Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Ship of Fools by Dave Stone (or, “Paw Judgement”)

As I hinted at in my Final Thoughts in the last review, the most immediate impression that struck me regarding Ship of Fools, Dave Stone’s latest contribution to the New Adventures, is that it may have been the victim of some rather unfortunate scheduling in being placed so soon after The Murder Game offered up its own spin on the whole “murder mystery in space” chestnut.

Well, OK, some transparency as to the chronology is perhaps due here, what with the increasingly circuitous and arbitrary nature of our passage through time in these reviews. Ship of Fools was, as near as I can glean from trudging through the Collectors’ Heaven segments in contemporary issues of Doctor Who Magazine, published on August 21, 1997. Those of you who have been keeping score might remember that Vampire Science and The Murder Game hit shelves on July 7.

The upshot of this is that Lyons and Stone’s books were separated from one another not only by the publication of Beyond the Sun on July 17, but also by that of The Bodysnatchers and The Ultimate Treasure on August 4. So really, this bit of unfortunately close symmetry can be laid at the feet of… well, me, and my arguably nonsensical decision to cover each month’s New Adventure before the corresponding BBC novels, regardless of the latter’s often being released a couple of weeks earlier. Buffini, Darvill-Evans, and Levene are off the hook with this one.

Terribly sorry. It will happen again.

Yet within this strange point of thematic overlap, I think there exists a singular opportunity to contrast the two lines’ respective execution of a similar brief. After all, in the final summary we ended up holding The Murder Game to be broadly indicative of what one might expect of a Steve Lyons novel if the jagged, unkempt edges that made works like Time of Your Life or Head Games so compelling were judiciously sanded down as a part of BBC Books’ general reaction against what some viewed as the excesses of the Virgin line. And, appropriately enough for our current purposes, there are very few writers more statistically likely to have their name and works mentioned in the same breath as “excess” and “Virgin Books” than Dave Stone.

There are, I suppose, a couple of rather superficial comparisons that can be drawn here between Stone and Lyons. On the most obvious level, they both got their start on Doctor Who writing for the New Adventures, and both came to Virgin’s attention after initially writing about other science-fiction properties entirely, with Lyons having collaborated with Chris Howarth on 1993’s Red Dwarf Programme Guide, and Stone being one of the most prolific contributors to the company’s abortive Judge Dredd novels.

Any attempts to equate the two writers very quickly run aground, however, on the very simple truth that it’s nigh impossible to make a meaningful case for Dave Stone not operating in a league entirely his own, even if nobody – himself included, one suspects – is quite certain exactly what sport he’s actually supposed to be playing.

There’s perhaps no better illustration, actually, of this divide than in a shared trait between Lyons and Stone that would seem, on a broad-strokes level, to further support the idea of their warranting discussion as writers of a kindred artistic stripe. Discounting the proverbial background radiation of self-awareness and irony that permeated so much of 1990s cult/genre fiction, Stone and Lyons have always seemed to stand apart in their willingness to actively and overtly engage with the fictionality of Doctor Who.

But the two of them each go about it in subtly different ways, even as they might both wield it in service of the very hazily aligned goal of “being funny,” and a comparison of the two writers’ debut NAs proves particularly telling here.

Conundrum, having spent the entire book resurrecting the Land of Fiction and making nods towards such minutiae of Doctor Who continuity as John and Gillian from the old TV Comic strips – if only with the apparent aim of declaring them “non-canonical” as compared to the First Doctor’s televised familial relationship with Susan, in a move that, in retrospect feels more than a little mean-spirited – chooses to close with a cheeky scene in which the Doctor seems to exhibit some level of awareness that his adventures are being witnessed by the audience.

In the context of the rest of the novel, it’s clearly a cute throwaway gag designed to give the book one last comedic punch of metatextuality, while simultaneously appealing to those sorts of fans whose knowledge of the show extends deep enough to recall the parallels to Hartnell’s infamous breaking of the fourth wall at the close of The Feast of Steven.

Conversely, a book like Sky Pirates! takes an altogether different tack. Sure, Stone certainly never leaves you in any doubt as to the artifice that he’s funneled into the novel’s creation, but there exists, underneath all his knowingly grandiose and impenetrable verbiage, a sense of lurking horror at the very concept of fictionality that he seems to be simultaneously sending up as an object of comedy.

