Part 1 (1/2)
The Dying Days.
Written by Lance Parkin.
Introduction - Preface by Lance Parkin
Conservative choices.
Fans in high places.
I've heard the same story from three independent sources. That doesn't make it true, but it makes it true enough that a newspaper editor would be more than happy to run it.
On May 1st 1997, on the night of the General Election, Tim Collins, newly-elected Conservative MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale and Doctor Who fan (he'd had letters published in fanzine DWB) sat in his local town hall, oblivious to the activity around him, frantically reading The Dying Days, 'because he wanted to have read all the New Adventures under a Tory administration'.
Over the years I've talked to hundreds of people, nearly all of whom remember exactly where they were when they finished it, some of whom have admitted to bunking off school or work to do so. I think, though, that Tim Collins wins the prize for best Dying Days related anecdote. He is now the shadow cabinet office spokesman and vice-chairman of the Conservative party, and he's on Sky News as I type this, calling for Stephen Byers' resignation.
Licence revoked.
The end of the New Adventures.
So ... the basics. The Dying Days was the sixty-first and last New Adventure published by Virgin Publis.h.i.+ng.
Virgin's licence to produce Doctor Who novels hadn't been extended because the year before the TV Movie starring Paul McGann had come out, and the BBC were keen to bring the books in-house.
At first, this was because there was a prospect of a TV series but even when that evaporated, the BBC recognised that Virgin had identified a niche in the market, and the books were nicely profitable (and just as important in an unpredictable market, had very steady sales).
The Dying Days was the first original novel to feature the eighth Doctor. It was original y published in April 1997.
Selling fast.
Out of stock before release.
Because it was both a 'last' and a 'first' book, it sold very quickly. The Dying Days was out of stock before the official release date. That's led to reports and persistent rumours that the book had a lower print run.
No, no, a thousand times no: the book completely sold out, so I know exactly what the print run was. The irony is that it's easily my biggest-selling Who novel it sold more than Just War, Cold Fusion, The Infinity Doctors and Father Time. And it's ironic, because for five years, now, second hand copies of The Dying Days have changed hands for a small fortune.
They've sold on eBay for over fifty times the cover price. There are plenty of copies out there, but the people that have copies cling on to them. So it's rare that one comes up for sale.
Something special.
Creating an 'event' book.
I didn't expect that when I got commissioned, but I knew it would be an 'event' book, and it had to be special. The editor of the range, Rebecca Levene (who for reasons best known to herself prefers to be called 'Bex'), and I thrashed out some of the details.
With almost every Who book, the editor will give the author a couple of things that 'have to happen' usually, these aren't major plot points, just things to bind the range together. When I wrote Just War, I had to put a couple of hints in foreshadowing the death of Roz, one of the Doctor's companions. With Father Time, there were elements of the 'Earth arc', like the physical state of the TARDIS.
3.The Dying Days was, essential y, a long list of 'requirements'. It had to both be a fitting end to a range and the pointer to a new future... futures, actually there was a new Doctor, but Virgin were continuing to publish books featuring Benny, and the book had to act as a showcase, maybe even an introduction, to her.
A view to a kill Would the Doctor survive?
At heart, the book was designed as an affirmation of what Doctor Who was in the mid-nineties. A hymn to the fact that the books had moved things on, that we'd left Doctor Who in a better state than we found it.
It was also a unique thing a 'last Doctor Who' story. A chance, like Dark Knight Returns or the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Al Good Things, to put a capstone on the legend. And I could kill him. This was one book where the Doctor might not make it.
Movie madness Shouting in a cupboard Bex and I were also reacting against the TV Movie. I love the McGann movie. Bex was far less impressed. Both of us agreed it was a pretty poor 'pilot', in the sense that it didn't real y get across the essence of Doctor Who. But I saw some great ideas in there and I loved the visuals, the sense of scale, Doctor Who in the style of Coppola's Dracula.
What it was missing could be summed up in one word: monsters. The threat was too abstract, the scale of the final confrontation two people shouting at each other in one of the bigger TARDIS cupboards was just not grand enough. This book was going to end in a pitched battle man versus an army of monsters. And the Doctor would get to demonstrate steel in the TV Movie, the Doctor's a pa.s.sive figure, someone who's tied up, follows Grace around. You see the velvet glove, and it's a lovely glove, but there's no steel inside it.
Bex and I had a phone conversation where we agreed that the TV Movie should have been that typical Doctor Who plot: monsters invading contemporary London, using subtle ways at first, then an all out invasion. Then it struck me... in sixty previous New Adventures, that had never happened. Alien invasions, contemporary stories...
but never the two together.
Bex didn't believe it ”No Future... that was set in the seventies”, ”Damaged Goods... no, wait, that was the eighties”. We'd been banging on about how the TV Movie should have done something that the books had never done. And we agreed there and then that was going to be our story.
Origins Pertwee meets Tom Clancy By happy chance, I'd been toying with a Pertwee Missing Adventure proposal a couple of years before, while I'd been waiting to hear back about Just War. The basic concept Pertwee UNIT story as Tom Clancy technothriller was just so fundamentally wrong that I could never get the book to work, but I did have a usable plot.
The book was called Cold War, and featured the Ice Warriors. In one page synopsis form, it's almost exactly the same as The Dying Days, although it would have been a completely different book.
The Dying Days is also about the end of the New Adventures era, and the pa.s.sing on of the torch. In 1995, just after I'd been commissioned to write Just War, I joked that we were in 'the Rebecca Levene Golden Age of Doctor Who'.
No-one, least of all Bex, took the remark seriously. Five or six years on, the phrase pops up in internet discussion of the books completely unironically. There's even a word for it: NAstalgia.
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Other influences Links to War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds was obviously a huge influence how could it fail to be, with Martians invading the Home Counties? Some of the chapter t.i.tles are the same, and almost al the original characters were named after places or people in Wells' book. Both, for example, have an astronomer called Ogilvy.
Note that I do invert a few of the things from The War of the Worlds germs don't kill the Martians in this, they're working for them! I saw Independence Day when I was writing Chapter Seven. As you'll see for yourselves.
The t.i.tle took longer than the plot. All we could come up with were joke t.i.tles: Licence to Kill, Licence Revoked, The Morte D'Octor. We wanted something ominous, something that reflected the end of the New Adventures in fact as well as fiction. In the end, I decided to watch the Bond film Licence to Kill, partly out of sheer masochism, partly to pick up tips on how to kill a popular franchise. And there the t.i.tle was, in the theme tune The Dying Days.
Bex and I had got a story and we had a t.i.tle. Which was just as well, because the lead time for the book meant I only had five weeks to write it...
Below: the original cover for THE DYING DAYS THE DYING DAYS
Chapter One
What We Saw From the Ruined House
Tuesday, May 6th 1997
The Doctor was late, as usual.