Written by Terrance Dicks book launch, 25 November

The Portico Library in Manchester will host the launch of my new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, on the evening of 25 November. I'll be in conversation with Portico Library trustee Esther Lisk-Carew from Manchester Metropolitan University, discussing Terrance's life and career.

• Buy tickets for Written by Terrance Dicks: Book Launch with Simon Guerrier

As well as his prolific contribution to Doctor Who and the 235 books he published, Terrance was also script editor and producer of the BBC's classic serials in the 1980s. At the event, the Portico Library will display some first editions of some of the books he saw dramatised, including Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist. 

I'll also be at Target Book Club in London on 24 October. More events and details relating to the book, including how to pre-order it, to follow soon. You can already pre-order my novelisation The Six Doctors and Steve Cole's novelisation of The Vampire Mutation, both based on papers I uncovered in the course of researching the biography.

(Yes, 25 November is the anniversary of the UK broadcast of The Five Doctors.)

Star Trek 4, by James Blish

Star Trek is 60 years-old today, sort of. Over the weekend of 1-5 September 1966, its pilot episode The Menagerie was shown to attendees of the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio — says p. 93 of this book. The series proper began with The Man Trap, broadcast on CTV in Canada on 6 September and on NBC in the US two days later. It wasn’t shown in the UK for almost another three years.

Anyway, this fourth anthology of prose versions of TV episodes was published in the US in July 1971 and issued in the UK in October, price 25p (the first Star Trek book in New Pence). It was the last of five Star Trek books available in the UK prior to 8 March 1972, the date on which Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks wrote to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, asking (among other things) for the return of the Star Trek books he’d loaned them. So, this is my final post on the subject of the influence of these books on Doctor Who of that period.

(For more of this stuff see my posts on Blish’s Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and the original novel Spock Must Die!, plus my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49 and my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks...)

The cover of Star Trek 4 looks very different from previous books, with artwork depicting the USS Enterprise in space, between two pale blue worlds. For the first time, there’s no artwork or photograph of the main characters — I wonder if, like with the later Doctor Who novelisations, there were issues over fees owed to actors. As with the previous volume, this is “all new award-winning” Star Trek, though that “new” is a little ingenuous: the adventures here were all broadcast on TV at least three years previously.

The book is dedicated “To Donna Woodman and the other new English Star Trek fans”, the author having now settled in the UK and, through these books, found himself the locus of an active fandom determined to see Star Trek resurrected. In his preface, Blish says he receives a lot of letters from fans and uses them to decide which stories to adapt next — suggesting he had free choice, rather than having it imposed by the publisher or rights-holder. 

He tells us that The Menagerie, adapted in this volume, won the prestigious Hugo award in 1967 and City on the Edge of Forever (adapted in Star Trek 2) won in 1968, but that the subsequent cancellation of the series meant there was nothing to nominate for the award in 1970. This is not entirely honest. For one thing, it misses out the 1969 awards entirely, where no Star Trek episodes were nominated. Technically, Star Trek could have been nominated in 1970 — any of the the 11 new episodes first broadcast in 1969 would have been eligible. But for two years running, it seems, the series was on air but not considered good enough by science-fiction fans.

Production on Star Trek ended in 1969, so Blish was faced with a limited number of episodes to choose from for these books, and an even more limited number of good episodes. But he’d also by this point committed to double the number of these books: 

“As matters stand now, there will be at least four more, all within the next year or so” (p. ix).

That may explain why there are just six episodes in this book, so as not to burn through the fuel. But I think it also explains the peculiar choice of first story.

All Our Yesterdays involves yet another time travel portal, on this occasion dumping our heroes back in a superstitious period. Spock gets emotional and snogs a woman because, we learn, he is 10,000 years back in time and that's what Vulcans were like back then — as if the psychology of his people, even on a far distant world, is contagious. There’s no effort to suggest that the same is true of humans. Anyway, the basic wheeze is that Kirk, with his technological gizmos, is accused of witchcraft. There’s a bit of running about. It’s not very good.

The Devil in the Dark is much better. It’s set on the planet Janus — not Janus VI as on TV — which is rich in the element pergium, atomic number 358. Mining operations for this precious resource are halted by a “big and kind of shaggy monster” (p. 23) that kills an engineer. There are references to new sci-fi material teflon (p. 24 and p. 26), a recent real-life invention of the space age, and Kirk is surprised that people here still use old-fashioned technology like fission (p. 27), because the Enterprise gets its energy from antimatter (p. 25). There’s no mention of teflon, fission or antimatter in the TV episodes, so this sci-fi materials stuff must all come from Blish.

At one heroic moment, Kirk says, “I feel the need for a conference” (p. 29), meaning a planning meeting to decide the next move. I tend to think of sci-fi business meetings round a table, all Walter Citrine in space, as a characteristic of The Next Generation, so this early version caught my attention. But “conference” is also the word Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts used for their meetings with writers to discuss potential storylines, scene breakdowns and scripts. I’ve seen no evidence of the term being used on Doctor Who before this, so the intriguing thought is they took the word from Kirk to make their natters about plot logic sound a bit more dynamic…

If that’s a bit fanciful, elements of this episode were surely a direct influence on them. The plot, involving the last survivor of an intelligent alien species attacking human miners, only for us to realise the alien is quite nice, surely helped to shape The Curse of Peladon (1972). You can almost hear Spock addressing the Third Doctor in one exchange (though he’s really addressing McCoy):

“No creature is monstrous in its own environment, Doctor. And this one appears to be Intelligent, as well.” (p. 29)

I’ve previously argued that the influence of Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror on Doctor Who story Inferno (1970) must have been via the book rather than the TV episode, given relative dates they were available in the UK. Here, the opposite must be true: scripts for The Curse of Peladon were commissioned on 14 May 1971, after a storyline conference between Dicks, Letts and writer Brian Hayles on 1 March — months before this book was issued in the UK. But The Devil in the Dark was broadcast on BBC One at 17.15 on Saturday 6 September 1969 and repeated on 17 March 1971, the latter just as the plot for The Curse of Peladon was being worked out. So, it was the repeat that influenced Doctor Who.

