Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Guest Podcast! We're All Stories in the End with host Iain Martin

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Guest Podcast! We're All Stories in the End with host Iain Martin · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

0:25
Welcome back. I'm Ian Martin.
0:29
And yes, I have redecorated. And yeah, yeah, I I know you
0:34
don't like it. Welcome to the start of the
0:37
second series of We're All Stories in the End.
0:40
And for this first episode in the new series, I'd like to
0:43
welcome a very special guest indeed, a man who wrote three of
0:47
my very favorite new adventures, as well as one of my favorite
0:51
crime fiction series. He was script editor for Doctor
0:54
Who's Golden Age as well. So let's all say hello to Andrew
0:59
Carmel. I know you probably don't want
1:14
to be reminded of this item because it's a long, long time
1:17
ago that you. Wrote it now.
1:19
But only for two reasons, which may not be the reasons you
1:21
think. Number one, I don't like the
1:22
cover art. I'm sorry, don't.
1:26
The other thing is I never wrote a book called Cat's Credible
1:29
Warhead. I wrote a book called Warhead.
1:32
I wrote a 20 Warhead, Warlock and War Child.
1:35
My sister said if I wrote another one I should call it
1:37
Wardrobe. But.
1:39
I. Had only had recorded instance
1:42
of my sister making a joke, but they had this stupid idea that
1:49
to back up a bit, One reason I did The New Adventures was that
1:53
there was supposed to be quite a lot of creative freedom.
1:56
The money was great. The money was better.
1:59
They offered us, they offered me one of their books and I told my
2:03
agent to say no because the money was so terrible.
2:05
My agent was really excited because he almost never got to
2:07
say no to anyone because they just had to take the deal and I
2:10
said no. And so they came back with an
2:13
improved offer, which to my surprise, they then offered to
2:15
all the other writers, which was only fair, but I thought, hey,
2:19
that was my deal. We're all getting it.
2:21
That's a good thing. So I guess brilliant and
2:25
terrible at the same time. Yeah, but so I did it because
2:28
they improved the money, because the books were not
2:32
novelisations, they're original novels.
2:34
They were pitched at a more adult audience and they were
2:38
longer. They weren't like Arrow Length
2:41
for people who don't know, Arrow is the publisher of the the
2:43
novelisations and they were very short books, so they were longer
2:47
they were. Theoretically, there was more
2:50
creative freedom involved. And I say theoretically because
2:53
one of the first things they did is they suddenly got cold feet
2:56
and decided that people would only buy the books if they had a
3:00
built in arc. And so the three books, my book,
3:04
and two other books by two other poor writers were suddenly
3:08
grouped together in a notional trilogy called Cat's Cradle.
3:12
Which, and I hated it then. I hate it now.
3:15
And all I did, I think I had a catwalk.
3:17
Past in the background of one of my scenes and this stupid idea.
3:22
But they immediately began to roll back on the the few things
3:27
that made it appealing. And I as you can tell, I'm still
3:30
resentful of that. So when you say I, I don't
3:32
welcome seeing that book only for those reasons that the cover
3:35
art not being great and for what?
3:37
All that stuff I just said. Well, it may probably not
3:42
surprise you one iota to learn that that's, you know, 30 years
3:46
on, That's the perceived fan wisdom that in no way is Cat's
3:49
Cradle really a trilogy in anything but name.
3:53
And it's quite a a blatant bit of, you know, audience
3:58
management to get people to buy all the books, which didn't need
4:02
to happen. It was.
4:02
A good trilogy, misunderstanding of the market.
4:04
People would have just bought anything that had Doctor Who on
4:07
it. And you know, you make your
4:08
writers unhappy. And I'm being a writer myself.
4:11
I'm all in favour of writers not being unhappy.
4:14
Well, exactly. So just to take you back one
4:18
step, when when you heard the new adventures were happening,
4:24
and I don't know if they would have approached you or you
4:27
approached them, but it sounds like Virginia came.
4:29
To you, right. I didn't know what was going.
4:31
I don't think I I was where that was going down particularly, but
4:35
they came to me and asked me if I wanted to do one of the books
4:38
right. And did you feel sort of vaguely
4:40
proprietorial about the 7th Doctor and Ace at that time?
4:44
Yeah, but that didn't mean I took a great interest in other
4:46
people's books. It just felt I had a strong half
4:50
prejudice about how I felt it should be done.
4:54
Now what? The the reason I've invited you
4:57
on when I haven't invited many other writers of these books is
5:01
that and I'm going to you know put my cards on the table here.
5:04
I they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it.
5:08
I couldn't find them online. They were too busy and in many
5:11
cases dead. No, but your three books are
5:16
amongst my 3 favourites. Certainly of the new adventures,
5:20
I think, I think your your books are the best.
5:22
They work for me because you and I don't know if you came up with
5:27
this in the 1st place, but there is a quote and I can't, I can't
5:30
find out who it's attributed to now.
5:32
But the 7th Doctor works best when you imagine him as like a
5:36
mountain range viewed through mist.
5:39
It was you from from a distance. Yeah.
5:43
Actor well done. That's a very good quote.
5:45
And that's the kind of doctor that works for me.
5:50
I do have to add a caveat that memory can play one false
5:54
because I had a very clear memory about the development of
5:56
the character Ace. What I did and what Ian Briggs
5:59
did, and then we found the paperwork.
6:00
It didn't do that to be completely different, but the
6:02
mountain range one rings a bell. Definitely.
6:05
I remember coming up with that because that was the idea.
6:07
The idea is that something big and shrouded in mystery and in
6:11
the distance and, you know, impressive, but don't get too
6:14
close in the sense that as soon as you may get up close and
6:19
personally just becomes another guy.
6:22
Absolutely. So the other elements that go
6:25
into Warhead, it's a very sort of cyberpunk, dark future kind
6:30
of novel. And I wanted to ask you if you
6:32
can remember what kind of things you were reading 30 years ago
6:36
and what your formative? One of the things that motivated
6:39
me to do the book, or at least motivated me in the way that I
6:42
did do the book, was when I was in Doctor Who, Ben Roanovic.
6:46
Who knew that I'd been a science fiction fan and sort of had left
6:49
the church like I wasn't really reading science fiction anymore.
6:53
He said you must read this. And he gave me New Romance by
6:56
William Gibson, which blew my mind.
6:57
And then he gave me Count 0, which was great.
7:00
And Gibson has done other some other interesting stuff, but I
7:03
don't think anything that quite stands with those two novels.
7:06
And so when I sat down to write a science fiction novel I my
7:11
Doctor Who novel, I that was a template that not only was.
7:16
Freshest in my mind. It was also, well, you know, I
7:19
really love those books, so I was kind of itching to try and
7:23
do one myself. A cyberpunk dystopian future
7:26
type thing. It's not the other way to do it,
7:29
but it was just, it was just echoing what I've been reading
7:32
myself and loving quite recently.
7:36
And were you bearing bearing that in mind?
7:41
Bearing in mind you were going for a more adult novel with a
7:44
different approach to writing the character of the Doctor?