Naturally, we ought to draw something of a line here and define exactly what we’re saying about the competing aesthetics of these two writers, if only to walk ourselves back from the precipice of making proclamations that become wholly outlandish and unsubstantiated. Certainly we’re not saying that Lyons’ writing lacks the capacity to evoke a darker, more horrirfic tone; again, Time of Your Life and Head Games are proof enough of the falsity of such an observation, to say nothing of a book like Killing Ground, where the bulk of Lyons’ meta tendencies are stripped away and you’re left with one of the more startlingly bleak Cyberman stories out there.

(Perhaps revealingly, it might just be my favourite of his five novels so far.)

But on those occasions that Lyons dispenses with the jokes and dips a toe into the outright horrific, that sense of horror generally derives not from the fictionality and contrivance of the Doctor Who universe itself, per se. Rather, it plays on the perverse frisson that accompanies the experience of witnessing these contrived fictional structures giving way to brutality, whether that be in the way that Angela’s death in Time of Your Life throws a wrench in the traditional rhythms of the companion introduction, or the fundamental wrongness of the Seventh Doctor being strangled by an image of the Sixth.

Even outside of those structures specific to Doctor Who, the final fates of characters like Norman Power or the Adventure Kids in a book like Conundrum build very consciously from the starting premise that there is something distinctly unsettling in seeing an Adam West-esque comic book superhero or the Famous Five despatched in such a dispassionate and matter-of-fact manner. As literary parlour tricks go, it’s perhaps not the most sophisticated option available, but the best Lyons novels are generally able to imbue proceedings with enough charm and humanity that they avoid becoming unrelentingly cheap and cynical exercises in shock value.

As we’ve already observed, though, Stone’s books are generally characterised by a deeply-rooted horror at their own artificiality, and when viewed through this prism, the frequency with which his novels return to the distinctive aesthetic of clockwork machinery begins to take on a much deeper significance than one might suspect at first glance.

Even at this early stage, it’s plain to see that the quintessential structure of a Dave Stone novel sees the Doctor and his companions thrust into a world governed by its own very particular set of narrative laws that exist at an ever-so-slightly canted angle from those of our universe, with the presence of the TARDIS inevitably serving to cause those laws to break down.

To a certain extent, this isn’t actually too different from the well-established standard of “What Doctor Who Can Do,” with the Doctor having possessed a certain mercurial and anarchic quality since the earliest days of the programme. The distinctiveness of Stone’s approach, then, is not so much a question of sheer originality as it is one of degree; if there’s one thing that is readily apparent just three books into Stone’s oeuvre, it’s that he’s never really one for half-measures.

Far from giving a knowing wink to the audience in the final moments of the book as Conundrum did, Stone’s Doctor frequently seems like he’s actively thrashing against the confines of the page, to the point where the climax of Sky Pirates! hinges on the rather bold idea that the character resembles nothing so much as a kind of incomprehensible and almost Lovecraftian nesting doll, with the outer veneer of a vaguely comical Scottish light entertainer serving to mask something so immense and anathema to the System that the Charon’s attempts to blast it away ultimately result in its own annihilation.

More than anything else, this is the key innovation of Dave Stone’s approach to Doctor Who, taking a well-worn narrative formula and building out the implications to the point where they become profoundly unnerving. To complain that very few other corners of the franchise are willing to pin their colours to the mast and pledge fealty to the vision of “The Doctor as incomprehensibly vast alien presence” feels rather akin to missing the point of the exercise entirely; Sky Pirates! is wholly unconcerned with how neatly its ideas slot into established Doctor Who precedent, and is honestly all the more interesting for it.

As such, the clockwork motif that features so heavily throughout these books – to the point that Stone identifies the purported trilogy of which Sky Pirates!, Death and Diplomacy and Oblivion are apparently a part as the “Clockwork Trilogy” in his introduction to the latter novel, strongly suggesting that its most important unifying threads really are aesthetic rather than narrative in nature – becomes, at its most basic, little more than a literalisation of the strictures of the myriad worlds that the TARDIS has forcefully crashed its way into over the years.

When you get down to it, after all, the symbolism of clockwork is strangely contradictory, being at once intricately and precisely wound and yet ultimately so very fragile if it meets with the slightest modicum of force, and it is therefore perfectly suited to serve as the mechanism of propagation that unites the surreality of the System with the pretence of the Dagellan Cluster’s Three Empires.

Even the comparatively grounded society of Dramos that exists at the centre of Burning Heart seems to adhere to this underlying narratological framework, with the Adjudicators and Human First having found their traits exaggerated so as to better fit into the larger story. Meanwhile, the choice to have transparent Hitler analogue Avrom Jelks set up his base in an abandoned amusement park, surrounded by the decaying husks of clockwork animatronics, establishes an explicit link between Stone’s apparent general disdain for narrative constraints and the strong association of fascistic regimes in the popular imagination with the cold, mechanistic impersonality of the industrial plant.