Hayles said himself that he drew on Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with attacks by a mythical creature revealed to be a hoax. Yet his Doctor Who story is much closer to what happens with the Horta here. The whole feel of the Doctor Who story, with a sci-fi trip to a civilisation that feels if not ancient than medieval may mean All Our Yesterdays was also an influence.

Both TV episode and book version of The Devil in the Dark reveal the Horta to be a silicon-based life form, which may have influenced Baker and Martin’s later Doctor Who story The Hand of Fear (1976). Blish thought beyond the surface of this creature, and tells us it has teflon-like internal tubing — a stone on the outside but with circulatory system of molten plastic.

Spock sets out his case for not killing the creature even before he’s learned its soft centre:

“If this is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.”

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

“Spock in particular was sometimes inclined to hold his fire when his conservation instincts, or his scientific curiosity, were aroused” (p. 34).

He supports his friend, but is bemused by this hippy/ecowarrior/woke sensibility. I would argue thaty this sensibility is very much in line with the Third Doctor — and a new development compared to previous incarnations. I contend that this Star Trek influenced both the character of the Third Doctor and the adventures he had.

Blish describes something quite different to the blobby creature seen on screen:

“It was huge, shaggy, multicolored, and knobbly with objects which might have been heads, sense organs, hands” (p. 37).

The shagginess is much more like Aggedor in The Curse of Peladon, so perhaps the book informed the design of that story — which went into production after this book was available in the UK. 

The TV episode and the book both reveal the simplistic way in which the Horta communicates with humans: “No Kill” it says (p. 39). Blish suggests in the altar and chamber something of the creature’s culture (p. 40). I think this inspired more than stuff in Doctor Who; amaze amaze, there’s quite a bit of the Horta in Rocky in Project Hail Mary.

In treating the wounded stone creature, McCoy uses thermoconcrete — a fun gag — and gets to use the first iteration of his, “I’m a doctor” catchphrase; in this case, he is not a bricklayer (p. 41). At the end of the story, the Horta and its progeny agree to help the humans with their mining. Spock says the agreement is logical, but I can’t think what’s in it for these indigenous creatures as their world is plundered.

That, I think, is where The Curse of Peladon is notably different from Star Trek. Doctor Who of this period is much more ambivalent about the virtues of the Federation and Earth Empire, which Terrance acknowledged quite openly:

“You can’t just do a kind of old imperial story whereby the galactic federation is coming to Peladon and is bringing the simplistic natives the benefits of civilisation, like Sanders of Africa bringing law and order to Africa. This isn’t how people think any more, even with a family adventure serial. We are all well aware now that what happens when an advanced [people] meet a primitive [one] is not always to the benefit of the primitives.” — Terrance interviewed by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado for Doctor Who — The Unfolding Text (1983), p. 53.

The next story in the book, Journey to Babel, begins with Dr McCoy asking Spock for a demonstration of the Vulcan salute, which we’re told is “complex” and that McCoy cannot reproduce, making it sound more like the flourish of Arnold J Rimmer in Red Dwarf than the familiar split-fingers thing. Again, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen to miss something so well known. 

The concern about such protocol is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy are welcoming aboard a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. Kirk knows this Sarek is 102 years-old, but not that he is Spock’s dad. The awkwardness that follows is surely because Kirk has been badly briefed; I reckon by AI.

There’s some fun stuff about Spock’s people, such as that a Vulcan teddy bear, a sehlat, is alive and has six-inch fangs (p. 51). (No, even I think it’s going too far to suggest that that could have been an influence on the troll doll in Terror of the Autons.)

Sarek is one of a number of delegates squabbling over whether to allow planet Coridan to join the Federation. The issue is that, 

“Coridans have a nearly unlimited wealth of dilithium crystals, but are underpopulated and unprotected. This invites illegal mining operations.” (p. 52)

Of course, the Federation is acting entirely altruistically and it’s just one heck of a coincidence that its fleet of starships run on exactly these crystals. One delegate, a Tellarite, is then murdered and we must work out the culprit. That is all very The Curse of Peladon, though Journey to Babel was first broadcast in the UK on Monday, 22 June 1970, a month after scripts had been commissioned for that Doctor Who story.

There are some notable details here: McCoy can give Kirk orders; Spock trusts McCoy, “to McCoy’s obvious startlement” (p. 58); and Spock insists on observing protocol even if means doing so at the expense of his own father (p. 59). Spock’s relationship with his father doesn’t seem logical in the slightest, but hush, you’re spoiling the story.

At the end, Spock exposes the real villains — smugglers from Orion trying to cause chaos and play off both sides (p. 66). There’s something of that in The Curse of Peladon and another Doctor Who story, Frontier in Space (1973), though I think the latter owes more to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). In fact, I wonder if that film inspired elements of this Star Trek.

The Menagerie begins with a 15-line footnote explaining that Blish felt it too confusing to adapt the broadcast version, which added lots of new material involving Kirk etc to the untransmitted pilot episode which had Spock under the command of a different captain. Instead of all the dramatic business of Spock-now facing court martial, Blish simply adapted the script of the pilot, in the process restoring the original ending not seen on broadcast. 

Reading it now, with these episodes readily available to watch or rewatch, that means the adaptation offers intriguing details about the original conception and development of this key story. But I can a Star Trek fan of the time feeling a bit short-changed to lose half the TV story — including all the “proper” bits of Star Trek, such as Kirk, McCoy etc. Our relationship to the book is different when it is the only permanent record of ephemeral TV.

Blish says that The Menagerie was the only two-part Star Trek story of the orignal run because the producers didn’t feel it worked. That is odd because it works very well, I think. Indeed, some of my favourite moments of later iterations of Star Trek are its cliffhangers.

The story begins in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s maiden battle, somewhere around Rigel VIII, with Spock still limping from whatever was involved (p. 69). Blish underlines how remarkable it is that Pike doesn't think twice about leaving the Enterprise in the command of Number One — a woman. She is,

“Slim and dark in a Nile Valley sort of way, she was one of those women who always look the same between the ages of twenty and fifty, but she had a mind like the proverbial steel trap, and Pike have never seen her shaken in any situation” (p. 70).

