Doctor Who: The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage

The Tenth Doctor gets a story from the pen of Derek Landy, prolific scribe of the Skulduggery Pleasant series.

The Doctor and Martha materialise in a white void, but stepping from the TARDIS find themselves in the English countryside. Where are they really? Who are those precocious children? What are the strange lights in the trees? And what are the smugglers up to in the caves under the woods? More importantly, is anything what it seems to be?

Landy makes a fine fist of writing the Tenth Doctor at his best; slightly lost, racing through the landscape with a machine gun stutter of words and theories instead of striding like a lonely god, and captures both the spark and the tragedy of the relationship with Martha (which, it occurs to me, has some rather striking parallels with the relationship between the Joker and Harley Quinn; there's a sobering thought). The weird fictional world is incomplete, but fantastically realised in its incompleteness.

So, yeah; I like this one.

Sometime at the start of next week, I shall finish this series of reviews with relative veteran Neil Gaiman's Nothing O'Clock.

Doctor Who: The Beast of Babylon

Charlie Higson, author of the Young James Bond novels and veteran of The Fast Show, takes up the reins for the Ninth Doctor.

Technically set at the very end of Rose, between the TARDIS vanishing and returning seconds later to take Rose Tyler away, we find the Doctor chasing Starmen; godlike beings which feed on stars. Can he neutralise them before they destroy another world, and will his new companion, Ali, help or hinder.

Higson writes the Ninth Doctor well, but there is a hiccup in the simple story here. Ali is, although concealed at first via the medium and reader expectations, a giant scorpion-creature with poisonous stingers and deadly, scything claws. She is obnoxiously bright, but also possessed of an instinctive defensive rage, and kills several people in her efforts to protect the Doctor. Regardless of species predisposition, it is hard to accept that the Doctor would be as okay with this as presented here.

This is a shame, because the book is otherwise well-written and the adventure rattles along nicely. The idea of exploring the Doctor's singular preference for human companions is an interesting one, but not quite explored enough, especially given the amount of treatment that the more vexed question of companions who kill have received through Leela and her spiritual successors.

Doctor Who: Spore

Spore is the Eighth Doctor short story, written by Alex Scarrow of Timeriders fame. Again, I'm not especially familiar with his work, but I know the name.

The Eighth Doctor is a bit of a challenge, of course. He has two definitively canonical appearances, and one of those post-dates this book, and yet there is a wealth of deuterocanonical novels, comic strips and audio plays to muddy the waters. Scarrow opts to keep it simple, and the Doctor thus appears without a companion on this occasion.

A mysterious object has landed in Nevada, and now the entire area is going out of contact. The Doctor has a nasty suspicion that he knows what is going on, and there's an easy way to stop it. Unfortunately, the Planet Earth won't have that knowledge for about fifty years, and if he's right then it certainly doesn't have fifty years in which to find it.

Spore is a disaster movie with the Doctor in it, more than an invasion story, but Scarrow's limited hard science is actually better than in most such tales, covering aspects of quantum theory as well as the nature of von Neumman machines. The Doctor is pretty solidly portrayed, and has an good foil in the form of a plucky Army scientist, which is important.

Doctor Who: The Ripple Effect

Lucky Number Seven has his story penned by Malorie Blackman, author of the Noughts and Crosses series, so it should be no surprise that it tackles the subject of race and racism.

Escaping from a natural time hazard, the TARDIS is thrown down on a world called Skaro; home to the Daleks, the most civilised and peaceful race in the galaxy. Has something happened to change the nature of the Doctor's oldest enemies, or is this some nefarious scheme? And if something has changed, can the Doctor accept it?

Blackman chooses to play with alternate timelines in order to touch on the question of whether the Daleks are irredeemably evil, and if not, what that says about the Doctor, who can never believe in their redemption. The Seventh Doctor - mysterious, secretive, and himself somewhat sinister, yet at heart mired in the same self-doubt that kept the Fourth from wiping out the Daleks in their cradle - is a perfect foil for this.

The narrative is simple enough, and driven - as all the best Seventh Doctor stories are - by the dynamic of the relationship between the Doctor and Ace. Like a dark version of Troughton's cosmic clown, the Seventh Doctor's light exterior hides a dark and weary heart. More than any other companion the Doctor's protege, Ace's more open and trusting nature is a mirror for his suspicions and resignation.

Doctor Who: Something Borrowed

And so to the Sixth Doctor, and Richelle Mead, another writer unknown to me.

The Doctor is taking Peri to a society wedding on Koturia, a planet given over to a highly romanticised recreation of Vegas at its height, but swarms of prehistoric reptiles and a mysterious bride could spell trouble. The Koturians have a rather unique addition to the wedding festivities, and an odl enemy seems keen to know all about it.