But even as the writer of a blog reviewing Wilderness Years fiction whose stance on the whole “Did the New Adventures make the Doctor too powerful?” question has pretty much always been a hearty chortle, followed shortly thereafter by getting back to more important discussions like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the fate of the Apollo 13 mission, I’d be remiss if I didn’t concede that there exists a non-trivial tension when it comes to Stone’s conception of the Doctor, and ironically enough it’s actually a tension that arises out of one of the more obvious rebuttals to those same tired NA debates.

Because really, the fact remains that there has always been something ever so slightly wrong-headed in debating how much centrality should be afforded the character of the Doctor in a show that quite literally bears the title of Doctor Who. Even before you factor in the more explicit incorporations of the title into the show as the “First Question” from The Wedding of River Song onwards, it’s a basic truism of the programme – at least once you get past the days of Ian and Barbara, I suppose – that the Doctor is granted unique status by the simple virtue of their eponymy.

Typically, the real question one should be asking of any development that “threatens to make the Doctor more important” or some such is therefore “How well is it executed?”, but in Stone’s case the quandary takes on a far stranger hue. The Doctor of Sky Pirates! or Death and Diplomacy is so indescribably huge, alien and irrepressible that, in the long term, the audience will inevitably be given cause to pose the question “Well, how can he be contained in a 300-odd page novel, then?”

And it’s a thorny, complex issue to be sure, to which the only real solution would probably be for Stone to either abandon that conception of the character – and the transition from the Seventh to the Eighth Doctor, whatever else we might think of its rather chaotic and hazy nature, does at least provide him with a pretty solid excuse to do so – or, failing that, to end up in some Doctorless corner of the franchise where the character can be defined by his absence, having finally escaped the confines of the written word and gone off to Adventures New.

Oh hey, now wait just a dog-gone minute…

And so, this lengthy preamble brings us to what is probably the second-most peculiar thing about Ship of Fools, namely that it marks the first of a grand total of four novels contributed by Stone to the ongoing Doctorless adventures of Bernice Summerfield. On its own, this fact isn’t especially significant. Sure, four books is rather a lot when you’re talking about a series that only ran for twenty-three instalments all up, but Stone is in this regard really just on a par with Justin Richards in the grand competition to see who can write the most Benny NAs.

It’s in the wider context of the current state of Doctor Who fiction in August 1997, however, that things become a mite stranger. Regular readers of the blog will probably remember that we have, to this point, largely dissented from the orthodox fan conception of these post-Doctor NAs as being a line that exists in complete opposition to and isolation from the contemporary BBC novels.

This isn’t, of course, to say that we’ve completely discarded the framework of the Wilderness Years’ increasing artistic fragmentation. With Happy Endings, the New Adventures were rather decisively outmoded as the future of Doctor Who by the airing of the TV movie, and the DWM comics followed up with a sucker punch of their own some two and a half months later by killing off Ace in a way that seemed designed to render Virgin’s use of the character irreconcilably “non-canonical.”

Perhaps tellingly, this is the second time in this review that we’ve made that observation of a creative decision, with the first coming three and a half years ago, in a novel from Virgin themselves no less. And sure, nobody was really going to go to bat for the sanctity of John and Gillian in the same way that they would for Gallifreyan history at the mere suggestion of the Doctor’s being half-human, but that’s besides the point. Rather, the point is that it happened at all.

The fan-oriented and fan-dictated nature of Wilderness Years fiction means that these kinds of petty spats are sadly all too common, and it would thus be rather foolish to pretend that we can completely avoid the “publication of Doctor Who fiction as vast, incomprehensible war” interpretation entirely.

But equally, well, all we’ve been subjected to so far is really just the foreshocks of that impending conflict. Like the Time War metaphor through which this conflict would eventually find expression, none of this is really bound by the rules of linearity or coherence, but I’ve already kind of worked out a very rough sketch in my head of what I consider the major “flashpoints” to talk about in future reviews, and they are all very definitely future events.

One of the most striking features of the New New Adventures to this point, then – although technically they’re the fifteenth New Adventures from the original – has actually been the relative state of harmony in which they’ve coexisted with the BBC line to date.

Certainly, this distinct paucity of outright conflict hasn’t been for lack of trying. Right off the bat, The Eight Doctors ran roughshod over Lungbarrow and Blood Harvest as if there were no tomorrow, while The Devil Goblins from Neptune felt rather difficult to square with where we left Liz in The Scales of Injustice.