But Blish doesn’t think — or have the authority — to provide her with a name. (In the TV series Strange New Worlds, the character’s name is Una, which is a nice play on “number one” but also in rightful homage to my pal Una McCormack, and surely the coolest thing ever to happen to a TV tie-in writer.)

Blish refers to the “dematerialization of the Transporter” (p. 72). This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The TARDIS is said to “dematerialise” (or it is “dematerialising” or has “dematerialised”) in dialogue used in TV stories The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers (1965), The Daleks Master Plan (1965-66) and The Smugglers (1966). My guess is that that was the influence of story editor Dennis Spooner, picked up by his immediate successor Donald Tosh. But the word then fell by the wayside.

But then the term was picked up again by Terrance Dicks in exactly the period of Doctor Who that I think was influenced a lot by Star Trek. Not only does the TARDIS dematerialise, it boasts a dematerialisation circuit. In that sense, the word is used in dialogue in Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos and Colony In Space (1971), Day of the Daleks and The Time Monster (1972), The Three Doctors (1972-73), The Green Death (1973) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974).

That can’t come from this book, which was published after those 1971 episodes. But perhaps Terrance took the word “dematerialise” from the Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow, where Scotty uses it to refer to the transporter. That episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 August 1970, just as scripts for Terror of the Autons were being finalised. Yes, yes, it’s a stretch, but I’m rather delighted by the thought that such a potent word in Doctor Who might have been pinched from the opposition.

Whatever the case, the fantasy realm Captain Pike encounters here is described as, “almost like that of an Oriental potentate” (p. 84); the latest example in these books of Oriental to mean “alien but sexy". There seems a genuine risk that Pike might give up Star Fleet and go with these fantasy slave traders, even before, “Pike saw another girl, nude, her skin green” (p. 85) which tempts him further. This is Vina, her name surely taken from Weena in The Time Machine by HG Wells. Like Pike, she seems quite keen on the fantasy, protesting, “No, let us finish” (p. 86) when it threatens to stop.

At the end of the story, Pike escapes the fantasy world and Vina, but his experience affects how this captain, in charge of a crew of competent people not judged by their sex, now views some members of his crew:

“Pike could not resist stealing a quick look from Number One to [Yeoman] Colt, wondering which of them, in other circumstances, he might have picked.”

Nicely, Blish ends with a twist on this, empowering the two women:

“When he found them both looking at him as if with the same speculation, he turned his eyes determinedly to the viewscreen and banished the thought” (p. 93).

In his afterword, Blish notes that it was decided that this dynamic of captain and two potential love interests would not sustain many episodes of the TV show so it was abandoned. In other changes, he says, Number One was demoted and became Lt Uhura, Colt became Janice Rand, medical officer Boyce becames McCoy, and Tyler became Sulu.

“The net effect was to make the new officers more interracial than before” (p. 94).

He concludes that he sometimes gets letters criticising his adaptations for being different to those as broadcast — presumably from fans with audio recordings of the episodes. He says, “I had to make my own judgment of what would best serve the authors’ intents”, showing fidelity to what was in their heads, if not what they typed.

Next up is The Enterprise Incident, the first adaptation in these books of a third season episode, in which Kirk is working under sealed orders that seem irrational. To keep the secret, he plays up to being “irritable and snappish” as if fatigued (p. 95), to the extent that when Spock questions his behaviour, Kirk responds, “you pointy-eared turncoat” (p. 104).

All of this is because the Federation are sending Kirk on a secret mission to meet a Romulan Commander, an otherwise unnamed woman Kirk thinks, “beautiful, aristocratic, compelling” (p. 99). Like Vina, she soon slips out of her clothes:

“Compared to her appearance in uniform, she seemed now to be wearing hardly anything, although this was in part an illusion of contrast” (p. 109).

We’re also told that, “Vulcans were cyclical in their mating customs, and immune to sexual attraction at all times” (p. 115). That’s clearly not true of the half-human Spock here, who is interested in the Commander.

We learn Spock has been in Starfleet for 18 years (p. 104). He kills Kirk again (p. 107) — a fact spoiled by the Radio Times listing for this episode: Spock “is eventually forced to eliminate his commander with the Vulcan death grip!” (Radio Times #2498, 25 September 1971). I can see why that description would make the casual viewer want to tune in.

The Enterprise achieves Warp Nine while shrouded by the Romulan cloaking device (p. 114), a piece of technology that seems to work very well and is extremely useful; the Enterprise never uses it again. Likewise, the Romulan Commander is a striking woman with a connection to Spock — just the sort of character deserving of a rematch. We don’t see her again, either.

Finally, there’s A Piece of the Action, involving a cargo cult based on Chicago gangsters — and on a particular book, Mobs of the Twenties published in New York in 1993 (p. 121). It’s a fun idea for a story from the 1960s adapted for prose in the early 70s to hinge on a text from the near future but about the past, seized upon by an even more distant future.

In the TV episode, Kirk makes up a card game he says is played on Beta Antares IV. Blish adds that Antares is, in fact, not a double star — so this is Kirk being clever (and certainly not wrong about basic astronomy), saying something his friends will know to be false as a kind of signal to them (p. 124).

Blish also adds a reference to “klee-et”, which he explains is a Vulcan word meaning “prepare to engage”, and refers us in a footnote to the episode Amok Time in Star Trek Three (p. 124, yes spelling out the ordinal) — the first time a footnote appears in these books of adaptations of episodes, having been used a lot in original novel Spock Must Die!

Again, the morality here is a bit suss, Kirk using a show of force from the Enterprise to put down the gangsters. Basically, the Federation is a bigger hoodlum than they are. But I’m struck by a notable absence in these four books: apart from Errand of Mercy in Star Trek 2, they’ve avoided all the TV episodes that work as analogies for the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. At university 30 years ago, I read with great interest H Bruce Franklin’s “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” in Science-Fiction Studies vol 21, no 1 (March 1994), pp. 24-34, which demonstrates how select episodes of Star Trek reveal changing attitudes to the real-life conflict. Was there an active choice made not to adapt the stories that touched on contemporary geo-politics? Again, I’m curious who decided or imposed the episodes to be adapted.

