Doctor Who - The King’s Demons by Terence Dudley

Published: July 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: David McAllister by default- shame there’s only one element from the actual story in there.

Purple Prose: "It was as if the TARDIS had identified immediately with a symbol of law and order; a small pocket of succour, of sanctuary in the quest through time and space. And you’re quite right, old girl, (the Doctor) thought approvingly." (p.34).

Crimes Against Literature: "How easy it is, thought the Doctor, to give a dog a bad name. The function of history, surely, was to include the dog’s point of view in the record of things, not ignore the bark for fear of the bite. The trouble was, of course, that most people howled before they were bitten." (p.50) I think we have a contender for the most overstretched metaphor in the history of Target Books...

The TARDIS materialises with... "a whinnying sound"

...and the Master’s dematerialises with... "a shrill, fluctuating, whirring sound"

Ramblings: After a full year, the Target range turned back to the Fifth Doctor’s era with a debut adaptation byTerence Dudley- an interesting venture, not least because Dudley seems to have decided towards the end of his BBC career that he wanted to try his hand at writing, and was ultimately commissioned to write two of Peter Davison’s adventures with historical settings. As the third attempt to adapt a two-part adventure into a full-length novelisation, it’s all the more remarkable that ‘The King’s Demons’ runs to 153 pages and doesn’t feel unnaturrally padded. Far from it- if anything, the impression it gives is that freed from the need to have everything over and done within the space of 50 minutes, Dudley is able to incorporate more of his background research into the narrative and flesh out some of his supporting characters, not least Ranulf Fitzwilliam, through whose eyes we experience most of the first two chapters. Dudley is also apparently very much au fait with the basic concepts behind Doctor Who, the Master and the events of ‘Time-Flight’ (although whether we should expect anything else from somebody who spent roughly half of the 1970s working with Kit Pedler, Gerry Davis and Terry Nation is another question) and so there isn’t the slight jar that sometimes happens with writers who don’t quite know the series beyond their own stories.

Of the regular characters, it’s unsurprisingly the Doctor and Tegan who come off best- Dudley captures the Fifth Doctor’s approach quite neatly, and in particular his tolerance of Tegan’s occasional tactlessness and insistence on seeing things in twentieth-century terms. Tegan, meanwhile, is handled equally well with insights into her Queensland background (after using the term "galah" throughout the book, Dudley eventually deigns to explain what one is towards the end) and sensitive insights into her thought processes. However, if the televised story was somewhat opaque as to the Master’s reasons for his plot, the book is quite frankly uninterested- it’s enough for Dudley that he wants to strangle the beginnings of democracy at birth, and that’s pretty much that. What’s most curious, however, is a short scene at the end of the book where, presumably correcting what Dudley saw as an error in the original scripts, the Doctor returns to Wallingford Castle and gives Ranulf and Isabella the medicine to save Sir Geoffrey’s life- it’s almost a New Adventures-style coda which one wouldn’t expect from an old-school writer like Terence Dudley. It’s an interesting extension of the original story, then, and I have to say that it’s the only Target book I’ve read so far to give me an insight into jousting technique to boot.