But for every one of these perceived slights to the established Virgin continuity, there was an equal and opposite vindication of that continuity. Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum went out of their way to namedrop Yemaya in Vampire Science and thereby tacitly affirm the canonicity of SLEEPY in the new range, while also allowing Lance Parkin to pre-emptively reference the Eighth Doctor’s status as “Life’s Champion” in The Dying Days.

Steve Lyons’ The Murder Game included a cameo from a nameless tortoise-like race, directly evoking the memory of the Chelonians from The Highest Science et al. Even Keith Topping and Martin Day referenced Ian and Barbara’s son, confirmed in later BBC novels to be the same Johnny Chess that Paul Cornell had been so fond of dropping references to since the time of Revelation.

What’s more, this spirit of cross-pollination between the ranges was reflected behind the scenes as well. Orman’s work on Vampire Science came just two months after she had contributed a short story to the fourth of Virgin’s Decalog collections, and she would return to the NAs for one last hurrah with Walking to Babylon in February 1998.

At around the same time as Lawrence Miles was making some of his most enduring contributions to Doctor Who with Alien Bodies, he was also writing books like Down and penning the first short story to feature Bernice Summerfield as its sole protagonist. Despite the aforementioned frequency with which Justin Richards wrote for Virgin, he split his time fairly evenly with the BBC Books ranges, to the point where he wrote an identical number of EDAs/PDAs (Demontage, Millennium Shock) and NAs (Tears of the Oracle, The Joy Device) for the year of 1999.

In the case of Dave Stone, then, we’re confronted with a rather unique oddity: a writer who very definitively and conclusively pitched their tent in the Virgin camp until the last, refraining from making the jump to the BBC Books lines until Heart of TARDIS in June 2000, some six months after the final end of the New Adventures. In the two year period encompassing Ship of Fools through Return to the Fractured Planet, his most substantive engagement with the other publisher came in the form of Moon Graffiti, his contribution to BBC Audio’s 1998 Out of the Darkness anthology, which was also reprinted shortly thereafter in the second volume of the Short Trips series.

With Heart of TARDIS and The Slow Empire both being some considerable distance in the future, it’s difficult for us to evaluate the wisdom of this decision in a manner which is informed in any meaningful way by the general quality of Stone’s output for BBC Books, but it certainly seems fair to comment, at these initial stages, that the author of a novel as uncompromising in its weirdness as Sky Pirates! might not be the best fit for a company turning out books like The Eight Doctors, War of the Daleks and The Ultimate Treasure.

Sure, the EDAs would eventually prove themselves a fruitful stomping ground for more “out there” talents like Lawrence Miles, Paul Magrs, or Lloyd Rose, but to date the most adventurous and successful BBC Books novel by far has been Vampire Science, and even there Orman and Blum were very purposefully hemmed in by the need to define the Eighth Doctor in total opposition to any of the more controversial affectations adopted by Virgin in their handling of the Seventh.

At any rate, the decision to stick with Virgin seems to have born fruit in this instance. For an author that tends to divide fan opinion as much as Stone, Ship of Fools stands out as a novel that seems to be held in high esteem by a fair amount of people. Consulting the barometer that is the almighty Sullivan rankings reveals it to sit at a respectable 73.4%, making it both the eighth highest-ranked Benny novel and Stone’s highest-scoring book to date. Indeed, across all categories it manages to be his highest-scoring book full-stop, being the only one to clear 70%. Contemporary coverage from DWM‘s Dave Owen was similarly glowing, dubbing Ship of Fools the first of the retooled New Adventures to properly corroborate Virgin’s bold claim that “Science fiction has never been this fun!”

And, perhaps predictably given my generally positive predisposition towards Stone’s books – even as I can quite readily list off a number of aspects of his personal style that would, in isolation, be the kind of thing to drive me ever so slightly batty – I can’t help but concur with this judgement. Ship of Fools is an absolute delight, with Stone having turned out a novel that is quite probably his best yet, and is almost certainly his most accessible.

Most revealingly of all, however, reading the novel almost back to back with The Murder Game only serves to further highlight the gulf between the relative levels of aesthetic conservatism and restraint exercised by BBC Books and Virgin, and to be quite frank, if the latter company are willing to let Stone go all-out and turn in books like Ship of Fools, then it’s hard not to feel that everyone involved is much better off for his decision to stick with the NAs.

There’s something of a temptation in discussing the plot of Ship of Fools, particularly as it relates to the context of the larger series in which it sits – as well as the context of its only real competitor in the world of Doctor Who-adjacent novel length fiction – to launch straight into discussions of long-form storytelling and serialisation.