As a permanent record of the TV episodes, these books must have had a formative influence on early Star Trek fandom in the US and the UK. I wonder how much they influenced a sense of the “best” episodes, or most worthy ones, filtered by the selection process and Blish’s own prejudice as an active member of the community at the World Science Fiction Convention. How much did he impose on fans?

I think this stuff was hugely influential on Doctor Who — both on TV and and on its own nascent fandom. Doctor Who surely took the idea of the Doctor as diplomat from Star Trek. He’s got his own elegant way of fighting — CTRL+F “Vulcan neck-pinch”, CTRL+R “Venusian aikido”. But the Doctor doesn’t kill his best friend the Brigadier, let alone kill him twice. And there’s nothing about the Doctor having alien hormones or a previously unmentioned wife. At least not for the time being.

My abiding thought is how much these breezy adaptations of TV episodes must have influenced Terrance Dicks’s approach to the novelisations of Doctor Who, and even the fact that such books existed at all. Star Trek 5 by James Blish was published in the US in February 1972 and issued in the UK in June that year. Thereafter, Corgi published UK editions of the Star Trek books by Blish. That was surely a vote of confidence in a market for such titles, even with no new Star Trek being made on TV. That must have helped support the case for a new line of Doctor Who novelisations launched by Target in 1973.

I shall return to those Doctor Who novelisations in due course, with a long post picking up where I left off. Coming soon: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters…

The Mystery of the Missing Diamond, by Terrance Dicks

First published in July 1982, this 56-page novel began a trilogy that Terrance Dicks wrote for Pepper Press, whose children’s editor, Brenda Gardner, he’d previously worked with on the Target Doctor Who books. Gardner went on to set up her own company, Piccadilly Press, for which Terrance wrote more than 100 books, including more adventures for Oliver and his friends. The seventh and last in the series, Gupta’s Christmas, was published in September 1985.

In 1986, Gardner told the Bookseller that she thought the Ask Oliver books were suitable for children up to the age of 10, and were a response to Terrance not being able to find suitable reading for his own youngest son — also called Oliver. Gardner’s responses in that interview are really interesting on why the books Terrance wrote for her appealed to young readers, and how unusual it was for someone to write for this particular age group:

“It’s important for children of this age who have begun to read to have books which they can actually finish … That’s a very great achievement for a child—actually to be able to say, I’ve read a whole book.”

“I think children who are grappling with early reading find it easier if they can go on to other books with a character already formed in their minds.”

“Writers are often not attracted to write for this age range simply because it isn’t as prestigious as fiction for older children. There’s no kudos in it, really; there are no major awards for books for this age range, for example.” — Tony Bradman, “Problems for the five to eights”, Bookseller, 15 March 1986, pp. 1066-67.

Ask Oliver has a similar set-up to Terrance’s already established and ongoing range of Baker Street Irregulars books for slightly older readers, published by Blackie & Son (where the publishing director who got Terrance involved was Richard Henwood, also ex of Target). As with the first of that series, The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, this first case involves a theft from a local amenity (there an old house open to the public, here a museum) which four local kids investigate because they want to be like Sherlock Holmes. 

What’s different is that the adventures of the Baker Street Irregulars are narrated by Rob, the leader of the gang and the one who is a fan of the Holmes stories. Here, the gang is led by proactive Pete, it’s cheerful Gupta who knows his Holmes, and Oliver is “the youngest and smallest of Pete’s gang”, as the back-cover blurb puts it. As with the Baker Street Irregulars, there is also a Girl One, in this case Vicky, “a quiet, rather serious girl” (p. 6).

Oliver is small, quiet and often overlooked. 

“He didn't talk much but he thought a lot. Oliver noticed things.” (p. 6)

This made me think of Bill Roach, the bullied schoolboy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy whose watchfulness is spotted by Jim Prideaux. But I think the plot here owes much more to Beau Geste (1924) by PC Wren; as this book was published, Douglas Camfield was busy directing a TV version of Beau Geste, broadcast later in the year. Terrance was script editor.

Like Beau Geste, the plot here involves the theft of a diamond where we're invited to guess who took it, but in fact the real mystery is revealed to be something else. Here, the diamond was “given” (p. 10) to the present museum owner’s great grandfather by an Indian sultan — which may be an homage to the classic Holmes adventures The Sign of the Four (1890). (The TV version of Beau Geste followed the TV version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, also script edited by Terrance, so I think this stuff was all in his head.)

The children get involved because the disappearance of the diamond leads to the police taking in museum attendant Mr Morrison. His previous kindness to the children means that they — and therefore we — think he must be innocent. But Oliver observes what the others have not: that Morrison wasn't arrested (p. 16).

There’s some typically Terrance stuff in the use of food: “doughnuts are very consoling in times of trouble” (p. 14). It’s a shame Vicky’s usefulness to the plot involves her pretending to be younger than she is, and ditzy, and threatening to blub, to get a hotel clerk to share the information the gang needs (p. 28). Cornered by adults, Gupta tries to bluff his way out by pretending to be the son of a sultan (p. 35). It’s a bit… at best, cliched and simplistic.

Facing further peril, Vicky won’t hide with boys in the toilets — “she didn’t think it would be proper, even for a detective” (p. 39). That feels a little too much like a 50-something male writer safely at home at his keyboard, and not what a real girl facing danger would say. Terrance often writes bolshier female characters, sometimes a bit over-zealous and wreckless in their efforts to be just as good as the boys. This feels a bit less rich.

For all that, it’s a fast-moving, twisty and ingenious story. As with The Casing of the Missing Masterpiece, our heroes circumvent genre cliches by going to the police, and are concerned by what their parents will think — so it all feels grounded in the real. The story is broken up by lots of illustrations by Valerie Littlewood, and is divided up into five chapters. 

