Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter

Published: 1986

Edition read: Target first, 1986

Coolest Cover: It’s a fair representation of the story, I suppose, although the slightly misshapen portrait of the main character would be a little more forgivable if it weren’t also a depiction of the author.

Childhood Recollections: I can remember reading this while waiting to be seen for a hospital appointment- only thing is, I can’t remember why I would have gone to hospital in 1986 and I’ve been racking my brains ever since.

Ramblings: After the ambitious mish-mash which was ‘Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma’, the Companions range needed something more recognisably based on Doctor Who and tailored to the length and attention span of the average Target reader. And in ‘Harry Sullivan’s War’, Ian Marter gave the range precisely that- a compact 148-page thriller with roughly equal measures of the international espionage of the Bond movies (the Eiffel Tower setting obviously uninfluenced by A View to a Kill) and the desperate chase across the Highlands of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Ian Marter’s skill in tailoring the story to his potential readership is very much in evidence, and the end result is a superior junior spy story.

If the plot reads like a simplified version of the typical espionage thriller- Harry falls in with an attractive woman who turns out to have connections to a European anarchist movement, is framed for the theft of top secret biological weapons samples and goes on the run to clear his name and find the real villains- then it’s Marter’s strong sense of Harry’s character and inner dignity, together with some sensibly-rationed cameos by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith, which make the difference. It’s clear that Marter saw Harry as having a great deal more courage and initiative than the character was allowed to have on television, even if at times there’s a tendency to overcompensate by taking out most of his charm and vulnerability. Of the other characters it’s perhaps the lovely (but unreliable) Samantha who stands out- she’s as much a victim of her father’s plots as Harry becomes, and while Alexander Shire never quite comes across as fully developed, the ending of the novel is such that Marter could easily have written a follow-up adventure- but the character of Rudolf Rainbow was clearly conceived in less enlightened times (although if the story had been made for television, Roy Stewart would have been a shoo-in for the role). Teddy and Esther Bland come across as exactly the sort of friends Harry would have, and essentially from the same kind of background, with the insights into Teddy and Harry’s shared past and education at Dartmouth adding to the sense of Harry as a three-dimensional character rather than the comic foil he became on television.

So what we have is a well-written if undemanding thriller, like most of Marter’s books written for boys of 12-14 and with its feet firmly in the Doctor Who universe, even if it sensibly sets out to avoid too many science-fiction elements and relies instead on earthly plot devices to keep things going. It’s not the most satisfying read ever, but it’s certainly a lot more entertaining than ‘Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma’ and leaves the reader with a real sense of how Ian Marter saw Harry Sullivan- after all, nobody could know him better- and an impression of what Doctor Who lost when Ian Marter died. We’re so familiar with missing adventures and companion-only adventures these days that it’s difficult not to wonder what Marter might have done given the opportunity to write a full-length Harry novel or a Sarah Jane Smith audio- but not difficult to imagine that in their own way they would have been cracking adventures.