Doctor Who and the Daemons

 

Barry Letts Doctor Who and the Daemons (1974)
Just to get the cloying stench of nostalgia out of the way, specifically the increasingly widespread notion of the quality of a work being equivalent to whether one is able to remember it from childhood, I was nuts for Who when I was a kid and The Daemons, first broadcast in 1971, constitutes my absolute earliest memory of the show. I would have been five. My memory is specifically of being terrified as I watched Jon Pertwee menaced by Bok, a living stone gargoyle, in a subterranean burial chamber. Somehow attendant to this memory is that of me informing my mother that it would be okay for me to watch Doctor Who from that point on because it no longer scared me as it had once done - which I vaguely recall as having been a cause for concern.

I became a regular and obsessive viewer from that point on. I bought the Radio Times special in 1973 and what little mind I had then developed was blown by the realisation of there having been both doctors and stories prior to Jon Pertwee. It never occurred to me that I might ever get to see, or at least experience, any of them because television was an ephemeral medium and I'd missed the boat. Naturally I went wild for the Target novelisations when they started to show up on the shelves of my local WHSmith. There were just five of them - three from the Hartnell era and two Pertwees. I wasn't much of a reader but I bought and read them all, assuming that would probably be the lot.

Then another five came out, and because I'd sent my stamped addressed envelope and coupon off to Target Books, I was forewarned and excited almost to the point of exploding. If they could just keep novelising the stories I'd missed due to either being too young or not actually having been born, I could die happy.

I expect persons of similar vintage will have recognised at least some of this, and a few of them give Doctor Who and the Daemons five stars on Goodreads. Five stars is the rating you give a book on Goodreads if your reaction is that it was amazing. I assume five stars also covers reactions as diverse as I can remember this from my childhood and I see it has a Doctor Who logo on the cover, thus illustrating the general worthlessness of the system.

The Daemons, which is also one of the first Who serials I ever saw on VHS, was inspired by Barry Letts reading Dennis Wheatley and Robert Sloman concluding that Erich von Däniken had proved that there were spacemen on Earth before we arrived, which he really hadn't. The thing we saw on the telly additionally betrays significant influences from John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos, Quatermass, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End at a bit of a stretch, and all that folk horror which was doing the rounds in the early seventies. It was a lot of fun and nearly caused me to shit myself when I was five.

The novelisation was great when I was a kid who hadn't actually read much of anything, but is underwhelming now that I'm in my fifties - which I state as a fully grown man who is nevertheless still able to take pleasure from seventies Defenders comics. It's not badly written. Letts makes some efforts to flesh things out a little, presenting more than we actually saw on the screen, but the bottom line is that it remains a two-hundred page blow by blow account of what we would have seen had we been sat in front of the telly back in June, 1971. There's a lot of running around while people get tied up and held captive in wooden trunks, which simply fails to hold the attention as prose, meaning the infodumps are more interesting than anything done with that info in the course of the story. It's readable, even now that I'm old and fat, but it really isn't amazing. Sorry.

Destroyer

Andrew Hickey Destroyer (2017)
I may be getting my wires crossed, but I somehow developed the impression of Destroyer having been written as something akin to a warm-up exercise, and from what I recall of since deleted blog posts, Andrew Hickey appeared to regard his forthcoming Basilisk Murders as a more significant undertaking. Destroyer is a whole brace of toes dipped into the thriller genre, a form with which I'm almost completely unfamiliar - and ordinarily not actually that interested - but which I'd probably prefer to term mystery because it reminds me of the Georges Simenon novel I read a month or so ago.

Essentially it's breezy wartime scrapes as Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Alan Turing, and Aleister Crowley attempt to defeat an occult plot to deliver victory into the paws of those ghastly Germans; so it's highly stylised and possibly ludicrous given the cast, and yet Hickey achieves a perfect balance in all respects with characters obedient to the strictures of the genre whilst remaining unburdened by anything much in the way of clichés. This isn't tweedpunk, or whatever clueless arseholes might be calling it this week. Crowley has turned up in fiction, particularly of the sort I tend to read, with some frequency, often as a fairly generic force of indecency, and rarely ever as anything which I've found particularly satisfying. I have my doubts about the man but tend to think he deserves at least a little better than he's generally been given, so it's a pleasure to read of him in Destroyer as a character at least as rounded and intriguing as he seems to have been in life.

As a thriller, Destroyer is brief and well paced, and arguably lacking any great philosophical purpose, which nevertheless doesn't mean it lacks depth or that it isn't capable of throwing out a vivid idea or two every couple of pages.

'Indeed,' said Wheatley, 'and so we can never discover the answer to the question is Baldur real?, and nor should we want to, for it would spoil the mystery of life. But we can have an answer to the simpler question does Baldur represent something real?, and the answer to that question is of course an emphatic yes! for all true religion contains within it a kernel of truth.

As for flaws, it's genuinely quite difficult to find any. The entirely masculine cast is a bit odd, but as Andrew explained on his blog back in May:

One thing I should note about this, because many of my readers will care - every character in this book is male. I thought long and hard about doing that, and the nature of the genre it's pastiching would make it even more problematic to actually include anyone of another gender. I understand if this puts readers off, but want you to understand that it was a choice I thought about and didn't take lightly.

I spotted some typos and a couple of incongruous instances of repetition, most likely inevitable given that the author was probably writing four other books and recording an album simultaneous to the composition of this one; but given that Destroyer seems to be something Andrew Hickey wrote as an exercise in the spirit of experimentation, and that it's not even a particularly ambitious effort, one can't help but notice how even workmanlike Hickey is considerably better than the great majority of authors firing on all four cylinders. Destroyer is a modest but nonetheless impressive effort which promises much for whatever the next one turns out to be.

Avail thineself of a copy yonder, or Amazon if you want the eBook or the (significantly cheaper) paperback. I'm not going to provide a link because I'm sure you can find Amazon under your own steam, and because they support Breitbart, and because they happily stock a wide range of shite by white nationalists, much to the delight of those leaving antisemitic comments in praise of said books, which I only mention because I want to marry my boyfriend Barack Obama and I hate freedom of speech etc. etc.