The Sixth Doctor is perhaps the most problematic for this project. Colin Baker's TV era was brief and inglorious, and there is a question over how much of the expanded material should be honoured. Richelle Mead does a good job with it, all things considered.

Old Sixy's mercurial - nay, ill-defined - temperament is largely managed by making Peri the narrator and thus excluding any of the Doctor's unspoken thoughts from the text; what Peri sees is what we get. This falls down a little, as Peri's inability to recognise an enemy she must presumably have seen rather recently leaves her seeming a little dim, but overall it is a good story with a very Whovian Macguffin at the heart of it.

If there is a criticism, and this applies to all of these stories, it is that the length feels more suited to a nuWho story than the more sedate pace of the classic series, but this is hardly of concern given that the audience must primarily be nuWho viewers (given the use of primarily children's authors).

Doctor Who: Tip of the Tongue

The Fifth Doctor story goes to Patrick Ness, an author whose work is not known to me.

In WWII Maine a strange fad grips a village; a strange fashion for 'Truth-Tellers', which say what you really mean even if you wouldn't have had the courage. The resulting rash of honesty is tearing the town apart, and that is when the blue box arrives.

Ness takes an interesting tack, focusing his story on two of the local children - a mixed-race girl and a German Jewish boy in 1940s Maine, who are thus set up to be semi-outsiders in their own world - while the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa appear only intermittently throughout the narrative. The result is largely successful, in part because the Fifth Doctor's role was, more than any other, to be a man in the background, perhaps in response to Tom Baker's larger-than-life presence.

As with Spear of Destiny, Tip of the Tongue is a pseudo-historical, which helps with the social commentary side of the story, concerned as it is with intolerance and the false virtue of universal honesty.

Tip of the Tongue is a good little story, and if it's a little short on Doctor, its no less a Doctor Who story for that.

Doctor Who: The Roots of Evil

The Fourth Doctor's entry in this series is penned by Philip Reeve, whose Mortal Engines and Larklight series hold a special place in my heart.

The Heligan Structure is a marvel, a gigantic, space-borne tree housing an entire civilisation in its branches. Yet at the heart of the Heligan Structure's root bole is a dark and brooding malice; a long-nurtured hatred, waiting to exact a long-delayed vengeance against an ancient enemy.

Once again, Reeve shows a good grasp of his assigned Doctor's character and style, incorporating jelly babies and a scarf rescue. The Companion is not forgotten either. Leela can become a two-note character, misunderstanding words and then hitting something, but Reeve also captures her intuition, the instinctive sense of danger and wrongness which the Doctor so often dismissed, but which was rarely wrong.

The Roots of Evil successfully integrates many of the elements of the series, combining weird science with mild social commentary, and action and peril with humour to create a convincingly Whovian cocktail. It's not an easy act to accomplish, especially in the limited space provided, but this is another good entry in the series.

Doctor Who: The Spear of Destiny

The Third Doctor takes the stage now in The Spear of Destiny, a pseudo-historical from Marcus Sedgwick, author of Floodlands and My Swordhand is Singing.

After failing to gain control of a dangerous artefact in a museum break-in, the Third Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant go back to the source and try to replace the legendary spear Gungnir with a replica in 2nd Century Old Uppsala. Things do not quite go to plan, however, as an old enemy plans to upset history and gain control of the spear for himself.

Sedgwick, like Scott, knows his stuff. His Third Doctor is scratchy and sensitive, but active and bold, and with an unspoken fondness for Jo which goes beyond the typical Doctor/Companion relationship (c.f. The Green Death). Jo, meanwhile, is scrappy, but not awfully bright. The plot, revolving around another of the Master's not-terribly-well-thought-out power grabs is pretty apt for the era, and the McGuffin - a spear which possesses the ability to manipulate probability to ensure that it always hits its mark, and in theory could allow the wielder to determine the course of history by will alone - feels like a genuine Whovian plot device.

Sedgwick also draws on some minor snippets of Who lore, like the fact that a Time Lord's core body temperature is significantly lower than a humans, which even I had to look up, so props there.

All in all, the story is pacy, and convinces handily as a Third Doctor pseudo-historical.

Doctor Who: The Nameless City

Eoin Colfer's A Big Hand for the Doctor did not impress, but I've already bought all eleven of these things, so onwards then, to The Nameless City. Our Second Doctor offering comes from Michael Scott, author of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series.

Good news! Michael Scott actually gets the Doctor he is writing for. There isn't a lot of the cosmic clownery, to be fair, as he pushes the character swiftly and solidly into his secondary mode; fearful, blustering and yet unbowed as a trap set by the enigmatic - assuming you've not seen The Time Monster - Professor Thascalos plants The Necronomicon aboard the TARDIS and sends it hurtling into the domain of the hate-maddened Archons, last of the Old Ones.