This impulse only feels natural, as we’ve already noted in reviewing Dragons’ Wrath that the first four Benny novels were developed in relatively close collaboration, with the authors exchanging frequent notes and adhering to a few well-placed editorial comments from Rebecca Levene to ensure that the fledgling series was able to maintain a certain level of basic coherence from book to book. Those of you who can count to four, then, will also have noticed that this represents the point at which that opening synergistic salvo wraps itself up, and so it probably behooves us to expend some measure of reflection in looking back over the series’ initial efforts.

Broadly speaking, the impression is a positive one. Over the course of these first few books, the series has managed to flag a number of threads as being ripe for later exploration, and has followed up on them in due course a few months down the line, making use of the series’ newfound TARDIS-free status quo to allow storylines to percolate in the background even as Benny might find herself roped into another entirely separate adventure.

Professor Archduke’s mysterious pantomime-based agenda and use of the phrase “Knowledge above all” in Oh No It Isn’t! were revealed to be signifiers of his membership of the Knights of Jeneve in Dragons’ Wrath. The Knights themselves will return in full force in Deadfall in a couple months’ time, roping Chris Cwej into a grand conspiracy involving their ancient founder Vazlor Baygent, mentioned as part of their backstory in Dragons’ Wrath, while Terrance Dicks’ Mean Streets will eventually pull back the curtain on the secrets of the Advanced Research Department that had been hinted at in the opening scenes of Cornell’s novel.

In regards to Ship of Fools, the most readily apparent hints of this ilk pertain to the persistent namedropping of Krytell and the Cat’s Paw throughout the preceding three books. It is perhaps not the most elegant means of directing the audience’s attention down a particular avenue, but it’s just about functional in establishing the New Adventures’ more slow-burning attitude towards setting up and paying off the background details of their fictional world.

This is, of course, really just an instance of the NAs having their finger on the pulse of conventional storytelling trends. By 1997, serialisation was well on the way to becoming one of the only games in town if you wanted to tell a story as part of an ongoing series, and it’s hardly surprising that Virgin’s output would reflect those developments.

There are any number of perfectly valid examples I could gesture at here to make my point. Just two months before the publication of Ship of Fools, the fifth season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine threw down the gauntlet for serialised narratives within Star Trek by launching the franchise’s first out-and-out war narrative, paying off threads that had been steadily building for the better part of three years. When it returned to screens in late September, it immediately launched a six-episode epic that saw the primary cast fragmented and separated from the eponymous space station for the bulk of its length.

The X-Files had always been willing to tease the vaguest possibility of a larger story – a mythology, even – requiring a longer-term commitment on the audience’s part than was typical of other comparable network shows, but it concluded its fourth season in May 1997 with a cliffhanger ending purportedly revealing the suicide of Fox Mulder. With the possible exception of the burning of the iconic basement office at the close of The End and the big-budget summer release of Fight the Future just one month later, it’s quite plausible to identify this specific cultural moment as the absolute zenith of the show’s relevance and visibility, resembling nothing so much as the commotion caused by Sherlock‘s The Reichenbach Fall some fifteen years later.

Even among less seismically successful shows, Millennium was just one month away from devoting the thematic arc of its second season to a dark, nightmarish and esoteric Hero’s Journey for Frank Black, with a steadily mounting apocalyptic pressure that eventually burst forth as a series of Patti Smith music videos and brought about the end of the world. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as we touched upon in reviewing Vampire Science, was taking a leaf out of Carter’s book and mixing standalone “villain of the week” plots with the ongoing schemes of a variety of seasonal “Big Bads,” with the phrase first being used in-text in February 1998’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

It’s easy, from a modern point of view, to fall into the trap of assuming this gradual crescendo of serialisation to possess a certain inevitability, as if the arc of society was always bending towards the premiere of The Sopranos in January 1999 and the dawning of a second Golden Age of Television. Under this paradigm, the logical conclusion would probably be to label the New Adventures more successful than the EDAs for their willingness to engage with these sorts of long-form narratives, with the world of twenty-sixth century humanity being sufficiently fleshed out that it can support the existence of a book like Ship of Fools, weaving together all these scattered threads in order to tell a larger story.

The truth is of course a mite more nuanced, as it often is in these sorts of situations. Even putting aside the quite reasonable point that we should probably refrain from making sweeping judgments about the Eighth Doctor Adventures when we’ve only read a grand total of two to date – and really, once we hit Alien Bodies the story arc horse has well and truly bolted from the stables anyway, for better or for worse – the notion that serialisation alone makes for an inherently worthwhile story doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny, coming a bit too close to an outright dismissal of those vast swathes of televisual history where the realities of the audience’s interaction with the medium made serialisation a wildly impractical option.