7:47
Were you aiming it at a specific kind of age range or were you
7:51
thinking this? Is for everyone, for grown-ups.
7:54
But I mean when I went for my interview with Jonathan Powell,
7:59
who is head of drama, he might have been head of serials, like
8:03
there was various names, but he was the guy who had to approve
8:06
my appointment at the BBC. We had this interview which went
8:10
quite well. I said all the right things at
8:11
the very end he said who is Doctor Who for?
8:15
And I had a politician's answer. I said it was for everybody, all
8:19
right. And he said no, it's for
8:21
children. And I said oh OK, but I I at the
8:25
time I thought, no, I didn't say it, but I thought, no, it's not
8:28
for sure. I think it should be aimed.
8:31
Pitched at grown-ups, but accessible to children in the
8:34
sense that there should be no reason that kids couldn't watch
8:37
it. Although bear in mind it might
8:38
give them nightmares. Because I mean, that's sort of,
8:41
in a way, it's what it's for, like Grimm's Fairy Tales.
8:44
But I much later realized that the reason he specifically said
8:48
that was, I think, to do with vengeance on Virus, that there'd
8:51
been some stories that had really been too.
8:57
Vicious and violent and grown up in quotes in their own kind of
9:00
way. So I it was only years later
9:02
that I realised where he was coming from when he when he had
9:04
said that he didn't want to repeat of things like vengeance
9:07
and virus but so but I that's all which is just say I've
9:11
always thought of doctors for grown-ups but you know that kids
9:17
not to shouldn't be deliberately excluded.
9:20
Yeah, I think there's there's a kind of feeling, certainly with
9:23
the Tom Baker era, that it's kind of aimed at undergraduates
9:27
and teenagers and children and the parents.
9:30
Exactly. It's on that.
9:32
Yeah, it's it's it's a whole spectrum.
9:35
At university when it was on watching it and loving the
9:37
skull. No, I wasn't doing that.
9:40
Not because I didn't like Dog to ride other things and it wasn't
9:42
on my radar. Well, quite, I think.
9:45
I mean it's it's very easy with the benefit of hindsight to
9:48
point out where Jonathan Powell went wrong.
9:50
But if it was totally aimed at children, then why was he
9:53
scheduling it at 7:30? I mean, that's bath time.
9:55
Everyone knows that. So you've written Warhead, a
10:00
couple of years have gone by and then you came back with Warlock,
10:04
which again was, I think almost exclusively set in Canterbury.
10:10
Well, yeah, I. I was born in London at the age
10:15
of five my family moved to Canada and I grew up in Canada,
10:18
so from the age of 5 to 15, my formative years, I was basically
10:21
Canadian. We moved back, which is.
10:25
So my mum and dad moved back and took the two younger kids with
10:29
them, me and my brother, and we lived in Deal in Kent.
10:34
Canterbury was the nearest big town and I had a lot of fun in
10:36
Canterbury and I eventually ended up doing my post grad in
10:39
Canterbury, so I knew Canterbury, so that was.
10:42
Reason for that really. I didn't realize there's a two
10:44
year gap between the novels, but I don't particularly know why
10:48
that is. When you mentioned Warlock, I've
10:50
got a lot of fondness for Warlock because it had the
10:53
conceit or concept of the living drug, which I think, I don't
10:56
know if anybody else had done it before and probably people have
10:59
done it since, but it was quite a cool idea and it was, as far
11:01
as I know it was original to me. It was quite a groovy idea and I
11:05
still think, if nothing else, that novel has that going for
11:09
it. I think it's, I think it has an
11:11
awful lot going for it, which is a shame because it's probably
11:15
out of print now. It's almost definitely out of
11:18
print. But yes, there's that remarkable
11:21
idea of the living drug and the way that people are able to use
11:26
it and use their kind of latent psychology to to kind of exclude
11:32
a member of the group and and he actually killed.
11:35
Someone do. Do they like?
11:36
You have to forgive me because it's a long time.
11:38
I like, like the the, the old Eskimo who's left out on an ice
11:41
drift because they're sundered from all social.
11:44
That's exactly, exactly. Yeah, there's there's you want
11:47
to plunder some of this stuff, it's great.
11:49
And it was your idea, so you can use it again.
11:52
Yeah. Well, that's interesting because
11:54
I was full of those. Kind of cool.
11:56
Ideas At the time, So I I wasn't really a science fiction writer,
12:00
but I did have this. Fascination with sort of the the
12:05
subliminal bandwidth of human behaviour, which is sort of what
12:08
we're talking about, yeah. And I think the other thing
12:11
Warlock did was it, or maybe did is the wrong word, maybe
12:15
represented. But I think that was one of the
12:18
very first books and certainly the first book of yours that
12:21
really had that unput, downable quality and the writing style
12:26
that you've carried through ever since.
12:29
Oh, that's really great here, because I always look at those
12:32
books and because they're Doctor Who books, they're kind of, do
12:39
you know that your expression, Red headed stepson?
12:41
Yeah, I'm aware of it. Yeah.
12:43
So what it means if anybody doesn't know, it means a sort of
12:45
unloved child. And that's because I they
12:49
weren't entirely my own creation.
12:51
I had to write about the Doctor. That was a given.
12:53
Fair enough. But also there was editorial
12:56
interference. And for all those reasons, I've
12:57
sort of thought I've ended up over the years not going back to
12:59
them and just thinking that they were early efforts that didn't
13:03
come off. But it sounds, I mean you've
13:05
said nice things about them now and other people have.
13:07
I mean, I remember Russell T Davis saying he loved them,
13:10
which was very kind of him, but maybe there is more value there
13:16
that I'm aware of and I should. If not, go back to them, At
13:19
least get somebody to do a synopsis of them for me with the
13:22
stuff I can recycle you. It always felt like you were, as
13:27
you say, kind of. You had to include the doctor.
13:29
That was a given, but you were doing your own thing and you
13:32
were populating these books with your own characters and telling
13:35
stories that I guess you wanted to tell.
13:38
Well, that was the thing that I didn't particularly want to
13:41
write a doctor novel, but I did want to write a novel.
13:43
So I sort of. It was one of those annoying
13:47
things where. I'm not sure that they were
13:50
entirely satisfactory as dog Two books, because what I wanted to
13:53
do my own thing and so I was always pulling against the
13:56
brief, which what isn't an ideal place to be.
14:00
And then again, like the Cat's Cradle pseudo trilogy, they did
14:07
this. They decided that they had to
14:09
have these recurring characters, like this bunch of other
14:12
characters that they foisted upon us, and suddenly they had
14:15
to appear in all the books, Which again, is stupid kind of.
14:18
This silly thinking that you have to have this serial element
14:21
otherwise people won't buy the next book, which is just not so.
14:24
And again, it kills it for the writer.
14:26
So I would include these characters in the most
14:32
perfunctory and kind of heel dragging and unenthusiastic way,
14:36
because I just didn't want to do it.
14:38
And they actually had some kind of bean feast, some kind of get
14:41
together for, you know, what you in America would call a rubber
14:45
chicken dinner for all the New Adventures writers.