The penultimate chapter even lists clues we should go back and check for, with hints to help us solve the case. We’re an active participant as reader. The blurb asks, “Can you guess who did it before Oliver”, promising that, “Clues are given in the story to help you solve the mystery” — and encouraging young readers to play along. 

In fact the revelation is that this is a why rather than who dunnit. 

“If no one could work out how it had been stolen, no one would worry about what had been stolen. The theft somehow made the diamond look real.” (p. 53).

Effectively, it turns the game we’re playing isn’t the one we initially thought. I’d have loved that as a kid, and eagerly moved on to the gang’s next adventure…

I’ve written lots more posts on the 235 books by Terrance Dicks. My biography Written by Terrance Dicks will be published soon.

Star Trek 3, by James Blish

This third volume of breezy adaptations in prose of Star Trek episodes was first published in the US in April 1969, by which point the TV series had been cancelled. It was issued in the UK in August of that year, with a sticker saying “3/6”, just weeks after the series began broadcast on Saturday teatimes in what was usually the Doctor Who slot. I read it, along with Star Trek, Star Trek 2 and the original novel Spock Must Die! earlier this year as research for my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks, and I’ve also written a piece on the cross-pollination of these two series, “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49.

The cover takes the same format as Star Trek 2, though with a black background rather than white. Whereas that previous book featured a photo of two leading members of the cast, this has three — presumably to match the title. The three leads of the series here are Kirk, Spock and Uhura, making the latter a selling point. Indeed, the first interior page lists the main characters as Kirk, Uhura and Spock, in that order, and describes her thus:

“Lt. Uhura—Unbelievably beautiful, she is the most popular member of the Enterprise crew and also one of the most brilliant scan engineers around.”

The front cover notes Star Trek is now “award-winning” and promises “mind-reeling” and “eerie excursions into galaxies of probability”, and the back cover promises journeys into “the supernatural”. I’m not sure there are galaxies, plural, or forays into the supernatural. There’s a lot of cod psychology of various kinds, including Spock getting horny.

Blish’s preface, written in 1968, addresses the “award-winning” claim on the cover. First, he explains for the lay reader the annual “World Convention” of science-fiction fans — admitting that, at the time he wrote this, it had only been held outside the US on one occasion — and Worldcon’s Hugo awards for best sci-fi of the previous year. The Star Trek episode The Menagerie was nominated for “best dramatic presentation” in 1967, and in 1968 all four of nominees were from Star Trek; City on the Edge of Forever won. However, Blish adapted that story in Star Trek 2 (using elements from the draft script that didn’t make it to the screen), so this new volume presents the three other nominees — The Trouble with Tribbles, The Doomsday Machine and Amok Time. 

Oddly, he doesn’t include The Menagerie here (it’s in Star Trek 4, about which more anon). And though Blish notes that City on the Edge of Forever also won an award voted for by TV writers (a Writers Guild of America award for “best episodic drama on television; the episode The Return of the Archons was also nominated), it’s the accolade from the science-fiction fans that he clearly thinks most worthy of note. That’s despite feeling that, “s-f fandom and Star Trek fandom do not seem to overlap very much, certainly by no more than 10 per cent” (p. viii).

Blish goes on to say that he’d received more mail about his two Star Trek books than for the rest of his writing career (27 novels over 20 years, including a Hugo award winner), and then answers a number of frequently asked questions — no, he can’t supply photographs of or access to the actors; yes, there is a book about The Making of Star Trek and yes, he is writing an original Star Trek novel. From this, we get a nebulous sense of early Star Trek fandom, casual viewers hungry for information and communion.

The first story in the book is The Trouble with Tribbles from the script by David Gerrold, which got its own book in 1973. Blish starts by telling us that we don’t know where tribbles originate from, describing what they look like — “a cross between an Angora cat and a beanbag” (p. 1) — and that they are harmless. He underlines that point, setting up the harm to come.

The story twice mentions the Organian treaty with the Klingons from a previous on-screen adventure, Errand of Mercy, which is as per the TV episode. That episode was included in Star Trek 2 but there’s no footnote back to it as there would be from Spock Must Die! onwards. Indeed, I think Blish introduced footnotes with that novel to give his own, original story a sense of authenticity. Perhaps the references to the treaty here prompted him to revisit it in the novel. 

Then there’s stuff not in the TV episode. On screen, early on, Kirk asks under what authority Nilz Baris has put a whole quadrant on defence alert, and is told Baris is Federation Undersecretary in Charge of Agricultural Affairs. “That gives him the authority,” says Spock, on screen. But in the book, Kirk counters that it is, “A position with no military standing of which I am aware” (p. 3) — suggesting that Kirk and the Enterprise are part of the military. As per the original version of the script, the book version features Koloth, the Klingon from Errand of Mercy. That may mean Blish was working from draft scripts.

Other than that, the adaptation has Spock remark on an unusual monicker — “His name is Cyrano Jones, of all things” (p. 9) — which seems oddly out of character (who is he to judge?). And there’s an odd bit of character work:

“Uhura had never shown the faintest sign of sentimentality before, but [with the pet tribble] she seemed to be far gone in gooiness” (p. 7).

Not for the first time, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen when he wrote this.

Next up is The Last Gunfight, the TV episode Spectre of the Gun, in which our heroes find themselves in Tombstone on 26 October 1881, taking the place of the real-life notorious gunfighters — by coincidence, something that also happens in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters (1966). 

Perhaps there is some direct crossover between this episode of Star Trek and Doctor Who. I wonder if the idea here, of god-like beings who intend to execute a person by putting them in a fantasy world drawn from their own memories, influenced Bob Baker and Dave Martin when they conceived Deathworld, the initial idea that became The Three Doctors (1972-73). Blish says the events are drawn from Kirk’s “ancestral memories—archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious” (p. 25), a concept not used on screen (but an element in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)). He also adds a reference to the events of City on the Edge of Forever (p. 26), again without a footnote, and tells us McCoy hails from Atlanta (p. 28).