But with all of that being said, there is at least the germ of a point underlying the basic observation that Ship of Fools is very specifically rooted in ideas and characters that have been meticulously set up over the past three Benny novels, to say nothing of the sixty-one Doctor-led NAs before that. And yes, it’s fair to once again provide the disclaimer that placing this against an Eighth Doctor range that is two or three books deep at this time is pretty much the definition of “stacking the deck,” but it’s equally fair to note that the deeply conflicted and paradoxical nature of the EDAs served as a perpetual constraint on their ability to ever turn out a book like Ship of Fools, no matter how good they might have otherwise been.

Accordingly, Stone very much gives the impression in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story that his chief concern was not so much one of long-form storytelling as it was of allowing the new range to move away from its roots as a Doctor Who spin-off, and that this mission statement very much dictated the final form of Ship of Fools:

‘I was definitely in the camp,’ says Dave Stone, ‘who wanted to make the break [from Doctor Who] and build our own shared universe with little or no Time Lord involvement at all. The idea of an interstellar cruise – poorly executed as it was – full of people from everywhere going to all sorts of places, was a way to show that universe off and make the point that it was a different one from what had gone before.

‘Given that,’ he continues, ‘the only kind of story I could think of that happened on a cruise-liner was a Murder Mystery. I’m now trying to come up with another sort of story that would fit – and drawing a complete blank. This shall be left as an exercise to the reader, who will no doubt come up with tons! So, it was a confluence of form, function and my own conceptual paucity, basically.’

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Ship of Fools feels like the first Benny novel to emerge with most of the expected elements in place, what with the reintroduction of Brax and Jason in Dragons’ Wrath and Beyond the Sun, respectively, and the attention paid to setting up St. Oscar’s University in Oh No It Isn’t! There are a few notable changes yet to come – perhaps the most prominent of which are the return of Chris and the People of the Worldsphere – but, by and large, this is the point at which it feels like the bedrock fundamentals of the New Adventures’ retooling as a spin-off series have finally settled down.

More than any largely unverifiable suspicions as to the filing off of Steve Lyons’ rough edges by editorial edict, it is this detail which feels like the most instructive point of divergence between Ship of Fools and The Murder Game. The Past Doctor Adventures, after all, are by their very nature a much more self-contained and episodic series than the EDAs or the NAs, and where Lyons had to devote some measure of his novel to affording sufficient definition for a regular cast from a television show thirty years past, Stone is able to avail himself of reams of pre-existing characterisation that exists for Benny within the Virgin novels.

The real skill of Ship of Fools‘ construction, in other words, lies not just in its ability to capitalise on its space-bound murder mystery premise to further distinguish the parameters of the fictional world that Benny inhabits, but in its simultaneously linking that premise to certain fundamental truths about Benny’s character and allowing her – and the larger novel – to engage in some suitably withering, witty and quirky Stone critiques of some of the underlying structures of the murder mystery genre.

We noted last time, almost in passing, that The Murder Game‘s basic structure owed a lot to Agatha Christie, but it’s worth looping back around to that point and interrogating it a bit further, if only to illustrate how Stone has adopted an approach to Christie that has… well, interrogated her a bit further.

In hindsight, The Murder Game fits into the same school of thought into which we might very well lump an episode like The Unicorn and the Wasp, preferring to use the tropes and mechanics of Christie’s stories as window dressing for a light-hearted, breezy romp rather than opting for any sort of deeper examination of those tropes. This is certainly a decision that makes some amount of sense; Christie’s tropes didn’t become so deeply engrained into the murder mystery genre by sheer chance, and it’s easy to construct solid, entertaining drama from them, and even to wring out some measure of comedy.

About the closest thing to a criticism we can make here is the observation that perhaps, given Gareth Roberts’ recent slide into pestilent transphobia, and our conclusion in considering The Well-Mannered War that his ultimate failing was one of holding a good chortle to be a sacrosanct and wholly apolitical goal, The Unicorn and the Wasp‘s choice of tack might have been a bit of an early warning sign of the writer’s potential for sliding into vapid, reactionary bigotry, and… actually, that’s a pretty substantial and damning criticism of the whole enterprise, so that’s vaguely depressing.

Because as unfortunate as it may be, it must be acknowledged that Christie was never a writer to whom you could apply such adjectives as “progressive” or “open-minded,” at least if you haven’t built up a foolhardy tolerance to people laughing in your face and throwing you out of various shades of dining establishment. Her books are littered with a pronounced strain of xenophobia, whether it be directed towards the Jews, the Italians, or really just about anybody who didn’t happen to “fit the mould” of comfortably upper-class, white English existence.

