City of Death Doctor Who - City of Death Doctor Who - City of Death (abridged paperback)

TSV Books Doctor Who and the City of Death

Author	David Lawrence
Published	1992
Cover	Alistair Hughes

Back cover blurb: When the Doctor and Romana take a break from their travels in Paris 1979, a holiday is far from what they get. Strange things are happening: lost art treasures are turning up, secret experiments are causing distortions in time, and the greatest art fraud in history is about to reach its fruition. When the time travellers team up with Duggan, a British detective, they learn that everything points to Count Carlos Scarlioni, a wealthy and famous art collector who is somehow much, much more than he seems... If Scarlioni is allowed to succeed, his plans will result in all life on Earth ceasing to have ever existed...

• The Art of the Matter by Andrew Feryok
• The Play's the Thing by Jason A. Miller

The Art of the Matter by Andrew Feryok 25/2/13

There was disbelief in Duggan's voice. "But its a fake! You can't hang a fake Mona Lisa in the Louvre!" ... "How can it be a fake if Leonardo painted it?" asked the Doctor.
Duggan scowled "With the words 'this is a fake' written on the canvas in felt-tip pen?"
The Doctor nodded "Yes, but it doesn't affect what it looks like!"
Duggan sighed, infuriated "It doesn't matter what it looks like!"
The Doctor raised an eyebrow "Doesn't it? Some people would say that was the whole point of a painting."
"But they'll find out!" protested Duggan. "They'll x-ray it!"
"Serves them right!" snapped the Doctor. "If they have to x-ray a painting to find out whether its good or not, they might as well have it painted by a computer."
- The Doctor and Duggan, Doctor Who and the City of Death, Epilogue, Page 81.

I want to say straight off that I stole my review title from one of the chapter headings of David Lawrence's novelization of City of Death. But I thought it was so hilarious that I just had to reuse it!

City of Death is one of those stories that is considered by just about everyone on the planet as one of the very best Doctor Who stories of all time. Back in September 2009, it was one of four runners up for the official Doctor Who Magazine ranking list for Doctor Who episodes. It ultimately ended up not in the top four but in the top ten out of 200 stories! City of Death is quite possibly the most perfect expression of what Graham Williams was trying to do with Doctor Who: make it funny, but also intelligent and dramatic. So many of the stories of the time lost this balance and usually became too silly to be taken seriously in any way. But City of Death was one of the few that stood proud and said you can have action-adventure, mind-bending temporal plots, and hilarious characters and dialogue all at the same time and make it look classy. Sadly though, despite its enormous reputation, City of Death was one of five stories that was never adapted into a novelization by Target or Virgin. Douglas Adams hoped to adapt it, but ultimately never got around to it before his untimely death. As a result, it has been left up to fans to fill the gaps in the novelizations and that is where TSV publishers stepped in.

David Lawrence was the author of TSV's novelizations, but interestingly it was not originally a TSV project. David Lawrence originally started novelizing the story on his own and only hooked up with TSV when he heard about their other efforts to novelize stories. I have to admit that, after reading Doctor Who and The Pirate Planet, I thought this book was going to be really complex and a little bit daunting as the author would undertake altering the story heavily from the original. My fears were originally confirmed when the prologue and chapter 1 seemed to have very little to do with the original story. Only one scene involving Count Scarlioni and Kerensky arguing about funding the time travel experiments was familiar from Part 1 of that story. Otherwise, it was all new material setting up the characters of the story and telling the story of how the Doctor first heard of the Jagaroth in childhood while listening to his mentor K'Ampo. Chapters 2 and 3 get better as we finally encounter the Doctor and Romana, but there is still a lot of new material, mainly because so much of Part 1 of City of Death is taken up from the Doctor and Romana running around scenic Paris with no dialogue. Since this would make boring text to read, Lawrence instead invents new scenes and gags to fill in these spaces. It's in Chapter 4, though, when the Part 2 material kicks in, that the adaptation pretty much becomes exactly what we saw on TV screens and remains so until the very end.

David Lawrence's additions to the story are pretty good though. The prologue is fantastic as he marries continuity from the Jon Pertwee years involving the hermit K'Ampo and the New Adventures book Lungbarrow to create an interesting window into the Doctor's past. Although we can probably dismiss the Doctor's admission of being an orphan down to "fan fiction", it does all fit what most fans probably envisioned the Doctor's childhood to be: an angry orphan who escapes from his classes to go listen to fantastic stories of the outside universe from a kindly hermit in the hills. I also liked the ongoing argument David Lawrence created between the Doctor and Romana. It seems that the Doctor was trying to educate Romana in appreciating the artistic accomplishments of mankind. He starts by taking her to two performances of Hamlet, one in the present time and one during its original run in the 15th Century. Romana just sneers at it like a spoiled teenager complaining about the lack of special effects. The Doctor's attempts to educate her on the art of the spoken word falls on deaf ears, as if she just sitting in the audience bopping to herself on her MP3 player while ignoring the stage. When this fails, the Doctor decides to take her to Paris to show her artwork instead of plays. While Romana is impressed by the beauty of the city, she still snears at the artwork until finally the Doctor has a complete meltdown accusing her of being a philistine and completely art illiterate while she extols the virtues of artwork created by computers. These sections from the early part of the book are hilarious and they could have done the whole book like this and it would have been entertaining! It makes me wish that BBC Books had roped in David Lawrence to write a few Fourth Doctor books instead of continually handing it over to Chris Boucher.

