Foreign Devils

Awful, awful writing from Andrew Cartmel, masking what could otherwise be a halfway decent murder mystery. After the initial opening - which is kind of exciting in a vintage, moustache-twirling, 1920s-pulp-thriller sort of way - the story just falls lifeless to the ground, and nothing Cartmel does ever gives it very much life again. For one thing, the characters he calls the Doctor and Zoe are almost nothing like their television counterparts, the Doctor being overly formal and Zoe rendered a generic female companion type. Poor Jamie barely gets anything to do at all; he spends most of the story completely out of commission. And Carnacki - a public domain character Cartmel has borrowed to add color to his tale - goes through the motions that resemble his classic stories, but he never really contributes very much beyond that which a generic detective would. To add insult to injury, the book (or at least the paperback edition) is appallingly proof-edited, with a host of typos that stand out a mile. It's not a terrible story - it moves along at a fair pace - but at the end, I found myself asking, "What was the point of that exercise?" ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1167423.html

This Telos novella is another of those attempts to marry the Whoniverse with detective fiction and occult forces, which can be done brilliantly (All-Consuming Fire, where the Doctor meets Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu mythos), tolerably well (The Unicorn and the Wasp, where the Doctor meets Agatha Christie), or not so well, as in this case, where Andrew Cartmel attempts to channel William Hope Hodgson. I haven't read any of Hodgson's stories featuring his mystical detective Carnacki; Hodgson inserts him here into a country-house murder mystery which turns out to be the result of enraged Asians using mystical powers against their colonial masters. As I have said elsewhere, one has to ask whether this is such a bad thing? As it is, the book is a pretty egregious example of what we now call cultural appropriation fail. It's not even a particularly compelling portrayal of the Second Doctor and Zoe (Jamie spends most of the story unconscious). Once again, I feel Telos have discharged their editorial responsibilities rather too lightly. ( )