14:49
And they got, and they circulated A questionnaire
14:51
saying what can we do to improve the regular characters.
14:56
And I wrote kill them. That was my response.
15:00
And I and I meant it, you know, just get rid of them.
15:03
So there are all these things that sort of prevented me doing
15:08
the novel I wanted to, but the novel I wanted to do wouldn't
15:11
have been a doctrine novel anyway.
15:13
So I you know, having signed up for, I needed to do really good.
15:19
I, you know it's AI always want to do a decent job, and I hope I
15:26
did do a decent job for people who are Doctor Who fans.
15:29
I know that I use the Doctor very sparingly, and part of that
15:33
may well have been because I was itching to use my own
15:36
characters, as you said. But also, I think the Doctor
15:39
needs to be used sparingly and adroitly, as opposed to being
15:45
overexposed. As we were talking about it at
15:47
the top of this this interview and yeah, I there was this joke
15:55
going around that I used the Doctor so little that but one
15:57
day when I wrote my own non doctor novel that the Doctor
16:00
would be on every page of it. I think Rebecca Levine I think
16:05
might have made that joke. She was very nice.
16:06
She was one of my editors at at Not Titan.
16:09
Forgive me, I'm waiting for Titan now.
16:11
Writing books for Titan, now for at Virgin, Peter Darvill Evans
16:15
was sort of the lead guy. And then he had a bunch of
16:17
talented people working under him, of whom Rebecca was very
16:20
talented. Yeah, I think I think you're
16:25
you're right in that certainly in a novel you have to find a
16:28
different way to use the doctor because you can't have someone
16:32
in a long scarf running up and down a corridor because that
16:34
doesn't work in prose. And I think the more successful
16:38
of these books are the ones that do something different with a
16:42
character who has been around for, you know, now 60 years, but
16:46
at the time over 30 years. And there's very little
16:49
innovation you can really. Bring to that can't be.
16:53
I won't say can't, but it's very difficult to be inside his head
16:57
because you, for reasons one you maintain the mystery.
17:00
I mean, there probably are would be a very cool way of being
17:03
inside his head if you did it very shrewdly and very
17:08
sparingly. Someone like Bernard Ronovich
17:10
I'm sure, could pull that off. But yeah, so that's an
17:13
additional problem. The Doctor, because you can't
17:15
really use him as too much for viewpoint character because he's
17:19
too alien and should be too alien and unknowable and you
17:24
know all his thoughts would be in at least 12 dimensions.
17:27
And again, that would be very disconcerting for.
17:29
That that's exactly it. He he he would not be like us,
17:33
which is the whole deal with him.
17:35
He should be alien. So the new adventures kind of
17:38
finished in the the Well it specifically in May 1997.
17:43
If you want me to be pedantic about it.
17:45
You drifted in and out of Doctor Who fiction.
17:49
You also wrote this Bad boy the Wise.
17:52
The Wise, if you liked that stuff in Warlock, there's lots
17:55
of stuff in the Wise which is like that.
17:57
Well, I love the wise. It always felt like you're kind
17:59
of Neil Gaiman moment. Oh well, that's that's really
18:03
good, because when I wrote it, people couldn't make head nor
18:06
tail of it. Like they just thought it was so
18:09
strange. But if you they didn't have Neil
18:12
Gaiman as a reference point at the time.
18:14
Somebody because. I know I sent it to other
18:18
publishers before it ended up with Virgin Worlds because I
18:21
remember there was this readers report they should that they
18:24
shared with me when they rejected it.
18:26
Said it's like Quentin Tarantino with the occult, which is not a
18:31
good combination. Well that sounds like a great
18:33
fucking combination. Pretty bloody good, isn't it?
18:36
I mean, you know. But yeah, it was my first
18:40
attempt to do my own proper novel, and it was over
18:42
ambitious. I didn't entirely carry it off,
18:44
but there's some. Cool stuff in it.
18:46
The the thing that I remember I'm getting goosebumps thinking
18:48
about now is something that I was you're talking about
18:51
favorite science fiction. I've always loved this.
18:54
This is an incredible story by Robert Heinlein called The
18:57
Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hogue.
18:59
Isn't that a great title that's so wonderful?
19:01
It's sort of he. He's known for sort of hard
19:04
science fiction, spaceships and space suits.
19:07
But this is this incredibly strange book, a nut book, book,
19:11
short story. And there's a bit in it in which
19:13
the world's kind of. Dissolving.
19:15
And somebody's driving their car along and they, they see the cop
19:17
and they stop in the truck, wind down the window to tell the cop
19:20
that something terrible is happening.
19:21
And like, there's just this void out there with the window open.
19:24
So they wind the window back up and everything's fine again.
19:26
Oh, that's fantastic. So I remember doing that sort of
19:28
homage to that in this. So it was totally kind of nuts
19:32
novel. But I'm still.
19:35
Yeah, I think I. I think it was a really good
19:38
shot over ambitious. Didn't do anything quite like
19:41
the cover because like the first they they tried, the first cover
19:44
they tried, which you could still find online because for
19:46
years on Amazon it had the cover that we didn't use right.
19:50
Because the way Amazon does that, like they get an advanced
19:53
copy, then you could never get it out of the system.
19:55
It was sort of a picture of supposed to be a picture of a
19:58
skull and something else but it just looked like a bowl of
20:00
melting ice cream. It was a terrible cover.
20:02
So I quite like the the chick with the.
20:05
It's actually a depiction of. Spontaneous combustion.
20:09
The other presiding memory of the Virgin Worlds was like,
20:13
there's some kind of publishing magazine, or maybe it was
20:17
science fiction magazine like Starburst.
20:19
Anyway, there's this interview about Virgin Worlds with Peter
20:24
Darvill Evans and the writers. And you immediately, when the
20:28
magazine came out, you immediately understood the whole
20:30
thing because there was this on the left.
20:32
As you know, you have the picture on the left hand side
20:34
and the text on the right. And there's this full page
20:37
photo. And there was this photo of
20:39
Darvel Evans. Like, his face was huge.
20:42
And there's these two little figures over his shoulder like,
20:44
you know, the devil and the Angel and the cartoon.
20:46
And these were the other writers, like, because it was
20:49
all about him, right? Though he is like, I'm in the
20:51
foreground, the writers in the background.
20:52
That was sort of that was symbolic of the, I mean, Peter
20:57
Darvill Evans was a talented guy, but he was a huge ego and
21:01
he got his own way about things that weren't, I thought, to the
21:05
detriment of stuff like one of just it's like one thing which
21:09
still bugs me. He would never remember the name
21:11
of my character in the book, so I ended up changing the
21:15
character's fucking name because he couldn't be kept getting it
21:17
wrong. But, you know, that's the tail
21:20
wagging the dog if ever there was one.
21:22
So, yeah, So Virgin Worlds was a strange enterprise.
21:25
It was Peter Darvill Evans, little vanity project, but God
21:29
bless him, because I wouldn't have had a chance to have my
21:31
novel published. I'm very pleased that I did have
21:33
my novel published. Nothing happened.
