughter (1970)
• Cinema Limbo: Highlander II - The Quickening (1991)

Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand

"'If this were a detective story, he'd be the murderer for a certainty, though,' said Barnes. 'They always pick on the benevolent elderly gent, because you'll never think it could be him!'

'Ah, but nowadays they're more subtle; they know that the reader's wise to that trick and the older and more benevolent a character is, the more he'll be suspected.'

'Perhaps it's gone all the way round and come back full cycle,' suggested Barnes, laughing; 'and elderly gents and paralytics in bath chairs are suspects number one all over again because the reader doesn't think the author would be so obvious. Anyway, this isn't a detective story, and it certainly wasn't old Moon.'

'So that leaves you and me and the three girls,' said Eden, grinning sardonically. 'A charming alternative.'" (p. 216)

My good friend Father Christmas added this to my Mum's stocking based on the blurb, thinking it a suitable present for a former nurse who likes a murder mystery. My Mum's first reaction was, "Oh, I knew her." In 1971-72, my late Dad was a joint junior registrar at Mount Vernon and Middlesex hospitals, working under Brand's husband, the surgeon Roland Lewis.

First published in 1944, Green for Danger involves victims of air raids in 1943 being brought into a military hospital in Kent, where someone bumps off a number of patients and staff. A film version was released in 1946, directed by Sidney Gilliat and starring Alistair Sim as Inspector Cockrill, with action moved forward a year to 1944 and the V-1 offensive, presumably for greater cinematic impact.

The book begins with postman Joseph Higgins pushing his old, red bicycle towards the new Heron's Park hospital to deliver seven letters. They're all from new members of staff and we get a quick glimpse of each character before being told that one of them will, a year later, murder this poor postman.

In Chapter II, we jump forward a year and are quickly caught up in the bustling, bantering hospital on the night of an air raid. The local ARP centre and a pub have been hit, so lots of patients are coming in, wounded and grimy and scared. At the same time, we get more details of stuff going on under the surface - the staff's love affairs and unrequited passions, their terror of the air raids, the people they've already lost. 

Higgins is brought in with a fractured femur, the sole survivor of the ARP Centre. The doctors decide to operate. Higgins and his wife are both nervous but are assured it's a routine procedure. In he goes to theatre, our seven suspects all on duty. By the end of Chapter III he is dead.

At first it seems that no one is to blame - sometimes these things just happen in theatre. Inspector Cockrill is called in as a matter of routine. But he starts to suspect that something more sinister has gone on and then someone else is murdered...

It all moves along breathlessly and the different characters are well drawn, with some suspenseful moments such as when another man goes into theatre with the same suspects on duty, plus the Inspector watching them. The air raids and murder make for a tense setting anyway, and there's something a bit naughty in the staff's complex romantic intrigues, their efforts to solve the mystery for themselves and the games they play with the police officers assigned to watch them. 

Cockrill deduces who the killer is fairly early on but requires more evidence before he can confront them, which is effectively a challenge to the reader to work out what he has spotted from the clues given so far. On more than one occasion, things don't go as he expects - putting lives in danger.

Brand keeps us guessing skilfully. There are some fantastic twists at we rattle towards the conclusion - one section ends with a character springing forward to attack and we think they are the killer exposed. In the next, brief section, the Inspector intercedes to stop this person and then arrests someone else. "Oh, it's them!" we respond to the sudden attack. And then, almost immediately, "Oh, no, it's them!"

In the closing chapter, the survivors compare notes and look towards the future. There are still further twists in the tale. One character seems to be proposing to another - and then it's clear that they aren't. The other character, hopes dashed, 

"stuck our her chin, made a little joke, and nobody knew there was anything wrong at all." (p. 255)

We leave them, laughing and talking, for all we are haunted by the trouble we know lies just under the surface.