But where City of Death really excels is in the characters and Lawrence captures them extremely well. Duggan's IQ seems to have sunk even lower in the novelization, but I think this is because we are denied the charisma of Tom Chadbon who gave a slight bit of intelligence to the character underneath all the brute smashing. While I really enjoyed the ending to City of Death in which the Doctor and Romana are seen running off aimlessly into the expanse of Paris, I like how the book ends on Duggan's character. For the first time in the book, he breaks into hearty laughter and the guy who couldn't understand art and hated people suddenly finds himself walking aimlessly through the city and seeing it anew as a place of wonder and beauty.

Count Scarlioni/Scaroth is still charming, evil and wonderful as usual. His henchman, Hermann, seems to have lost some intelligence as well. He is now a brute thug who delights in any opportunity to kill or torture people. On TV, the Countess tended to come across as a bit on edge and nervous at all times. But in the novelization, she is much more confident and more of the Count's equal. The Count also seems to have more feelings for his wife. On TV, he seemed to treat her as a slave and a tool for his ambitions. But in the book, he treats her much more as a partner and seems to really regret having to kill her at the end of the story as he really did have feelings for her. And the moment when she discovers the truth about him, you sense not only fear, but her heart breaking, since this was the man she loved and respected and he now turns out to be a green monstrosity.

If there is anything I disliked being added to the story, it was the scenes where the Doctor throws a birthday party in Leonardo DaVinci's studio and invites artists and historical figures from across history to celebrate. First of all, this breaks all kinds of rules of time, and it also seems incredibly unbelievable. Shakespeare, DaVinci, and Napoleon sharing a pint and discussing what they would do with a time machine? These scenes just seemed too silly and could not suspend my disbelief at all. But I will admit that I liked how DaVinci nearly punches out Duggan for not calling Florence "Florenz" which was a labored running gag that came to a hilarious conclusion with this gag.

On the whole, this is a marvelous novelization. David Lawrence really didn't need to add anything to the story since it holds up so well on its own, but what he does add for the most part does work very well. The novelization is very short though. Even though it has twelve chapters, a prologue and epilogue, each chapter is only about four pages long or so. A quick but highly entertaining read that does the TSV novelizations proud. 10/10

The Play's the Thing by Jason A. Miller 25/9/21

My August 2018 trip to Paris, my annual rewatch of City of Death, and last year's read-through of the abridged paperback Target release of the "official" James Goss novelization, at last led to me to the now-somewhat obsolete TSV fan novelization of that story, released first in the 1990s, and then rewritten and released in about 2002. It's tempting to try to not compare this work (the 2002 edition) with the Goss work, because one is officially licensed by the Douglas Adams estate, and the other likely had a total readership in the mid-three digits. However, reading the two in comparison has me more than a bit curious as to which one I'd keep in my "official" head canon.

David Lawrence is a Shakespearean actor from New Zealand, and he brings a distinctly Bardic flavor to his work. His foreword to the 2002 edition reveals that this is actually his third go at City of Death, with the first version having been heavily suffused in Douglas Adams-style humor, but with Lawrence revealing that he cut most of that out in favor of the Shakespeare. And, why not? City of Death is, after all, a story starring as the villain one of the great Shakespearean actors of his time, and quotes from the first draft of Hamlet... in the Doctor's own handwriting.

So while the Goss novelizations (both hardback and paperback) are consciously written in a Douglas Adams-ian style, the Lawrence novelization(s) are not. And that's the bolder choice. While Adams "wrote" City of Death, he wasn't the only writer -- he was working from a David Fisher script, which suggests a slightly different brand of humor, and he also had heavy input from Graham Williams and Michael Hayes, not to mention what changes the actors brought to the script during rehearsal. You don't NEED to write City of Death as an Adams pastiche... do you?

One major difference between the two novelizations is in their embellishments. Goss had the ability to work from the actual scripts and other archival material, his being the licensed work. Lawrence was working strictly from the episodes as aired, and his own imagination. It's Lawrence who decides that the various masks Scaroth wears in his human forms (Scarlioni, Tancredi, etc) are secreted by natural Jagaroth biology and that the masks periodically decay, thus explaining the Part One cliffhanger. Goss worked instead from Adams' notion that Scarlioni wasn't even always aware that he was an alien wearing a mask. Lawrence's interpretation is a little gross but probably works better, making more sense in the context of the story.