21:35
But it I did write another novel.
21:37
It was my own novel. And you get better at writing it
21:40
through doing it. So thank you very much, Peter
21:42
Darvill Evans. Presumably the right, so back in
21:46
your court now, so you could always give it a a bit of a lick
21:49
of paint and and try and put it out again.
21:53
As with the New Adventures books, I think the thing to do
21:56
is really just to to strip mine it for you.
22:00
Know to parts, perhaps. I mean, I'm probably doing an
22:03
injustice to these books because I'm sure there are people out
22:05
there who love them. So that's probably a horrible
22:09
thing to say. But that's I feel more like that
22:11
we should take them to hotel, drug them and steal their
22:14
organs. We print them.
22:17
So what a horrible thing to say about my own books because, you
22:19
know, they are my children. It's true that just Stephen
22:22
Gallagher said that to me once because I was thinking I was
22:25
talking about was I should list all my books, you know.
22:28
You know that says by the same old the beginning of the book in
22:32
the front matter. I said, well should I include
22:35
like my Doctor Who books and my judge and he said they're all
22:38
your children. He's he's a very good writer.
22:40
Very wise writer. And yeah so I've decided now
22:43
I'll have, I'll have like Graham Greene used to distinguish
22:47
between his novels and his entertainment.
22:50
You know, like you know he said two tier system.
22:53
Right. So I think I'll do something
22:54
similar with that with my, you know, plus in wonderful age,
23:00
post ironic postmodern age we're in now.
23:03
It's kind of cool to have written these sort of pop art
23:05
novels which, you know, are featuring characters like Judge
23:08
Dredd and the Doctor from Doctor Who.
23:10
So yeah, they're my entertainments, yeah.
23:23
We we're in, I suppose, the around about the time of the
23:28
Millennium. I think you were doing, did you
23:30
say some Judge Dredd work as well?
23:32
So what happened after The Wise? I did a series of novels for
23:39
it's it's gone under a variety of names.
23:42
I think they were called Black Library at the time.
23:44
They were Games Workshop. They had acquired the rights to
23:47
do novels based on the 2000 AD characters.
23:51
So I did Judge Dredd. I did Strontium Dog.
23:55
Did I do an impression? I did 3 you can see you can see
23:59
how. I'm trying to think Durham red.
24:04
Nope. Strontium Dog.
24:06
Robo Hunter. Maybe I perhaps I only did two,
24:10
but so I did. I definitely did a Judge Dread
24:12
one, which I was quite fond of. It's called Swine Fever and I
24:17
wrote a Strontium Dog novel, which it was called Fistful
24:23
Strontium because it was a spaghetti western.
24:26
But then they. They had to change the title
24:29
because they had a book that fell through and my book had to
24:31
be published with the title. So this is you can tell how
24:33
annoying all this was. I don't see why your title needs
24:38
to change, because they've had a problem with a different book.
24:41
I know there had to be a book with that title, kind of
24:43
so-called Day of the Dogs or something.
24:46
Anyway, so those all had certain virtues, because the only way
24:51
you can write something is if you are somewhat in love with
24:54
it. So I did.
24:56
Interesting thing. I remember with the Strontium
24:57
Dog novel, I wanted to write it like a Henry Kutner 50s science
25:01
fiction novel, specifically like Fury, with a lot of pace and a
25:05
lot of kind of space operating stuff.
25:08
But there I wasn't particularly proud of any of these books.
25:13
But then I'd written a lot of stuff because I'd also did
25:17
another Doctor Who novel for BBC Publishing, which is called Adam
25:20
Bond. Not bad at all, but.
25:24
Still, you know, Child of a Lesser God.
25:27
But then the thing that happened to him was I wrote a good book,
25:33
a book I was proud of. And that book was called Script
25:35
Doctor. And it was my memoirs about my
25:37
memoir about working on Doctor Who.
25:40
Because to my eternal credit, I had kept a diary during that
25:46
period. And I wrote this really good
25:48
memoir. Anybody who's interested, I say
25:50
this with no. Vanity whatsoever.
25:52
Because if anybody's interested in that era of the show, they
25:54
should get that. It's the only book of its kind
25:57
really about working in British television during that era.
26:00
But about specifically about Doctor Who, Absolutely.
26:03
So I was very proud of that book and I consider that that my
26:06
writing of good books, really. Began there because although The
26:10
Wise was very ambitious and it was my first real novel, I
26:12
didn't think it quite came off. And then the odd thing was.
26:17
Obviously Script Doctor was a work of non fiction.
26:19
I then wrote a work of fiction which I'm very proud of.
26:21
But the strangest thing is it was based on ATV series.
26:25
Like by based on everything I've said you should think that that
26:28
would rule it out, but it was based on The Prisoner which is
26:30
ATV show I love and I wrote a prisoner novel called Miss
26:33
Freedom. And the thing was, not only did
26:35
I love the Prisoners ATV show, I instantly saw how I could do a
26:39
really fun, interesting novel about it.
26:43
Because I was a big fan of 60 spy novels and this was really
26:47
in that corner. And people know about James
26:50
Bond, but they may not know about Len Dayton or Adam Hall,
26:54
who wrote the Quiller books. Adam Hall's a pen name for Alice
26:57
and Trevor which is also a pen name.
26:59
So it's like this. Whole mirrors.
27:01
But anyway, the the Quiller books are great, so the Len
27:03
Dayton books. So I thought, oh, I could do a
27:07
prisoner novel like it was. A Quiller novel or a Dayton
27:11
novel. And that's what I did and it
27:12
came off really well and I'm very proud of that book.
27:15
So it is a prisoner novel, but it's anybody wants to check it
27:18
out. It's called Miss Freedom.
27:19
So I felt that my novel writing career began in earnest with
27:23
that. All of which brings us to where
27:26
we really want to be, I think, which is talking about the vinyl
27:28
detective. Absolutely.
27:30
So when? Because there's there's always a
27:34
bit of lag. But when did the idea kind of
27:37
strike you? When did you write the first
27:38
book and when did it ultimately get published?
27:41
So after, not after, but while Ben was at Waterstones working
27:46
for you, Ian, he was writing. He he always, obviously, he's a
27:51
writer. He's a great writer.
27:52
He wasn't destined to work in a bookshop.
27:54
He was destined to write stuff, great stuff.
27:57
He was working on a novel and he published it as a big best
28:00
seller. Hooray.
28:02
And it was really good. So I said to Ben, because we'd
28:06
been a couple of broke writers together, like, you know,
28:10
lending each other, like whoever had a credit card with some
28:14
credit left on it would pay for groceries for both of us.
28:17
That's the way it was. I mean, I'm not exaggerating
28:19
either. So he'd become a big success.
28:23
And I said, well, what's? I always quote this story, but
28:25
it's worth quoting. I said what?
28:30
What is the secret? Because I've been trying to
28:31
write, but like I'd deliberately, I'd sat down and
28:33
deliberately tried to write big best sellers.
28:36
Oh, this would be great. This would be a huge best
28:37
seller. And of course that's not the way
28:40
to do it. Because Ben said what you need
28:42
to do is not try and second guess the marketplace or write
28:45
what you imagine people will want.
