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.

Snuff

Snuff is the 39th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and you've got to take your hat off to a man who responds to the impending loss of faculty to Alzheimer's by setting out to write a murder mystery. Admittedly, it's not the twistiest of mysteries, but nevertheless it's a pretty tight plot.

We're back with Sam Vimes for this one, as Ankh-Morpork's hard-bitten watchman brings big city law to the countryside in a narrative which owes a lot to In the Heat of the Night, but with the inevitable Discworld slant. It continues the process of modernisation, with factories, plantations and ox-powered paddle boats added to the already established telegraph network and movable type printing to drag Ankh-Morpork kicking and screaming out of the Century of the Fruitbat, and almost unrecognisably far from the high fantasy pastiche of The Light Fantastic.

As with many of Pratchett's more recent works (by which, I feel old to recount, I pretty much mean the last fifteen to twenty years) the humour of the novel is tied up with a darker side and an exploration of the human condition. In common with the Sam Vimes back-catalogue (post-Guards, Guards at least), this means an examination of the importance of law in separating right from wrong, and in particular the adherence to law as the last fire by which savage humanity can warm themselves and keep from falling back into the blackness. There is also a pretty solid - if not unproblematic; the story is still about the white folks - look at racism; ground that Pratchett has covered before, but rarely so bleakly, as the goblins also embody an extreme of class-based oppression.

Snuff is a solid adventure with a good conspiracy/murder mystery at its core, and a lot of thought behind it. It was also at least one soul-destroying child death short of what I had feared, so that's good.

On reading - Choices

Reading involves choices; has done since long before we passed the point that a single human being could hope to read everything ever written, even in their own language. So, what are the choices that I make when selecting my reading material, and what informs them?

These days, I confess that I shy away from ongoing series, although that used to be a shoe-in for me. Of course, I used to ask essentially one question: Is it on the SF/Fantasy shelf at the Fleet Library. That was how I ended up reading Battlefield Earth, the Atlan saga (featuring a female protagonist whose sole contribution to anything seemed to be to bounce haplessly around the landscape like a rogue billiard ball, putting out for anyone who seized her roughly and then pining about them when they got killed/bored/forgotten by the plot) and just about everything the Davids Eddings and Gemmell ever wrote.

Why have I changed my modus operandi? Well, aside from the evidence above, Robert Jordan has a lot to answer for in that respect; not because he died before he finished The Wheel of Time, but because it was notably the first series in which boredom overtook the completist demands of my egg-hoarding lizard brain and I decided that I just could not be arsed. And yet, I still kinda want to know how it ends; thus my new policy. If I stick to self-contained novels, then if it's shit I can find out what happens without having to slog through three more volumes.

If I do see a promising series, I will usually look for a standalone by the same author to test the waters.

I still focus a lot on SF and Fantasy, because that's my jam, but crime fiction is in the ascendant with me. On the plus side, since most mass market paperbacks go for £5.99, £6.99 or £7.99, regardless of size, fantasy gives you a lot of paper for the price. SF and crime tend towards more modest volumes.

I read a lot of children's and YA fiction, having got into it very much as a teacher. Honestly, I enjoy the absence of the tawdry, pointless sex scenes which seem to be de rigueur in books for grown ups these days (and that's another shift in my tastes since I was a teenager).

Moreover, there is just so much stuff out there that I go more by recommendations than I used to, although I have to be careful with that. My mother recommended Angela's Ashes, and I don't think I've ever completely forgiven her.

I am also a full-on convert to the Kindle, for the simple reason that it's much easier to read on a bus, and with my smartphone my books and music are in the same place. The mobile telecommunications aspect is kind of a fringe benefit.

So, Kindle books, ideally non-series, in the SF, fantasy and crime genres; with some exceptions, naturally.

I also don't read as much as I maybe should, which makes me sad. Perhaps when I am commuting by train I will get more into the rhythm of the thing.

The Long-Legged Fly

The Long-Legged Fly is the first of James Sallis's noirish detective novels, featuring Lew Griffin, a black PI in near-contemporary (in this book, 1960s to the early 1990s) New Orleans. Griffin is a struggling man; struggling to make ends meet, but also fighting with racism and with his own demons - most notably drink, rage, and a sense of incompleteness in his life.

The novel is divided into four parts, each defined by a particular case. In 1964 he is hired to find a missing black activist leader, in 1970 a runaway girl, in 1984 the kid sister of an acquaintance and in 1990 his own son. The first case is the highest profile, but Griffin pursues each one in a low-key, bleakly realistic fashion, running down leads and shaking down potential informants; and hitting dead ends as often as not. In truth, the cases are a backdrop for Lew's own story; his evolution from a bitter, brutal ex-MP to a self-educated college teacher and novelist, by way of the revelations and relationships that get him there.

Moreover, the book presents a rich picture of New Orleans through the years, and one unaffected by sentimentality. No jazz-soaked romanticism or shadowy voodoo for Lew Griffin's New Orleans; this is a city dominated by particular shades of ingrained racism, politics, and above all, food, for Griffin is a gourmet of Southern cuisine.

An interesting book, although not an upbeat one by any stretch.