When Chekov is apparently killed, Kirk finds his science officer’s cold response hard to take, thinking that he’ll “never get used to Spock’s hidden emotional life” (p. 31). Spock, out of character, refers to McCoy as “Bones” (p. 34), and adopts a Scottish accent to achieve rapport with Scott, “his voice suddenly taking on a dark, Caledonian color, as deep as that of a prophet’s” (p. 35). (Do prophets have dark, deep voices?) It’s an example of Spock’s psychological knowledge of, and love for, his various human shipmates, which earns the following response from Kirk — again not heard on screen:

“Privately, and for no other ears than yours, I think you are a sentimental bag of mush” (p. 37).

The Doomsday Machine features Brand, not Matt, Decker — I assume some relative of the Will Decker in the first Star Trek movie. The story involves an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy whole planets, but we’ve already had a story, Operation — Annihilate! in Star Trek 2, in which the Enterprise could itself do that. I think this story must have influenced the Doctor Who adventure Colony in Space (1971), about an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy a whole star, not least because it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon.

Scotty’s fluctuating accent is acknowledged here; we’re told he gets more Scottish when things are serious (p. 50) — in Spock Must Die! it is a sign of him being under stress. It’s also interesting that when Kirk is teleported, the room he was in, “faded around him” (p. 51) — we see it from his perspective, something rarely done on screen.

Assignment Earth begins with references to Kirk’s two previous experiences of time travel (in City on the Edge of Forever and Tomorrow is Yesterday, both in Star Trek 2). The plot involves the Enterprise travelling back from the 23rd century to Earth in 1969 to prevent Gary Seven and his cat from sending a rocket off course — the implication being to start a war. That was surely an influence on what became Day of the Daleks (1972), in which guerrillas from the 22nd century travel back to c. 1980 to blow up a man they think responsible for starting a war. In both cases, the action taken to prevent catastrophe is what causes it. I wonder, too, if the description here of the incongruous Gary — “a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit” had an influence on the appearance of the Time Lord at the beginning of Terror of the Autons (1971).

On the same lines, I wonder if Mirror Mirror inspired some of The Curse of Peladon (1972), as it involves a storm stranding the Enterprise landing party on a planet that has firmly declined an invitation to join the Federation. The storm affects the teleport, sending Kirk to “another dimensional plane” (p. 71), where he meets alternative versions of his friends, including a bearded Spock, living in a tyrannical regime. As I argue in my piece for DWM, this was surely an influence on the Doctor Who story Inferno (1970), and script editor Terrance Dicks must have taken the idea from this prose adaptation because the TV episode Mirror Mirror wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the summer of 1970, when Inferno was in the midst of being shown.

McCoy refers here to Spock as “Spocko” (p. 82) and Kirk says of Uhura “Good girl” (p. 76) — neither of them in the TV episode. I was taken by Kirk referring to one of his alternative counterparts as “Mr Pseudo-Sulu”, and describing Pseudo-Chekov’s “lubricious expression” on seeing Uhura (both p. 79) — a rare bit of Blish enjoying the kind of well-chosen words that feature in novelisations by Terrance Dicks. He tells us the Enterprise is a “fifty billion credit starship” (p. 75) and adds some psychology:

“Evidently this universe had never discovered that men pay more attention to a machine when its voice is feminine” (p. 74). 

Friday’s Child is another story about a planet with valuable mineral deposits the Federation is keen to get its mitts on for the indigenous people’s own good. Blish gives us a history of Ceres, then explains that it’s not the dwarf planet (he calls it an asteroid) of the same name in the Solar System. The people of Ceres seem primitive but are descendants of space-travelling humans from Earth, so must have regressed in just a few generations.

There’s a fair bit of male gaze here — a meal is “served by a most scantily clad Cerean girl of whom it was impossible not to be aware” (pp. 87-88). McCoy also refers to “basic humanoid stock” and “genetic drift" (p. 95), what with being an old racist. As well as English, he speaks Vulcan, Old High Martian, medical Latin, Greek, Fortran and Vegan (p. 91). 

The story here is all about a woman, Eleen, who doesn’t want to care for her new baby, due to various things that have been going on. The Enterprise crew are surprisingly judgmental and unsympathetic. “We intend to keep both you and your baby alive, whether you want it or not,” McCoy tells her (p. 94). Kirk tells her, just as sternly, that she is required to look after the child because of her traditions, which he’ll “enforce … if I have to” (p. 99). Ick.

The book concludes with Amok Time, which begins with Spock throwing soup at Nurse Chapel (in the TV episode he just declines it). His quarters are, says Blish, “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental”, while his reading screen shows an image of “the head of a very young girl, no more than a child” (p. 106) — who turns out, thankfully, to be a grown-up he’s known since childhood. As per the TV episode, his request for shore leave has been declined, but he’s not revealed the medical condition that would surely justify his workplace making reasonable adjustments. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the Next Generation, where the Enterprise has office managers.

Blish tells us that Spock’s normal pulse rate is 240 bpm and he has non-existent blood pressure and green blood (p. 107), information not featured in this TV episode but taken from The Naked Time. As I say in my DWM piece, I think the first UK broadcast of that episode, on 19 July 1969, inspired the lines in Spearhead from Space about the Doctor’s own pulse rate, though it may have been taken from this book. Kirk assumes that Vulcans breed “eugenically” (p. 106), and I realise that Pon-farr, as described (p. 109) is basically periods for men. 

The arena on Vulcan is described as being like Stonehenge (p. 110); I wonder if that’s the result of Blish having recently moved to the UK. As per the TV episode, we’re told T’Pau is the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council, though it’s not clear why. Spock’s childhood pal T’Pring, “no child now”, is still referred to as a “girl” (p. 111). T’Pau sets out the stakes of the duel to follow in much more on-the-nose language than broadcast:

“Are you prepared to become the property of the victor? Not merely his wife, but his chattel, with no other rights or status?” (p. 112)

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

Then Kirk and Spock fight to the death. Oddly, Blish chooses to narrate this from Kirk’s perspective, which undercuts the tension — and the “death” of Kirk on screen. Instead, we have Kirk listening to Spock’s remorse at having killed him.