28:47
You have to write what you genuinely yourself love and
28:51
write. Write about that.
28:53
I thought, well, I genuinely love, you know, record
28:55
collecting and vinyl and hi-fi. And all this and jazz and all
28:59
this stuff. So I thought, OK, what about a
29:02
record collector turned sleuth, the vinyl detective.
29:05
So that's how that came about. And I sat down and I wrote the
29:08
first novel. And I remember thinking at the
29:11
time that this is the novel that I could, as always, I was broke
29:15
and I was up against it. I just thought, I've got got to
29:18
write the book. That'll be my big breakthrough.
29:20
And so there was so much writing on this book.
29:23
Like my entire. I felt my entire life depended
29:26
on this book. And I actually had an agent at
29:28
the time because I've had phases when I haven't had an agent.
29:30
And I had a very powerful, important agent, Julian Friedman
29:34
at Blake Friedman. So I sent him this novel.
29:37
She was going to be a huge best seller and change my life.
29:40
And Julian didn't read it for six months.
29:44
I'm looking at six months to the day before he got back to me and
29:47
like. Can you begin to imagine what it
29:49
was like waiting during that time?
29:51
Like. And so the only way I could keep
29:53
my sanity was to occupy myself by writing the next novel.
29:59
I thought, I'll write the next novel in the series.
30:00
I couldn't occupy my mind. And I did that and it turned out
30:03
rather well. And when I finished the second
30:06
round, I thought, well, I might as well do a third now, by which
30:09
time several things had happened.
30:11
Julian had read the novel and didn't like it much.
30:14
And. Often when you're a writer, I've
30:17
been a writer and and an editor, a script editor, but basically
30:21
an editor. So I've worked both sides.
30:23
I've been a poacher and a gamekeeper, and you often run up
30:26
this against these people who say that they don't like
30:29
something you've written, but either they can't tell you why
30:32
or they proceed to tell you why, but everything they're saying
30:35
is, can I say bullshit? Absolutely you can.
30:37
Everything they're saying is bullshit, not because they
30:41
aren't sincere in. Feeling there's something wrong,
30:43
but they can't articulate what's wrong.
30:45
And very destructively they feel they have to say something and
30:48
give you some pointers. So they say all this stuff which
30:51
means nothing because like they might have done at Robert McKee
30:53
course if you're a screenwriter and this they tell you all these
30:56
things, you know at the halfway turning points in the wrong
30:58
place, you know like nonsense. But they feel they have to say
31:01
something which is stupid. So what you have to do is you
31:03
have to think number one, are they right?
31:07
Is there something wrong with it?
31:08
And if. If there is, you have to kind of
31:11
work out what's wrong with it with no help from them.
31:14
So I thought, OK, he did say one thing that gave me a bit of a
31:17
clue. There was a section that was as
31:19
a diary or as a letter, and he felt that went on too long.
31:21
But basically the book went on way too long.
31:25
So the book was huge because it's like the wise you get
31:29
ambitious and you want to write a huge book, big, successful
31:31
book. So I cut.
31:34
And I'm not exaggerating about 30,000 words out of it.
31:36
And as is so often the case with my own writing, if it doesn't
31:40
work, it often just needs take a bunch of stuff away and what's
31:43
left does work. So, So there's way better
31:47
streamlined version. And by this time it also the
31:51
third novel. So my agent had three novels and
31:54
he couldn't sell them. He didn't particularly want to
31:56
sell them. He wasn't really.
31:57
He kept trying to pitch them as a noir, but they're not a noir,
32:01
I mean. The only noir thing about them
32:03
is that they've got a first person narrator.
32:05
Really. They're cosy.
32:06
They're cosy crime. And he couldn't wrap his head
32:09
around and he couldn't sell them.
32:10
He couldn't sell them. He just he didn't really care
32:11
and he just gave up. And sometimes having a
32:14
high-powered agent isn't a good thing because although on paper
32:17
it looks great, they're going to be consumed with all their
32:19
high-powered clients. They're not going to be consumed
32:21
with nurturing you and getting your career started.
32:25
But so those books, I had those three books.
32:28
And I was going to write the 4th and I just thought, what am I
32:30
doing? And I just felt like I was a
32:33
lunatic making paper dolls, right?
32:35
You know, like. Here's another one like nobody
32:37
cares. I thought, so I shouldn't have.
32:39
I should have kept writing the 4th book because I eventually
32:42
had to write it anyway and it would have saved me some time if
32:44
I had written. So I had three books on the
32:47
shelf and that was it. There was nothing.
32:48
But what I did do is I showed some friends the books as PDFs
32:53
and a couple of friends. I mean, it's not fun reading
32:55
APDF, but a couple of friends did.
32:57
And one of my friends who did is this lovely guy called Guy Adams
33:00
who's a writer himself. And he sort we sort of talked
33:04
about maybe doing a project together and it didn't quite
33:07
come off. But we always stayed in touch.
33:09
The one day he said to me, there's this new editor at Titan
33:12
Books called Miranda Jewess. She's there, edits the Crime
33:15
line, the crime fiction. And I think she'd quite like, I
33:19
think she'd like the vinyl detective.
33:20
Aren't you Senator? So I sent her an e-mail saying,
33:23
obviously saying Guy Adams, since yesterday, I get in touch,
33:27
he's, I've got this book, we'd like to take a look at it.
33:29
And she emailed me back saying, of course I'll take a look at
33:32
it, but I have to let you know I'm about to start jury service,
33:35
so be prepared for a long silence.
33:38
I sent the book and she got back to say, oh, jury service was
33:41
cancelled, right. So sure, the book.
33:43
And she said, oh, I like it. And I said well.
33:47
I have to break it to you. There's two more of them.
33:50
She said, God bless her. She said, send me the other two
33:53
books. And I sent her the other two
33:56
books. And then she got in touch and
33:58
she told she's These are the 2 greatest sentences any writer
34:02
can ever hear. She said we want to publish the
34:04
books. We don't want any changes.
34:07
Can you imagine how wonderful it is to hear that?
34:09
It was just so great. So I I feel an enormous love for
34:12
Miranda Jews welling up in me now.
34:15
But if not for well, I suppose, if not for Benaroynovich, Guy
34:19
Adams. Miranda, Jewess, No Vinyl
34:21
Detective. So.
34:22
And that we published the three books.
34:25
The 4th book came along and I'd started writing it, and I kind
34:32
of wish I'd gone on writing it, because although I had the story
34:34
in my head, I couldn't just pick up where I'd left off.
34:36
I'll tell you what it was like, Ian.
34:39
They used. There's often these
34:40
documentaries on TV in England, I'm sure everywhere about people
34:44
who want to build their dream house like this.
34:46
We're going to build our dream house, right?
34:48
And before in the nightmare that was Brexit, let's not get into
34:52
that. But obviously it's a shit show
34:54
beyond description that you used to be able to do this thing.