And it's actually pretty good, if not flawless. Scott describes the Necronomicon as 'older than the universe', showing more familiarity with derivative mythos fiction than the motherlode, but hey, it's not Lovecraft's anniversary. There is also always something a trifle Seventh Doctorish about these cosmic encounters, but on the other hand the First Doctor encountered the appalling whimsy of the Celestial Toymaker and the Second himself fell foul of the vicissitudes of the Land of Fiction.

The main thing is that Scott has taken the time to get the Doctor right, and not only the Doctor; Jamie McCrimmon is spot on, from his incomprehension to his unquestionable and unquestioning valour and courage. The humour is there too, sparking occasionally against the dark background.

A good recovery after a bad start, but will the pace be maintained?

Doctor Who: A Big Hand for the Doctor

"Hey; you know what we should do? Get a bunch of famous writers to produce eleven chapters of an anthology, one per Doctor, and then sell them as individual books at a massively inflated price. They'll go for that, right?"

Well, I did, albeit on Kindle, so here follows my verdict on the 50th Anniversary short story collection in elevenish blog posts.

We begin with Eoin 'Artemis Fowl' Colfer's A Big Hand for the Doctor, and damn if I didn't almost stop here as well. I have a lot of time for Colfer as an author (as well as the Fowl novels, I adore his diesel-punk romance, Airman), but I was unconvinced by his official Hitchhiker's Guide sequel and the man should never have been allowed to write the First Doctor.

The First Doctor was curmudgeonly, irascible, irritable, and had little time for his companions' more active natures and cultural digressions. He was an explorer, a dilettante, but not an adventurer and certainly not a crusader, and he had basically no ability to steer the TARDIS. In Colfer's offering, however, we get a Doctor who lost a hand fighting - nay, hunting - space pirates; who has pursued said pirates through time and space in the TARDIS; who references popular culture as if he were his own Tenth or Eleventh incarnation; who uses a wrist communicator to keep in touch with his granddaughter; and who at one point uses one of Colfer's own fairy swear words.

The story might have worked with the Third, Fifth, Seventh, Tenth or Eleventh Doctors, and maybe even the Fourth, Eighth or Ninth. In fact, almost any Doctor but the First would have been a better fit. The overall style belongs purely to nuWho, and shows a dearth of understanding of the First Doctor and his era.

Not a promising start.

The Cuckoo's Calling

The Cuckoo's Calling is the debut novel by crime writer Robert Galbraith.

Yeah, okay; I'm just messing around. As is now well known, the novel is by JK Rowling, whose attempt to escape the Pot-light was foiled by a mouthy lawyer, resulting in massive sales (although notably, the book had already received strong reviews by the time of the outing). In her self-conscious bid to escape typecasting, Rowling/Galbraith has produced a hard-bitten detective novel, full of sex, violence and depravity, as well as being liberally salted with profane language.

Gimmicky or not, this deliberate shift helps in one significant way, which is that it is easy to approach this as something very different to Harry Potter. It is a very distinct beast, and that in itself speaks well of the author's ability, and while those expecting some kind of Potterverse equivalent of Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London will be disappointed, the fault there is fundamentally theirs. What The Cuckoo's Calling is is a strongly-plotted, well-written detective novel in the modern milieu; less graphic than many, but distinctly harder than, say, Midsomer.

The core of the story is its protagonist, as with any private detective story, and Cormoran Strike is, as a PI must be, quite a character. A towering, overweight, lycanthropically hirsute former Red Cap - the UK military police, rather than a murderous, Scots goblin - with a tin leg, he nonetheless owes much to the slim, neat ur-detective Philip Marlowe in his character and methods: abrasive, sly and methodical; touched with an idiosyncratic sense of honour and afflicted by more than his share of emotional scars. Playing off against him is his temporary secretary, Robin, an ingenious young woman whose discretion, cultural awareness and Google-fu complement the more visceral Strike, while her lack of experience allow the author to illuminate his ingrained process.

The story concerns the death of a young supermodel, written off as suicide until her brother asks Strike to reinvestigate. Rowling/Galbraith (I really don't know which is appropriate to use) is focused on the characters and their points of view, building up the picture of the investigation through Strike's - and to a lesser extent, Robin's - eyes, and for the most part reserving their inner monologues not for exposition, but for expanding on the minor characters, so that the reader is not only privy to all of the information, but to the detectives' broad interpretations of their character and reliability. As a consequence, this is a mystery that the reader can participate in along with the protagonists without being hampered by a lack of evidence.

Harry Potter never really convinced me of Rowling's ability as a writer, beyond the spinning of a yarn, but The Cuckoo's Calling shows assured, mature storytelling and superb characterisations. It gets a firm recommendation from me for anyone who likes a good thriller and isn't easily offended by the word fuck.