Published: November 1987

Edition read: Virgin reprint, 1992

Coolest Cover: I’m fond of Tony Masero’s original, but at the time I would have thought Alister Pearson’s reprint cover cooler because of the use of characters and costumes from the televised episodes.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: The Doctor dashing through a network of tunnels in a cart pulled by two Alsatians- and yes, that’s the dogs (needing to be clear because of the French setting, you see)

The TARDIS materialises...with a jolt

Childhood Recollections: I think this is another case of having read the hardback from end to end fairly quickly although I’m not completely sure.

Ramblings: This really isn’t a book to read while you’re under the weather- believe me, I’ve been slightly poorly the last week or two, and in those circumstances you really don’t want to open a book which starts chapters with lines like "When Simon Duval returned to his quarters after the banquet he was gratified that he had been recognised by the Abbot but irritated that Lerans had not only failed to identify the cleric but had also been implicated in the escape of the apothecaries". What it is, however, is something rather more interesting. Thanks to the miracle of the BBC soundtrack releases, we can now sit down with our Ovaltine, bob a CD on and, with the aid of a collection of publicity photographs covering the main characters and sets, enjoy a reasonable impression of what the televised episodes were like to watch. We didn’t have this in 1987, of course, so whatever Lucarotti wrote was likely to be taken as the last word on ‘The Massacre’ (we didn’t have all this silly "of St Bartholomew’s Eve" business back in 1987 either). It’s only been from reading the book and finding a distinct difference in feel between the book and the televised (and audio-released) episodes that I’ve reverted to my reference books and discovered that Lucarotti’s scripts were substantially rewritten by Donald Tosh- and yet the main reference material available to Lucarotti would clearly have been his own papers. So what we have- or at least what I suspect we have- is Lucarotti’s adaptation of his original story rather than the transmitted tale; whereas in the Nathan-Turner era such departures were generally frowned upon, allowances could be made in the case of a non-existent Hartnell story which most would struggle to describe in more than a sentence and being adapted by the original scriptwriter.

The first real stumbling block in ‘The Massacre’ is the characters, few of whom are particularly distinctive- barring one or two, a collection of French Protestant and Catholic hotheads defined mostly by their hatred of the other denomination. As the characters don’t really come to life, it makes it difficult to pick the book up and put it back down again without completely losing one’s sense of which character is which- a shame when the story as transmitted seems to have had a better cast than most. Lucarotti’s plot also seems rather more convoluted than what was seen on television, where the story concentrated on Steven and his attempts to find the Doctor and get out of Paris while also saving Anne from the coming slaughter- here we have the Doctor and Abbot crossing each other’s paths like something out of the Thomas Crown Affair- and there’s a lack of clear ideas too. A little like ‘The Reign of Terror’, the Catholic Frenchmen are bloodthirsty bigots who will stop at nothing to rid the country of Protestantism (although Marie de Medici does have a brief moment where she explains that her complicity in the planned massacre is her gesture of resignation, having failed to reconcile the two faiths), while the Protestants are reasonable and downtrodden- there’s little or no attempt to emphasise the tragedy, or where absolutist Catholic rule would lead France in two hundred years’ time. This would be forgivable if the space were given over to creating a sense of impending menace, but that doesn’t appear either. Compared to Lucarotti’s other efforts, it’s inevitably something of a disappointment- Donald Tosh’s hand in the final scripts may be a factor, but it lacks the focus of ‘The Aztecs’ and the sprawl of ‘Marco Polo’ without really adding any qualities of its own, and in a Target schedule filled with more ambitious and atmospheric novelisations of stories from the monochrome years, it’s unfortunately a disappointment which could have been much more.