34:56
You could order. I think it was called the hoof
34:58
house. Basically, you order a house
35:00
from Germany, right? These guys from Germany come
35:02
over with this house pre, sort of, and they put it together,
35:05
they German crafts and build your house.
35:07
They bring the stuff out and you've got a house right?
35:09
The only thing the British have people have to do is they have
35:13
to pour the concrete for it, right?
35:15
So they they had. To that's all the British
35:18
workmen had to pour the concrete.
35:20
And they came and they pour the concrete.
35:21
They didn't have enough concrete, right?
35:22
Oh, we're going to go go back and get some more concrete.
35:25
The problem with concrete when it sets is.
35:28
You've got these two batches and a concrete, and there's going to
35:29
be like this crack down the middle.
35:31
And that's just an extended metaphor to what happened to my
35:34
book. I'd poured the concrete and I'd
35:36
come back four years later, like there's no way I could pour a
35:38
second batch and it was going to.
35:40
So I sort of had to start again. But it was fine.
35:42
I mean, I it was much the same novel as it would have been, but
35:45
I think it was better because I knew more about what I was doing
35:48
by now. So that was the 4th one which
35:51
was called. Flip back.
35:53
Yeah. Yeah.
35:55
On the island, they just said the one because people love that
35:57
island. I just said the one on the
35:58
island. Yeah, I mean, I so as a as a
36:02
reader, as a fan of these books, I absolutely didn't notice much
36:06
of A tonal shift that you might have expected if the writer had
36:10
had a break of a, you know, an extended.
36:12
Break I think I rewrote the front end, but I just there's
36:17
not really much of A spoiler. It begins with our heroes
36:22
visiting this rock star and somebody comes to assassinate
36:24
the rock star. So I'd sort of done a version of
36:27
that. I think I just rewrote the
36:28
version of that and then carried on.
36:29
But that's as far as I'd gone. But I always had that, what I'm
36:32
going to call the KLF notion of what it was about, which is
36:36
people may not remember the KLF was this crazy wild band and
36:39
they burned 1,000,000 lbs dollars.
36:41
They did. Whichever one it was, it was a
36:44
lot of money. They just burnt it.
36:45
They burned it. Like there's a kind of crazy
36:47
work of art, like a a living installation.
36:50
Anyway, they did that, so I thought, wow.
36:52
Let's write about a band that did that.
36:54
That's what I did. So I think as I think when the
36:59
first couple of books came out, I was, I was working for Virgin
37:03
Megastore, I was living in Dubai at the time and I was their
37:06
buyer and we we took them in. The hard sell for me was that
37:13
cosy crime wasn't really a thing in the Middle East because
37:16
everyone's kind of, you know, under the age of 40 and.
37:21
You know, it's not but what I but what struck me immediately
37:24
about the books was that they had this phenomenal appeal in
37:28
that they were cosy crime, which was and I can't remember the
37:32
exact timeline of which TV shows came along when, but I think by
37:36
then it was a fairly well cemented.
37:39
Genre that was gaining popularity, but it was by a man
37:42
about man's things like vinyl and cats.
37:47
And you know, it had a very feminine quality.
37:49
There was a love story, there were cats.
37:52
There was this desire for sort of coffee and inertia, which is
37:56
a very beautiful thing. And so it managed to appeal to
38:02
such a wide readership that as a bookseller.
38:06
You're able to pitch it to absolutely every market,
38:10
everyone that comes in your shop.
38:11
I do say sometimes warning may contain cats, but the cats, the
38:18
cats is an interesting thing because I was writing the books
38:20
and talking to Ben all the time because obviously he was.
38:23
I'd sort of started off as his mentor and now he was my mentor.
38:26
You know the, the, the. Student has become the master.
38:29
And I said, look, this guy is heavily based on me because it's
38:33
all low hanging fruit because then I don't have to do any
38:35
research like his hi-fi is my hi-fi, you know his
38:39
neighbourhood is my neighbourhood and so on and so
38:42
on. And and he said, are you going
38:44
to put your cats in it? I said that's a step too far,
38:47
I'm not going to put the cats in.
38:49
He said oh you got to put the cats in.
38:50
And he's right, because although the cats never feature majorly,
38:54
they're sort of. That kind of crucial piece of
38:57
the puzzle, and it's just, it just adds something to it.
39:00
And also, they're not. They're cats, Jim, but not as we
39:03
know them because they're not like, foolishly cutesy cats.
39:06
Anybody who's really owned the cat will recognize the cat
39:09
shenanigans that ensue. Yeah.
39:11
And so I included the cats. And the other thing is you
39:15
touched on his relationship with Nevada.
39:18
And so our hero is for anybody who doesn't know which is most
39:21
people listening to. This, our hero, is kind of a
39:23
nerd. He's sort of like a geek, but
39:27
he's lucked out. He's married.
39:28
This not married because they're not married.
39:30
He's living with this fantastic, beautiful woman.
39:33
And the thing I'm very proud about that is in the first book,
39:38
it was a classic detective story in which a beautiful, mysterious
39:41
woman knocks on the door and she brings a case to our hero.
39:45
So that was Nevada in the first. And she starts off as like the
39:48
femme fatale. But then because there's there's
39:51
two kinds of detectives. Well, mostly most detectives are
39:55
are twisted loners, right. But there's a very rare other
39:59
kind of detective who's a double act like Nick and Nora Charles,
40:02
you know, or I think Macmillan and wife.
40:04
So, you know, the husband and wife team.
40:06
So I did this thing which I'm very proud of.
40:09
Which is sort of in the first book.
40:10
The first book was kind of a Dashiell Hammett novel like The
40:12
Maltese Falcon with the lone detective and and the
40:15
mysterious, beautiful, morally ambiguous woman who brings a
40:18
case to him. And then they get together.
40:21
And from the second book on it's Nick and Nora Charles, which is
40:23
another The Thin Man. It's another Dashiell Hammett
40:28
detective story about about a married couple who get along
40:30
really well and have a great time together and so mysteries.
40:33
So it it and it's making them a team.
40:38
Like that was really great. And I love the fact that it went
40:40
from one kind of crime, classic crime novel to another.
40:44
And it's not just that, it's the two of them.
40:47
They got their little gang of friends, a little Scooby gang of
40:49
friends. And that when people talk to me
40:51
about the books and loving the books and the great thing about
40:54
social media is that that can happen, that's what they always
40:57
cite. There's always the characters
40:59
and it's, I always ask you, the favorite characters and it is
41:02
always you can't, can't guess like some people it's tinkler,
41:06
some people it's Nevada, you know it's never stinky.
41:10
Who's sort of like? No, no one likes Stinky Stammer.
41:14
But I do have to say I've just started a new series of novels.
41:18
Do you know anything about this? So I have seen advance preamble,
41:23
but do tell, do tell us all about well, the reason I just
41:27
mentioned Stinky Stammer who's like the bet noir of our hero.
41:30
He's sort of a media whore. Well, this is the protect.
41:34
This is a very closely related series.
41:37
It's about a fan of vintage paper because more like though
41:41
hanging fruit. I thought, what else do I love
41:42
besides records? I love vintage paperbacks.