Writing when he did, Lawrence was heavily influenced by the New Adventures. His final chapter title, "The Death of Art", may not be a reference to arguably the worst NA of all time, but his prologue definitely owes its existence to Lungbarrow, the final 7th Doctor NA, in which the Doctor's childhood on Gallifrey is explained. Here, we see a young lapel-tapping William Hartnell Doctor escape his tutoring in order to visit K'Anpo the hermit (also from Planet of the Spiders), where he first learns the story of the Jagaroth. None of this was part of the author's original intent when City of Death was made, and none of the Lungbarrow stuff is really part of Doctor Who continuity anymore, anyway, but it's nice to think back on the time when the NAs were the center of our shared universe. Although, oddly, Lawrence doesn't elaborate on Romana's mention of "the Braxiatel Collection", which also became a biggish part of the NA/MA mythology.

When not borrowing from NA/Cartmel Masterplan-era lore, Lawrence cuts loose, and prefigures his Fourth Doctor as the figure Matt Smith would eventually become, someone cheerfully dipping into and out of Earth history, mixing and matching historical figures for fun. Chapter 1, named for a famous Casablanca quote, is mostly drawn from Lawrence's own imagination, and features the Doctor in Florence, in Leonardo's studio at the dawn of the 16th Century, partying with Leo, Shakespeare and Napoleon. Charles Dickens expresses a desire to time-travel into his own future to meet his great-grandchildren -- a mixed bag, as we know now that Dickens had two third-great-grandsons who became actors, one of whom starred in Human Nature/The Family of Blood, and the other one of whom drew very few laughs as a child actor on the US sitcom The Partridge Family.

Lawrence also uses his early chapters to reorganize the story. The opening TV sequence, the destruction of the Jagaroth spaceship, is relocated deep into the Part Three material and turned into a flashback. Once Lawrence gets to the televised scenes proper, he gives Duggan and the Countess lengthy introductions (giving them different back-stories than does Goss), and then puts all the Count/Kerensky/Hermann scenes together in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is reserved for the Doctor and Romana's giddy and presumably post-coital journeys through Paris; here, the conceit is that the Doctor is trying to school Romana in the genius of Earth art, and he takes her to two different productions of Hamlet -- the original, and then a 21st-century remount at the new Globe Theater (possibly featuring Lawrence himself on stage). Romana is not impressed. Lawrence also throws in a sly defense of the Classic Series: "[T]he point is in the story, in the poetry and the script! Not in the special effects!".

Once the story proper gets underway, Lawrence largely sticks to the televised action and dialogue, but does throw in some extra material in the middle, to try and explain the one or two baffling moments in the plot (such as the Countess pulling a gun late in Part Two). Lots more bullets are fired in this book than on TV. Something I wish he hadn't done was alter the already-perfect TV dialogue, but at least he doesn't do this very often:

"I might ask you exactly the same question, Doctor!" -- Captain Tancredi, ruining your memory of the sublime Part Two cliffhanger

Writing a fan novelization and freed from authorial intent or rehearsal scripts, Lawrence is free to add other ideas, many of which improve the original story. Like the notion that the Countess here intends to kill the Count at some point and inherit his entire fortune -- a nice counterpoint to the Count's final plans for her. Kerensky has chilling nightmares that prefigure the Count's final parting words to him.

The prose is very nice, as you'd expect from a Shakespearean actor who gets to speak for a living the greatest words ever written. The Doctor feels "a twinge of pain nagging at his ego" when he can't explain something. When Scarlioni gets angry, "Any trace of humour, irony or charm had vanished from his features." As we flash back to the opening sequence, "A yellow sun in the blood-red sky overlooked the lifeless hell."

One thing Lawrence doesn't perfect, though, is Tom Baker's genius mid-sentence personality switches, which the actor used to remarkable effect during his various confrontations with Tancredi and Scarlioni, and without which the words on the page seem a little lifeless in comparison.

There are other continuity references thrown in: the Hartnell Doctor visited Paris twice, so Lawrence has the Tom Baker Doctor remember those visits. There are also lots of other homages to smaller corners of Doctor Who continuity -- Robert Holmes' one reference to "the twenty-narg note" in The Two Doctors makes an equally brief but welcome callback here. A K9 scene is added, meant to bridge the gap between the robot dog's laryngitis in the previous story, and his new voice-actor in the following story.

The book ends with a newspaper article explaining away the fire at the chateau. This is a clear callback to Terrance Dicks using a similar device at the end of his novelization of Pyramids of Mars. Terrance did that as an authorial flourish to adapting one of Doctor Who's perfect stories, in one of its perfect novelizations. Lawrence here very, very nearly manages to achieve the same feat.

This does't replace the Goss version on my Target bookshelf -- it can't, I only have the e-book edition -- but, honestly, I'd have a very hard time choosing which one is the definitive novelization. Perhaps, like Mona Lisa itself, this is the one that's hanging in the Louvre... even if you can just make out the words "This Is A Fake" in a palimpsest under the front cover.