Accordingly, these anxieties also tended to manifest in a not inconsiderable amount of classism, with a profusion of working-class individuals throughout the writer’s novels depicted as simple-minded folk who occasionally get above themselves in aspiring to the wealth or status of those in whose employ they dutifully perform menial and thankless labour, and who should really just accept their lot in life.

The typical defences present themselves here, some of them sounding eerily similar to the kinds of rhetoric that you might hear trotted out by Doctor Who fans who want to convince themselves that the dodgiest thing about The Talons of Weng-Chiang really was just a large, unconvincing rat. Interviewed by the BBC on the topic of Christie’s alleged bigotries in conjunction with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 adaptation of Death on the Nile, Professor Vike Martina Plock argued vociferously against the notion of censoring some of the more unsavoury segments of the original novels:

“It made the [censored] novels less socially critical as documents of their time because I do think Christie’s novels criticise racism rather than perpetuating [it],” she says. “The racism depicted in the books draws attention to the fact that it was very dominant in the culture in which Christie was living. The 1930s [when her career as a crime writer hit its peak] saw the rise of the far right in Europe, leading to the Spanish Civil War and to World War Two, and [racism and] xenophobia were obviously rife.”

In due course, the objections to these defences are just as easy to come by as they are in the case of Talons, with the main point I would raise being that Christie’s status as a white upper-class English woman does severe damage to any possibility of her being considered some neutral arbiter of these kinds of prejudices. What, if anything, is the implied critique in choosing to give And Then There Were None the original title that she did?

Even the defence that the writer was “of her time” feels as lukewarm an excuse as ever, with the fact that the Anti-Defamation League saw fit to contact Christie’s American publisher about the antisemitic elements of her works as early as 1947 suggesting that these beliefs aren’t just some lamentable failing of the past that people didn’t have a problem with until modern audiences were all gripped by some nebulous “woke mind virus” or whatever such nonsense the tabloids are spewing this week.

In the context of 1997, these were particularly pressing questions, with two of Christie’s most famous detectives having received high-profile BBC adaptations in recent memory. Joan Hickson took on the role of Miss Marple between 1984 and 1992, starring in dramatisations of all twelve original novels to feature the character, while David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot had, to date, helmed six seasons of television from 1989 to 1996, and would eventually return for seven more between the years 2000 and 2013.

In regards to some of the thornier elements of the original stories, to quote the same article from the Death on the Nile press cycle as before, it seems that the policy of choice in these adaptations was one of almost surgical excision:

“There was a conscious erasure of diversity in the TV adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s,” says Dr Jamie Bernthal-Hooker, author of Queering Agatha Christie. “Black characters in the books were replaced with white characters and similarly those who we can read as LGBT [were removed].” One example Bernthal-Hooker gives is of Christie’s 1955 Poirot novel Hickory Dickory Dock, which was originally set in a 1950s student hostel and featured an array of international characters, including Egyptian student Ahmed Ali and his flatmate Akibombo, who was of West African origin. However, when the book was adapted for the small screen in 1995, the action – as was often the case in the long-running TV series – was transplanted to the inter-war years and it featured an all-white cast.

“It was perhaps understandable in terms of avoiding the problematic stereotypes,” Bernthal-Hooker says – the characters were sympathetically but stereotypically drawn by Christie, with the latter speaking in “comical” broken English – “but also there was clearly no attempt to develop or update these characters for the screen, as happens to other characters in the adaptations.”

Indeed, these problems seem to be so deeply-rooted in the tradition of the murder mystery within English popular culture that they have even spilled over to television programmes with no tangible connection to Christie whatsoever. At the time of Ship of Fools‘ publication, ITV had broadcast The Killings at Badger’s Drift some five months prior, the pilot episode of their forthcoming detective drama Midsomer Murders, with the first full season commencing filming across July and August 1997 for transmission the following March.

Over the years, the show would begin to come under increasing scrutiny for the overwhelmingly white makeup of its cast, culminating in a frankly appalling 2011 Radio Times interview with original executive producer Brian True-May in which he defended the decision not to prominently feature any minority cast members on the grounds of preserving the show’s status as “the last bastion of Englishness.” After people quite rightly raised their voices in uproar in response to these comments, he announced that he would be stepping down from the producer’s chair after having helmed fourteen series of the show.