41:45
So I've created a sleuth who is deals in vintage paperbacks, and
41:51
I thought, I thought about the various changes I could make.
41:54
So it's a woman protagonist That's different.
41:57
Instead of being told the first person, it's told what they call
42:00
a close third person. Which means Cordelia wasn't
42:03
happy about the situation, but she knew she was going to have
42:06
to go through the door and into the room anyway.
42:08
So you're talking about what's in her head, but it's not like I
42:11
was waiting outside the door. I could hardly bring myself to
42:13
turn the knob. It's not first person that's
42:15
that's different. She this is all very
42:18
mechanically and she likes dogs instead of cats.
42:23
And here's the the big twist is like she she's very our hero in
42:27
the Vinyl detective there. He's quite a straight arrow.
42:30
He's like quite a Boy Scout. I mean, not to a tedious extent,
42:34
but he's very morally unwavering.
42:36
Whereas there's much more grey tones in the Cordelia, Cordelia
42:42
is she doesn't hesitate to bend the rules and break them and
42:47
she's quite a naughty girl. And knowing all this, it may not
42:50
surprise you to learn that she's Stinky Stammer's sister.
42:54
She's called Julia Stammer. Yeah, and she obviously she
42:57
hates Stinky too. And that part of her problem,
42:59
part of the reason that she's a bit of a a bad hat, is because
43:04
she had to grow up with Stinky. Right.
43:06
But anyway, so that's all kind of sideline won't mean anything
43:08
to anybody who doesn't know the Vinyl detective.
43:10
But anybody who does that might not only reassure them that
43:16
there's overlaps with the world of the vinyl detective.
43:18
It's also an important signal that it's different.
43:21
Because I think some people might be scandalized by some of
43:24
the goings on and and the way that our heroine behaves in
43:26
these books. But if anybody is, and they
43:28
don't like the paperback sleuth, they can just rest easy because
43:32
there's another vinyl detective novel on the way.
43:34
It's going to come out late because this book is sort of in
43:38
the publishers schedules has preempted the next vinyl
43:41
detective novel, but in about it, within 12 months from now
43:45
I'm hoping that there will be a vinyl that there should be vinyl
43:48
Detective novel out, another vinyl Detective and another one
43:51
of the paperback sleuths. And then from now on there
43:54
should be 1. They're both on a yearly cycle,
43:57
so every year there should be another book in the series for
43:59
people in both series. That's incredible.
44:02
So you're going to essentially become Agatha Christie with your
44:06
Miss Marple and your Poirot. That's a great way of putting
44:09
it. But she she did write more than
44:11
two a year, didn't she? She was quite.
44:13
She probably did. I feel like she managed to get
44:15
through about one a week. There were so many of them.
44:18
Agatha Christie is really a really good writer.
44:22
Like, seriously good. And my novel, the one that's the
44:29
punk one, Oh yeah, that was that was called.
44:33
Low action, Right. Low action.
44:35
That was I deliberately said about each time I write one of
44:38
these, my final detective books. These days I try and think, what
44:43
kind of crime novel do I want it to?
44:44
Because there's all different kinds of crime novels.
44:46
This is a little bit, just to mention my favorite crime writer
44:49
of all time, a guy called John D McDonald.
44:51
He wrote a series about a character called Travis McGee,
44:54
and they're great books. And he wrote 21 books.
44:57
And The thing is, the 21st book is as good as the first, maybe
45:00
better, actually definitely better.
45:01
So the quality never flagged. But in an interview, he said
45:04
this really insightful thing. He said, I don't think of the
45:07
Travis McGee books, his 21 crime novel.
45:08
He said, like one of them is a Horror Story.
45:11
You know, one of them is a mystery, one of them is a
45:13
thriller. So he saw them in different
45:15
terms. To suit the story.
45:17
So when I wrote Victory Disc, which is the third violent
45:21
detective novel, one with the green cover, I've been reading a
45:24
lot of Colonel Woolrich, who was a Golden Age crime writer best
45:28
known now for Hitchcock's Rear Window.
45:31
The the, the presiding characteristics of a Colonel
45:34
Woolrich novel were that terrible things happened to the
45:38
protagonist, like they would get buried alive or something like
45:41
that. And the suspense was unbearable.
45:43
So in Victory Disk, I've deliberately put in two set
45:47
pieces, which were in the manner of Colonel Woolrich, where
45:50
terrible things happen to the people involved.
45:53
And so I often would think, what kind of crime novel is this?
45:57
And when I wrote Low Action, I thought, I'm going to do an
45:59
Agatha Christie. I'm going to, but there are many
46:01
kinds of Agatha Christie. I'm going to do the crime where
46:06
you set up a whole bunch of interesting suspects.
46:09
You know one of them is the killer or the would be killer,
46:12
but you don't know which one is and they're all equally
46:14
plausible. And the other thing was it
46:20
wasn't a book about looking for the killers like somebody had
46:24
killed somebody. Somebody was going to kill
46:26
somebody. And you've got all these
46:28
prospective people who who are the would be killer.
46:31
And this guy called Ed Young, who I've known for, I knew
46:36
because he wanted to be a writer and doctor whom we stayed in
46:38
touch and he's this great guy. He said were you reading Peril
46:42
at end House when you wrote this And I was that.
46:44
It was completely and like there's virtually no similarity.
46:48
But at the same time, it is totally my take on peril at End
46:52
House by Agatha Christie, which I thought was incredibly
46:54
insightful of him and all. Which is to say I love Agatha
46:58
Christie. And if you like Agatha Christie,
46:59
that was my Agatha Christie Vinyl detective novel.
47:02
Oh, and just to roll back a bit, when my first agent, Julian
47:07
Friedman, was trying to sell the vinyl detector and he couldn't
47:10
sell it and didn't really know how to sell it, everybody wanted
47:13
Scandi Noir, what I called Danish disembowelment, right.
47:17
I said it wasn't Danish disembowelment.
47:19
It was a cosy crime. But I thought, you know what?
47:21
You can't beat him. Join him.
47:22
So I wrote it. Scandi noir.
47:24
So Book 6 and the final detective is in fact it's my
47:29
Scandi. No, I want.
47:30
It's all with the purple cover. OV Yeah.
47:33
Attack and decay, Which thank you very much here.
47:36
Yeah. And I think that's the best in
47:38
the series. If somebody wants to jump in and
47:40
just read one novel, now don't start with the first one,
47:43
because I don't necessarily think the first book in a series
47:45
is the best book. I know it sounds strange, but
47:48
there's not such a strong element of Cyril that you need
47:50
that. And I'm keenly aware of Patrick
47:52
O'Brien, who wrote the Aubrey matching books.
47:54
They're about seafaring adventures in the Napoleonic
47:57
Wars. If you read the first Aubrey
48:00
Matcher novel, you may never read another one because it's
48:02
not that great. It's kind of turgid.
48:04
But if you jump in anywhere else in the series, you'll be
48:06
completely enchanted. Then you can go back and read
48:08
the first one, knowing the characters.
