The Romance of Crime

A novel featuring the Fourth Doctor, K9, and Romana II

Written by Gareth Roberts

Polarity Rating: 4 out of 5

Season 17 is arguably the worst period of the Fourth Doctor's era, what with the uninspired "Destiny of the Daleks" (did we really need to see Davros again?), the boring "Creature from the Pit," and Doctor Who's failed attempt at pantomime in "The Horns of Nimon." I imagine Gareth Roberts truly wanted to challenge himself by writing a novel set between those aforementioned stories, or perhaps he's a fan of season 17 and just wanted to celebrate it. In any case, The Romance of Crime somehow feels like a season 17 story, except it turns out to be much better than most of the stories in that very season.

The flavor is in the description of the characters, with guards that wear red frockcoats, a judge who, if he had been portrayed on television, would have chewed the scenery to bits, and villains that seem like hilarious caricatures of some of the more forgettable baddies in Doctor Who's long history. The flavor of this era of the program also can be read in the description of the setting, a space station with meandering corridors in which the characters inevitably run back and forth in. And, perhaps best of all, the portrayal of the Doctor and Romana is crafted straight from the late era of the Fourth Doctor, with the usual banter between the two of them. Take, for instance, this quote from the Doctor as he barges into a control room filled with villains:

"Hello everybody. It's nice to see you again, Xais, and you Mr. Pyerpoint, and you charming Ogron gentlemen, and, ah, you must be the Nisbett brothers. You don't know me, I'm the Doctor, this is my friend Romana, and that's Mr. Stokes, and do you know unless you listen to me I think we're all going die."

It's as if Gareth Roberts was actually channeling Tom Baker. Try having any one of the other ten actors that have played the Doctor say that line, and it wouldn't feel right at all, not even if David Tennant gave it his best.

Most of the story unfolds aboard the Rock of Judgment, a space station which cruises the galaxy and functions as both a kind of galactic courthouse and prison. The captain, for lack of a better word, is a judge named Pyerpoint, who spends the first half of the story trying to keep order in true bureaucratic fashion after the Doctor and Romana arrive. The Rock is home to a number of interesting characters, including security chief Margo, who seems to suffer from erratic bouts of possession from forces unknown, and Menlove Ereward Stokes, the resident artist and winner of this story's most eccentric name. (Stokes spends much of the story cowering behind corners, whining about every situation he finds himself in, and trying unsuccessfully to hit on Romana. He reminds me very much of a heterosexual version of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space.)

We soon learn that Margo is slowly being taken over by the spirit Xais, an evil female mutant who had been executed at the Rock years earlier for slaughtering dozens of non-mutants, whom she calls Normals. Xais can kill human just by looking at them, but they don't just drop dead; they literally fold in on themselves in a grisly display of flesh and bones. Xais has her own allies, the Nesbitt brothers, intergalactic gangsters who look like Drew Carey and act like Gordon Ramsey. Oh, and the Ogrons make an appearance as well, and Roberts handles them much better than they way they were portrayed in "Day of the Daleks" and "Frontier in Space." (No spoliers there -- there's a drawing of an Ogron on the front cover.)

What Xais has planned I will not tell you. What I can tell you, however, is that it involves a number of allies and a tangled web of deviousness that I relished reading. What results is a typical "base under siege" story, with characters being split up, reunited again, and split up again into different combinations. Of particular note is K9's role in the story as he accompanies a rough undercover police agent who ends up taking a shine to the tin dog.

Xais' evil plot aside, the main attraction is reading about these characters rather than the way the story moves. Perhaps the plot itself is the story's weakest link, as it's all pretty straightforward, but it's the tasty ingredients in the story itself -- namely, the characters -- that make this stew particularly good.

This was Gareth Roberts' fourth novel for Virgin's Missing Adventures series (the first three were Seventh Doctor New Adventures) and he went on to pen a handful more and wrote three scripts for the new series, namely "The Shakespeare Code," "The Unicorn and the Wasp," and "Planet of the Dead." All three of these scripts lack much of the humor and rib-poking that fills The Romance of Crime (with some exceptions, particularly in "The Unicorn and the Wasp"), and I'm hoping that his upcoming installment for the Eleventh Doctor brings some of this back. He was certainly an asset to the novels published by Virgin, and I look forward to reading more by him.

Fun Facts:

• Roberts brought the large, eccentric, and bald artist, Menlove Stokes, back in The Well-Mannered War and he later became a regular in the Benny New Adventures.
• For this first time (I think) we're told that the Ogrons are from the planet Braah, where drastic changes in the climate caused the Ogrons to undergo an evolutionary hiccup. As a result, they're not unlike a cross between an ape and a koala bear.