Still, killing Kirk seems to end Spock’s manic sex drive, like some kind of sexual release. I also wonder how the Vulcans will react when they learn Kirk has survived the ordeal: wouldn’t they demand a rematch? It all ends happily and a cured, unsexed-up Spock praises Nurse Chapel’s “very good plomik soup” (p. 117), providing closure. The Enterprise heads off to further adventures…

Doctor Who Magazine #633

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts some exciting news: my novelisation Doctor Who - The Six Doctors will be published on 21 January, followed by Steve Cole's novelisation Doctor Who - The Vampire Mutation on 4 March. Both are based on newly discovered paperwork in the archives of the late Terrance Dicks, which I worked my way through last year. I say a little about that in the news story, and will have more to share in due course.

I've also written another Who Connections feature for the mag, this time using the song "As Time Goes By" as my starting point, inspired by something my friend Matthew Sweet told me. And Paul Cornell has kindly written in to add some extra facts to my previous Who Connections piece, on Star Trek.

Here is some publicity bits related to The Six Doctors and The Vampire Mutation:

Doctor Who Magazine #632

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and features another Who Connections piece by me, this time on Star Trek (pp. 44-49), examining how and when it first influenced Doctor Who and when, exactly, Doctor Who then influenced Star Trek. For this, I spoke to Star Trek books writers Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier.

If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.

The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.

I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.

Talk on David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks

The talk I gave on Doctor Who writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks for the York Festival of Ideas earlier this month is now up in full on YouTube for your delight:

The books mentioned at the end are my biography David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023), and my archive-investigating analyses of the Doctor Who stories The Evil of the Daleks and The Edge of Destruction for the Black Archive range. 

It is my 50th birthday today, so you should buy at least one of these.

My new biography, Written by Terrance Dicks, will be out later in the year. I am busy writing it right now.

Doctor Who quiz on YouTube

I'm one of the contenders on the debut episode of Gav Rymill's Doctor Who quiz, battling Ellie Collins, Benjamin Cook and Tim Missing-Episodes. You can enjoy it here and now:

The Case of the Missing Masterpiece, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by John Bolton

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

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

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

A Riot of Writers, by Terrance Dicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling

A fortnight ago, I was again at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre to undertake more research for my forthcoming biography of Terrance Dicks. Among the files I looked at were “RCONT22-617-1 Hall James Andew 1980-84” and “RCONT22-90-1 Baron Alexander 1980-84”, which provided some useful material on Terrance’s time as script editor of BBC-1’s Sunday tea-time Classic Serials.

Paperwork I saw at WAC shows that Terrance’s predecessor, Alistair Bell, was still in post as late as 21 May 1980, when he accepted the script for the first episode of Great Expectations, dramatised by James Andrew Hall. This acceptance meant Hall had the go-ahead to write the remaining scripts. Great Expectations was broadcast in 13 episodes between October and December 1981, with Terrance credited as script editor — his first credit on Classic Serials.

Meanwhile, producer Barry Letts commissioned his own dramatisation, Gulliver in Lilliput. As well as writing the scripts, Letts directed all four episodes, broadcast in January 1982.

That left Terrance to find a six-episode story to complete the 22-episode “season”. The earliest document I can find relating to his time as script editor is from his own archive of papers. On 2 June 1980, he wrote a to-do list in a notebook. He had to write The Cop Catchers (the latest novel involving the Baker Street Irregulars), then the novelisation Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon, then an outline for a never-published original novel. On the next page of the notebook, so on or after 2 June, he listed three potential Classic Serials: The War of the Worlds, “Edwin Drood — solved” and The 39 Steps. He clearly wanted to take the series in a more action-adventure direction.

After some back and forth over suitable, available choices, on 18 September Terrance formally commissioned his first Classic Serial: Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling, dramatised by Alexander Baron. He inherited Baron, who’d dramatised Sense & Sensibility for Bell earlier that same year, just the latest in a line of dramatisations and original plays. 

Terrance clearly got on with him: Baron dramatised several more classics for Terrance: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982); Jane Eyre (1983); Goodbye Mr Chips (1984); Oliver Twist (1985); and the 16-part epic Vanity Fair (1987), the penultimate Classic Serial. He also dramatised a six-part serial for Terrance where the scripts were accepted and Baron paid in full, but the production was then cancelled. More on this in my forthcoming book....

The choice of Stalky & Co at the start of their ongoing relationship is really interesting. It’s a book of stories about three naughty schoolboys at a minor public school in the mid to late 19th century, and not exactly in step with 1980, all punk, Grange Hill (1978-2008) and The Empire Strikes Back. My wife has been entranced by Baron’s later dramatisations for Terrance but this one left her utterly cold. There’s little to like about this cruel, privileged trio in their cruel, privileged world. There are almost no women in it at all. What was Terrance thinking?

Well, Terrance was a big fan of Kipling: as I’ve posted before, Kim was among his favourite books. But that is set in India and told on a huge scale. Stalky & Co was better suited to a TV budget, being set in England, with three principal characters and a smallish supporting cast. 

Perhaps this particular book also offered a twist on Grange Hill, which — as detailed in Box of Delights by Richard Marson — caused a storm of outrage by showing badly behaved school kids at an ordinary comprehensive. Stalky & Co presents badly behaved school kids at a posh, Victorian school, perhaps suggesting a legacy of hijinks, that this stuff is not new. I also wonder if, in 1980, Stalky & Co seemed relevant because of the Thatcher government, elected the previous year, being so full of public school old boys. In that sense, it offers a view of how those leaders, or their kind, were forged.

The stories certainly resonated with later generations of pupils at posh schools. My edition, published in 1950 by Macmillan, boasts a sticker saying it was bought for Brown's House Libray in 1951 and was surely read by students there given that it still included a bookmark of someone’s chemistry homework. I suspect the stories reminded Terrance of his own school, East Ham Grammar School for Boys, to which he gained entry as a working-class boy from East London — an outsider.

