Fiction Reviews
Doctor Who
Death in the Stars(2024) Bonnie Langford, BBC Books,
£20 / Can$42.95 / US$26.00, hrdbk, 145pp, ISBN 978-1-785-94879-4
Buckle up, because here we go with a standalone mystery involving Mel Bush, who was a companion to the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, written by Bonnie Langford with some help from Jacqueline Rayner. Bonnie Langford, of course, played Mel Bush back in the day, and also in the present day, as she has returned to the character in episodes involving the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. Jacqueline Rayner has considerable experience on the writing and production side of Doctor Who, writing novels, short stories and audio adventures, notably Sixth Doctor audio adventures for Big Finish starring Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford, so their paths have crossed before.
Doctor Who: Death in the Stars is subtitled “a Melanie Bush mystery”, and is made up of 19 chapters with references to Mel’s previous adventures with the Doctor(s) dotted throughout, and also mentions Langford’s credits on screen and on stage which have been slipped into the storyline for the eagle-eyed, or Langford devotees, to spot.
As mentioned, Mel Bush is back in the Doctor’s timeline; first appearing in Jodie Whittaker’s last outing “The Power of the Doctor” when she appears in a sort of self-help group for companions of the Doctor, and then she surfaced in the Fourteenth Doctor story “The Giggle”, now working with U. N. I. T. in information technology, using her computer programmer skills which she never managed to employ during her original, TV appearances. Even more recently she has helped the Fifteenth Doctor, and his companion, Ruby, in the new Doctor’s season finale.
But in Death in the Stars Mel is in her younger timeline, no longer with the Seventh Doctor as she left him at the end of the episode “Dragonfire” to embark on new adventures with Sabalom Glitz and his ship the Nosferatu ll. For those unfamiliar with Glitz – well, he did appear on screen way back in (blimey) 1987 (the year SF² Concatenation was founded) – he was brilliantly played by the late Tony Selby and is a character who comes across as a mixture of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses and Blaine Sternin, the conman played by Michael Keaton in Frasier. Glitz is always on the hunt for a fast-buck, or fast-credit, or whatever currency is prevalent at the time, but that usually ends up with him getting into trouble, with Mel trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, sometimes with varying success.
The actual deaths that occur in the stars don’t really get going until the second half of the novel after Mel and Glitz have encountered some feral youths on an abandoned space station, and Mel has taken one of them – a young woman called Hope, under her wing. Soon they encounter a spaceship where the crew is in suspended animation and the trouble really begins when they are revived and the murders start and the only two suspects appear to be Mel and Glitz.
Death in the Stars continues a strand of novels written by companions of the Doctor, a list which contains the good, the bad, and the awful, with contributions over the years from the likes of Frazer Hines (Jamie), Ian Marter (Harry Sullivan), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Sophie Aldred (Ace), and Alex Kingston (River Song). Langford and Rayner have to be congratulated for pulling off one of the better contributions to this sub-category, getting the characterisation of keen and eager, Mel, and cynical, and world-weary, Glitz, just right, and injecting the right amount of thrills and spills and humour to keep the plot going. We even get an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant based on a pop star, who was also a TV presenter, and a scientist – who could that be based on, I wonder? The AI assistant even has a… er, um, a squirrel assistant too. Nostalgic, and great-fun, Death in the Stars should appeal to old-time Doctor Who watchers like yours truly, and may be the first of a new series. Fingers crossed.
Ian Hunter
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