Retrospective: Martin Day by John Seavey 13/11/03
For some authors, a retrospective of their writing careers reveals themes and tendencies that follow throughout their work; their seventh novel, though refined, is recognizable as distinctively similar to their first. Other authors, though, such as Martin Day, struggle for a long time to find their own writing voice, and that struggle becomes even more visible if one reads these works in chronological order. Martin Day is an author who took quite some time to find his feet, and his novels (The Menagerie, The Devil Goblins From Neptune, The Hollow Men, Another Girl, Another Planet and Bunker Soldiers) bear witness to his incremental improvement.
Day's first novel, The Menagerie, was the first Missing Adventure to feature the Second Doctor, and is in no small part responsible for giving rise to the description of that Doctor in prose as "elusive". Although not without merit as characters, Day's TARDIS crew barely resembles their televised counterparts, a flaw that would follow him through several books. However, Day's worst sin in his first novel is a lack of focus. He spends the entire first half of the novel attempting to establish a sense of mood and atmosphere on the unnamed planet of its setting, which forces all of the revelations about the nature of the threat menacing it to the later half. The resulting novel is bottom-heavy, with many important plot points not showing up until almost the final chapter, and feels lopsided and strange. In addition, Day (who co-wrote the seminal reference work The Discontinuity Guide) tries to work in many references and fan theories that don't really fit in with his stories, resulting in even more digressions and less space for the plot.
Perhaps because of negative fan and critical reaction to The Menagerie, Day co-wrote his next three novels (The Devil Goblins From Neptune and The Hollow Men with Keith Topping, and Another Girl, Another Planet with Len Beech.) He might have felt that working with another author would help shore up his weaknesses, but instead it seemed merely to emphasize them. All three novels share the problem The Menagerie had of trying to do too much at once. Devil Goblins deals simultaneously with alien menaces from Triton, CIA conspiracies, and an infiltration from UNIT, and consequently fails to resolve two of the three; Hollow Men tries to be simultaneously a crime thriller set in Liverpool, a rural "hidden monster" spook-fest, a futuristic "genetic engineering" story, and a sequel to The Awakening, and spends far too long establishing the rural setting to deal with any of its other threads in detail; and Another Girl, Another Planet, while relatively focused, tries also to be a prelude to the Dellahan "Gods" arc, and the linking material seems odd and shoe-horned into the story. All three of the novels also share a fascination with Who-related in-jokes, fan theories, and unrelated continuity -- it's as though Day had a lot of left-over material from The Discontinuity Guide that he had to fit in somewhere.
After Another Girl, Another Planet, it was quite some time before Day wrote for any Who-related line again, and his ensuing effort, Bunker Soldiers, is so different that it seems like it was written by another man. Gone are the in-jokes and TV references, gone as well the different plots that fight against each other for page space. Instead, we get a clean, crisp, tightly-written Hartnell historical in which all the story elements work together to bring about a picture of impending doom, and Day's prose, always best at clearly and concisely narrating events, is allowed to work to those strengths.
As I began this retrospective, Martin Day announced that he would be writing another Doctor Who book in the not too distant future for the BBC. I'm not sure if I'd have welcomed the Martin Day of The Menagerie, but the older, wiser Martin Day of Bunker Soldiers is very welcome to write for the range again.