City of Death City of Death TSV novelisation

Target Books Doctor Who - City of Death Abridged paperback

Author	James Goss
Published	2018
ISBN	0 425 28391 2
First Edition Cover	Anthony Dry

Back cover blurb: "You're tinkering with time. That's always a bad idea unless you know what you're doing." The Doctor takes Romana for a holiday in Paris - a city which, like a fine wine, has a bouquet all its own. Especially if you visit during one of the vintage years. But the TARDIS takes them to 1979, a table-wine year, a year whose vintage is soured by cracks - not in their wine glasses but in the very fabric of time itself. Soon the Time Lords are embroiled in an audacious alien scheme which encompasses home-made time machines, the theft of the Mona Lisa, the resurrection of the much-feared Jagaroth race, and the beginning (and quite possibly the end) of all life on Earth. Aided by British private detective Duggan, whose speciality is thumping people, the Doctor and Romana must thwart the machinations of the suave, mysterious Count Scarlioni - all twelve of him - if the human race has any chance of survival. But then, the Doctor's holidays tend to turn out a bit like this.

• Better than Table Vintage by Jason A. Miller

Better than Table Vintage by Jason A. Miller 12/1/20

Prologue: Obligatory Douglas Adams Quote

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone publishes a novelization of City of Death, the Universe will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Five times before.

I. Five. Yes, Which You Then Brick Up in a Cellar in Paris

First, what we already know. City of Death is one of the handful of Classic Series Doctor Who episodes that did not got novelized for the Target range, in this case because Douglas Adams became super-wealthy at the tail end of his tenure as script editor, such that the li'l publishing house could no longer afford his going rate. He wound up cannibalizing bits of his old Who scripts for other projects (most notably Shada and Krikkitmen), and so fandom would never get to read his adaptation of City of Death, widely regarded as his best Who story.

Of course, to say that City of Death is Adams' best story is to damn Adams with glowing praise. Bear in mind that he didn't so much "write" City of Death, as rewrite David Fisher's original pitch in a single weekend, while taking liberal suggestions from producer Graham Williams and director Michael Hayes. The episode was written as a rush job, and perhaps became perfection merely by accident.

But, at any rate, we never got to read this story in print until... well, until the four other times before now. The New Zealand TSV line put out two separate David Lawrence adaptations of the story for the hard-core fans (and Lawrence, in his foreword to the TSV version, says he's now novelized the thing three full times), and then James Goss wrote a full-length, officially licensed hardback edition of the thing in 2015.

So now comes the fourth version: Goss' abridged paperback version, put out in 2018 to join the relaunched Target imprint (now a division of BBC books), coming out alongside four New Series novelizations.

Five novelizations of City of Death? One more, and then we can brick all six copies up in a cellar in Paris, travel back in time, get Douglas Adams to novelize one, hang that in the Louve, steal the original, and sell all seven. There are at least seven people in my address book who'd pay millions for that their private collection. It would be an expensive gloat, but they'd buy it.

I have the second edition of the Lawrence adaptation and have skimmed it, but have never read it all the way through. I also have the hardcover Goss edition, which I have never read, but which I have heard on audiobook, as read by Lalla Ward (Romana II). Back in 2015 when I worked a 20-minute walk from my daughter's kindergarten class, I'd listen to the audiobook for a total of 40 minutes each day, occasionally walking down crowded Brooklyn thoroughfares, with noisy cars drowning out my enjoyment of the story.

II. The Paintings Went Down Very Well

I recently bought novelization #5 -- the Goss paperback -- at The Who Shop during my first trip to London, in August 2018. Coincidentally, I'd just been over to Paris the day before, where I'd visited the Eiffel Tower second-floor observation deck -- yes, the same one used for filming City of Death. I took enough video from the deck to pair it up with Dudley Simpson's iconic Gershwin-esque City of Death score, and quoted about half the story to myself, taking special delight in standing where actor Tom Chadbon stood as the Doctor shouted "BYE BYE, DUGGAN" from down below. I plowed through the novelization on my flight back to the States the day after purchase.