As detailed in Baron’s own memoir, he was also a a working-class boy from East London, who joined the Communist Party in his youth. I can see both dramatist and script editor being fascinated by the power dynamics, the anthopology, of this strange, elite world as conveyed in these stories. If so, I think they played that down in the TV version.

At least, I think that sense of anthropological study is more pronounced in the book. The nine stories were originally published separately in magazines, beginning with the two-part “Slaves of the Lamp” in consecutive issues of Cosmopolis: A Literary Review in April and May 1897. Part I involves three schoolboys (Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle), engaged in rehearsals for a school pantomime and getting their own back on a teacher who treats them severely. Part II is set decades later, when Beetle — now a man — hears of his former friend Stalky’s heroic exploits in India, turning the tables on his foes. The implication is that school, and the outwitting of rules and teachers, has been a training ground for the adventure of empire.

To this base, the book adds a further seven stories, all from the schoolboy period. Stalky, M’Turk and Beetle (the latter based on Kipling himself) get into various scrapes. In several episodes they enact a kind of justice or revenge. The man who accuses them of thieving is framed to look like a thief; the master who accuses them of trespass is framed to look like a trespasser; the rival House that accuses our heroes of stinking is made to stink. In one story, a teacher even engages the three boys to deal with a bully.

The boys smoke pipes and sneak alcoholic drinks. Their larks include spitting on wild rabbits, shooting and killing a cat, and stealing and pawning each other’s watches to spend the money on tuck. The sense is that this is all meant to be fun, and its based on close observation of real experience, but I didn’t warm to these boys very much.

Even so, it’s interesting how Baron — and Terrance and the team — approached the dramatisation. In surviving paperwork, Terrance implores Baron to stick as closely as possible to the book, and to Kipling’s original dialogue. Yet there are significant differences. For example, the first TV episode is based on “An Unsavoury Interlude”. In the book version, the three friends are out in the countryside one afternoon. Beetle leaves his friends, and M’Turk and Stalky decide to shoot a rabbit.

“Hi! There’s a bunny. No, it ain’t. It’s a cat, by Jove! You plug first.” (p. 75)

They then hide this cat in the rafters of a rival House, and over time it stinks out the place, making their rivals smell bad. Yet in the TV version, Beetle is with his two friends for the rabbit shoot and, being short-sighted, he shoots a cat by mistake. It’s the same nasty incident, but not so cruel.

The choice of stories to dramatise is also interesting. The TV serial adapted six of the nine stories in the book Stalky and Co, but BBC paperwork shows that rights were agreed — with Kipling’s work still in copyright — to three other stories about Stalky and his friends: “Regulus” (1917), “The United Idolators” (1924) and “The Propagation of Knowledge” (1926). None of these ended up on screen. 

Of the three stories skipped from the original book, “Slaves of the Lamp Part II” was obviously cut because it largely describes events in India, decades after the boys leave school, so would have entailed a different, older cast and expensive location filming. “The Impressionists”, set in the boys’ school days, includes a plot element where the boys lend money to their peers, and there are references to “Shylock” and other antisemitic phrases. I can see why Alexander Baron, born Alexander Bernstein, felt he could skip that story.

Then there’s “The Flag of the their Country”, which may have been skipped for being too polemic. Kipling clearly had something to say about patriotism and heroism, though perhaps not what we would expect. In the story, the local council is keen that the boys should drill (march, exercise etc) to prepare them for the army. Stalky ends up running drill as yet another dodge. The headmaster informs the council that the boys are drilling themselves, and word reaches one Raymond Martin MP, who is so impressed he turns up at the school to deliver a patriotic speech, full of platitudes and cliches. The room full of boys listens “in sour disgust”. To conclude, Martin shakes out a rolled-up Union Jack “and waited for the thunder of applause”. This is how the boys respond:

“They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before—down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, half-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte’s window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it; it was no part of the scheme of their lives; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eves? Happy thought! Perhaps he was drunk.” (p. 213)

The same story tells us that 80% of the boys in the school were born abroad, and 75% of them are sons of officers in one or other of the armed services, while other stories in the book underline that the boys are largely being readied for military or administrative work in the empire. In “A Little Prep”, which was adapted for TV, we’re told that nine old boys of the school have been killed in India in the past three years, which the current pupils take in their stride. A wounded old boy then visits the school and shares a story about encountering a classmate on the battlefield, where they exchanged their old nicknames:

“I never knew it was one of us till I was right on top of him. There are heaps of Duncans in the service, and of course the name didn’t remind me. He wasn’t changed at all hardly. He’d been shot through the lungs, poor old man, and he was pretty thirsty. I gave him a drink and sat down beside him, and—funny thing, too—he said, ‘Hullo, Toffee!’ and I said, ‘Hullo, Fat-Sow! hope you aren’t hurt,’ or something of the kind. But he died in a minute or two—never lifted his head off my knees.” (p. 178)

In the final story — or the first, in the order that Kipling wrote them — we learn that Beetle ends up getting apprenticed to a newspaper in India, M’Turk leaves school for “Cooper’s Hill”, aka the Royal Indian Engineering College, while Stalky goes to Sandhurst. India is, says Beetle, full of men like Stalky. The boys and their peers are the fuel of the British Empire, so their attitude to the flag is surprising. But it fits with the sentiment in “A Little Prep”, where the hero of the tale is not a soldier but one of the teachers, who puts themselves at risk, without seeking acknowledgement or thanks, to help one of the boys. That is Kipling’s point: Such selfless courage earns admiration; the flag gets nothing at all.

Was that sentiment too controversial, too punk, for a dramatisation in 1982? Perhaps they could have got away with it when the serial was first broadcast, from 31 January to 7 March. But less than a month later it would surely have been unthinkable, given the start of the Falklands War on 2 April.

So, I think Stalky & Co was a more potent, resonant book to dramatise at the time than may first appear. And I think we can see that in the subsequent books dramatised for BBC-1 Classic Serials with Terrance and script editor and producer. More on this to follow...

See also:

• My list of the 236 books published by Terrance Dicks, with links to my longer posts about them
• Me on The Jungle Book by Rudkyard Kipling