48:10
You'll enjoy it, but it's not a good one to start with by any
48:12
means. And although I don't feel that's
48:14
a problem with my book or which is just to say you can jump in
48:17
with any of them, and I'd recommend Attack and Decay.
48:20
And if anybody's a sound engineer, they'll know what that
48:23
title actually has a meaning. It's not just a cool title, it
48:25
actually refers to audio engineering stuff.
48:28
But yeah, so I wrote. That was my Scandi Noir.
48:32
Well, I mean it's so it's it's very reassuring to hear that the
48:37
vinyl detective. Is ongoing and that what's your
48:42
heroine in the other books called?
48:44
Her name is Cordelius Cordelia. She's the paper paperback sleuth
48:48
Cordelius. And of course, the Vinyl
48:50
Detective doesn't have a name. No, I always wonder if you're
48:54
going to subtly drop in that his name is, I don't know, Kandru
48:58
Art Mel or something like that. No, I'm not the first guy to do
49:03
this. Dashiell Hammett did with the
49:05
Continental OP never had a name, and Len Dayton did with his spy
49:11
the Nameless operative. You can do it if you've got a
49:13
first person narrator, because his name doesn't have to come
49:17
up. It's always me or I and people
49:19
say, oh, it's you. It's not not at all difficult to
49:23
tap dance around not saying his name.
49:26
But as with Len Dayton, if there's ever an adaptation for
49:29
the screen, they're going to want a name.
49:31
And I've got one worked out and it's fine.
49:33
And I'm not going to be precious about it.
49:35
So he will have a name when and if he appears on screen.
49:38
And I say on screen because I think television is the way to
49:41
go rather than the movies for for my book.
49:44
So I'd like. To Yeah, this this is a this is
49:47
a Sunday night. 7730, that kind of time slot, I think kind of
49:53
ongoing. I think it could easily happen
49:55
easily be very successful, but it just needs.
49:57
I mean we've had interests and at least two sort of serious
50:03
meetings with people who were genuinely interested in.
50:05
One of them wanted to do it and their offer was we want to do
50:09
it. We don't want to give you any
50:11
money for it. We want to change everything and
50:13
we don't want you to be involved.
50:14
And I said, oh, you know what, that's not such a great deal.
50:17
I think I'm going to say no. They're like, what?
50:20
How could you say no to our great deal?
50:23
So. There you go.
50:24
I mean it's not, it's not the best offer, is it?
50:28
No. And but I think it will
50:30
eventually happen and especially if my friend Ben's Rivers of
50:34
London series which keeps coming like there's I think there's
50:37
been four or five like proper serious production companies
50:41
have optioned it and like you know tried to get on screen
50:44
that. I think that will eventually
50:45
happen. And if that does happen, that
50:47
will only make it easier for my stuff to happen, because I'll
50:49
have a friend who's got a successful television series,
50:51
which never hurts. If you're trying to get your
50:53
stuff on television, the best is called Vinyl
51:09
Detective Radio, and you can find it on a platform called
51:13
Reclaimed Radio. It's also on Midway Pride Radio,
51:16
but Reclaimed Radio has a better system for archiving the shows
51:22
and accessing them. So Reclaimed Radio, Vinyl
51:24
Detective Radio. And if anybody wants to bar, go
51:27
out and find the Vinyl Detective LP.
51:28
There's a Vinyl Detective LP of music you didn't know that it's
51:32
classic jazz tracks plus especially written theme Vinyl
51:36
Detective Theme by my buddy Joe Kramer, who's a Hollywood
51:39
composer, and I play his theme at the top and tail of my show
51:43
every week. So do TuneIn at some point if
51:46
you. And it's not just jazz I haste
51:48
to do have. Although I'm a jazz nut, there's
51:50
not a lot of jazz being played at the moment.
51:52
There's perhaps a couple of tracks per show.
51:54
There's everything. And it's really good stuff.
52:24
Hello again so. When is a Doctor Who novel not a
52:29
Doctor Who novel? Well, when it's written by
52:32
author of The Master Plan, Andrew Cartmell, surprisingly.
52:36
Welcome to Cat's Cradle Warhead, which doesn't feature a cradle,
52:42
what you would traditionally call a warhead, or anything at
52:45
all to do with the previous novel.
52:47
In this so-called trilogy, it barely even features a cat or
52:51
once again, the title of character.
52:54
Yeah, it does turn out to be a complex and at times gripping
52:57
novel, although not without his flaws.
53:01
This is the manipulative chess master incarnation of the Doctor
53:04
after all, so it kind of makes sense that he stays in the
53:07
background, popping up now and again to say something.
53:10
Eddie Malik and then disappearing just so he keeps
53:13
his plans on track. Also, no aliens, monsters,
53:16
renegade Time Lords, or any other such malarkey.
53:19
Apart from the telekinetic powers.
53:21
It's almost more of a techno thriller heist novel.
53:24
So in this bleak, dystopian world of the near future, one
53:28
which depressingly doesn't seem that far fetched, the bulk of
53:31
the story falls on Ace, unsupporting characters and what
53:35
an interesting bunch they are. Unlike Times Crucible, where I
53:39
couldn't have cared less about the fate of the bunch of misfits
53:42
caught up in the Doctor's wake, here Carmel introduces us to a
53:45
living, breathing people with lives and histories and
53:48
problems, vignettes that. Often lasts a few scanned pages
53:52
and when some of them are gone as quick as they're introduced.
53:55
Take Maria the Cleaner for example.
53:57
You generally miss them. Reviewers often talk about world
54:01
building, but this is proof of an author who's great at
54:03
character building. But it's the bits in between the
54:07
character moments which I was lesson numbered of.
54:10
Let's get the matter of Justine's drug fuelled
54:13
hallucination out of the way first.
54:16
Severed heads rolling into toilet urinals.
54:19
I'm sorry, what? And given where this early the
54:22
new adventures range, I'm not sure.
54:24
I can quite believe that the ace of the TV series could hire and
54:28
command a score of hardened Kurdish mercenaries, take part
54:32
in a mass shootout, and happily wander around naked.
54:36
But it works. I guess it's certainly
54:39
action-packed. What's slightly more
54:42
problematical is the fact that the Doctor seems to be quite
54:44
cruel in the way he uses people. He lets people die.
54:49
He abandons poor Maria, he allows Bobby Prescott to be
54:51
murdered by a gang of St. folks that the Doctor himself has
54:54
hired and he uses Vincent and Justine as his ultimate weapon,
54:58
regardless of the danger it puts them in.
55:01
OK, so maybe the ends justify the means and and don't get me
55:04
wrong, I certainly enjoy characters that have a perhaps
55:07
more Gray coloured moral compass.
55:10
It's just not how I'd expect the character of the Doctor to
55:12
behave. This is a well written novel.
55:16
Yeah, some interesting things to say about the direction we could
55:19
be heading in as a society. He's a well realised supporting
55:22
cast and it cleverly pulls together a whole host of
55:25
seemingly disparate threads into a cohesive finale.
55:29
By those standards, it's a successful and enjoyable book.
55:32
But as I said at the start, I'm not entirely sure it's a Doctor
55:36
Who book.