So here's what you need to know about the paperback Target-imprint Goss novelization. This is not a brand-new work by Goss, it's merely an abridgement of his 2015 hardcover. The book has been restructured so that it's no longer 20 chapters spread out over four parts. It's now a Target-standard 12 chapters long (with the cliffhangers coming at the ends of chapters 3, 6, and 9, of course), and the surviving chapters have different titles from the hardcover. The new titles are classic Target, with a twist: the prologue is "Escapes to Dangers", the plural form of Terrance Dicks' favorite chapter title; "Sentenced to Death" and "A Kind of Victory" will also be familiar to long-time Target connoisseurs.

The remaining text is basically identical to Goss' 2015 work, except that only scenes from the TV episode remain. The hardback contained tons of extraneous material, including an extended prologue in which the Doctor and Scaroth visited a number of historical personages, setting the pieces of the story in motion. We learned from the hardcover that Hermann was a young Nazi officer during the war and that the Countess was named Heidi, the bored daughter of a rich Swiss banker who helped Scarlioni steal her father's fortune (which in turn was presumably stolen from Nazi victims). We meet more of the sidewalk-cafe artist from Part One, and the character who became John Cleese in Part Four. The latter two characters have several additional scenes woven throughout the book, which I found more exhausting than amusing when I was listening to the audiobook 20 minutes at a time. The slimmed-down paperback is thus a faithful adaptation of the TV story, with every scene intact and reasonably faithful to the original, but missing all of Goss' own inventions (some of which was adapted from Adams' original notes, but none of which made it to TV)

III. If They Have to X-Ray it to Find Out if it's Good or Not

The Goss paperback is, in the larger sense, un-put-down-able. I mean, you can't ever go wrong novelizing City of Death.

Some caveats, though. Goss is in full-on Douglas Adams mode, so the humor of the authorial voice often intrudes upon the narrative. For the most part, though, his dry wit comments on the action rather than talking over it, and you really can't flip past a page without finding some keen line in the prose. Some examples:

• Paris had a venerable history of ignoring tourists seeking attention. - Page 34
• The Doctor did some of his best thinking at gunpoint, especially on his way down to a dungeon. - Page 59
• [The Count] was wearing a fabulously expensive dressing gown and covering his prisoners with a rather lovely gun. - Page 84
• The Count smiled at [Kerensky] with the benevolence of a snake. - Page 112
• "Oh, do be quiet," the Count said, annoyed that he'd ever taught these humans language in the first place. - Page 140
• It was a very lovely day. The sun was shining like there was no tomorrow. Which, for anyone in this entire world, there wasn't. - Page 169

I do wish the book had included more of a travelogue on Paris, as I started reading the paperback only a day after I'd left the original (humming, as I've already said, Dudley Simpson all the while). In his afterword to the hardcover, Goss credits someone for having shown him around Paris, but he still makes a mistake literally on page 7, placing the observation deck at "the top" of the tower, even though the one used on TV was the second floor deck, which is barely halfway up the structure. The book does give a Wikipedia-eye view of how Paris is laid out, but I would have liked some more observational humor about what it's actually like jogging through Paris.

Goss incorporates some hilarious Adams stage directions from the rehearsal scripts, and also leaves some lines as they were before rehearsal, when Tom Baker and Lalla Ward and Julian Glover changed them for dramatic impact. Most of the final TV dialogue is intact here, although Romana loses her "I was never any good at geometry" zinger, this line being rolled back to the Doctor in the book. That was a bit annoying. But the "You're a beautiful woman, probably", remains intact, even though that's not how Adams wrote the line.

IV. Divorced From its Function and Seen Purely as a Piece of Art

In City of Death terms, I can't quite say that the paperback adaptation of Goss' novelization is "exquisite, simply exquisite". But it's definitely more than just a table wine. It complements the TV story nicely, as it adds texture to Scaroth's villainy, the Doctor's zaniness and Duggan's bullish... well, bullish everything. The prose is often hilarious, although, as Adams did so often, Goss will often stop the story to bombard the reader with bluntly acidic asides.

The book is still no replacement for watching City of Death, visiting Paris yourself, and having a quick stagger down the Champs-Elysees whistling Dudley Simpson before you grab that quick bite at Maxim's. But it's a worthy effort, even though we've seen it four times before, and even if this version won't fetch as much as the Gainsborough.