It is intriguing to wonder as to the possible significance of the murder mystery’s ubiquity in the United Kingdom of the 1990s, perhaps reflecting a retreat into those aspects of class and ethnic identity that more traditionalist segments of the nation – the kind of people who read The Spectator and can seriously and unselfconsciously bandy about terms like “the last bastion of Englishness,” in short – might fear were somehow at risk of being eroded in the wake of seismic global changes, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the European Union.

Taking something of an armchair sociology perspective on media criticism, it almost feels like a cross-Atlantic transplantation of similarly white, middle-class anxieties playing out in the American media of the decade, with the fear of anarchic, random violence implicit in the umpteenth serial killer movie or heavily racialised slice of local news coverage regarding gang conflicts having been replaced with an altogether more targeted and subtle threat against the kinds of institutions of which Christie was apparently so fond in her own time.

(To arguably stretch this analysis well past its breaking point, I’ll also note that it’s a rather spectacular piece of bad fortune that Stone should so heavily commit to the idea of critiquing Britain’s relationship with the nobility – “…the inbred, vestigial growths of family trees that had properly given up any semblance of life centuries before, and who now performed some travesty of life by leeching parasitically off the last of the family inheritance,” indeed – in a book published just ten days before the nation would be gripped by a mass outpouring of grief over the death of Princess Diana. Then again, some might well view this as little more than a morose vindication of Ship of Fools‘ observations regarding the peculiarly high level of emotional energy that even the most ordinary and working-class citizens of the United Kingdom are willing to invest in the foundations of the country’s aristocracy.)

Where the nineties treated America to the perverse, glitzy spectacle of the O. J. Simpson trial, the British media found themselves gripped by the murder of James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys, with all the associated pearl-clutching over the apparent inability of society to properly raise its youngest members and protect them from the malign influence of such “video nasties” as Child’s Play 3.

As far as Doctor Who writers go, then, the concerns that typically animate Dave Stone would seem to be uniquely suited to a deeper exploration of the ways in which the punitive framework of the murder mystery often serves to reinforce traditional systems of power and wealth, and the world of Ship of Fools is, appropriately enough, largely just a parodically heightened extrapolation of the unspoken subtext lurking at the heart of many of these stories.

This is perhaps most obvious in the blatant parodies of famous detectives with which Stone has populated the passengers’ list of the Titanian Queen, from Khaarli the Czhan to the blissfully incompetent Emil Dupont, “the greatest detective in all of Nova Belgique.” With the notable exception of Khaarli – directly tied as he is to the Dagellan Cluster which Stone had established as a much less affluent corner of the galaxy back in Death and Diplomacy, with the writer wisely refraining from basing the character too heavily on Earl Derr Biggers’ original creation – the detectives onboard the titular ship of fools are portrayed as being singularly disinterested in the plight of anybody who doesn’t happen to belong to the richest of the rich.

At times, Stone’s handling of these ideas – particularly in the final revelation of the ludicrously complex plot and its attendant murders of labyrinthine complexity essentially coming down to something as prosaic as an insurance scam – almost seems to prefigure the themes undergirding Rian Johnson’s work on Knives Out and especially its sequel, Glass Onion, and if Ship of Fools has one major flaw it’s probably that the inevitable “murderer revealed” scenes can’t help but pale in retrospect when compared to those films, as the standard cadences required of these sorts of sequences seem to jar heavily against Stone’s very specific strengths as a writer of dialogue, which lie more in snappy one-liners and surreal asides than in wrapping up a murder mystery.

What we’re left with is dialogue that is functional, but feels a little flavourless coming from the man who’s spent the bulk of the novel inundating the reader with such concepts as Schindler’s List on Ice or a guard dog that manages the improbable feat of being half bull-mastiff, half Chihuahua and half squid, to say nothing of the litany of rec.arts.drwho regulars that he famously kills off in increasingly inventive fashion.

Still, it must be said that these small difficulties are largely papered over by just how well Stone manages to capitalise on how well-suited Bernice is to play the role of protagonist in a story like this. For one, there’s the obvious fact that the main upheaval to the role of the Doctor Who companion which she brought about in the first place – with Cornell pretty much inventing the “relatively ordinary person with sufficient pop cultural awareness to react to and lampoon the more fantastical elements of a Doctor Who story in a manner not too dissimilar from the average reader” from scratch – means that placing her in a position to take the piss out of the Christie-esque mysteries around her will reliably lead to sparks of some description.

Even outside of that, however, there are all manner of tiny details in her backstory that serve to make Benny the perfect vehicle for commentary on these class structures. Within the English class system as it is commonly understood – and, despite the science-fiction trappings, this is quite plainly Stone’s chief source of inspiration – Benny would, after all, seem to be something of a walking contradiction, the daughter of a well-to-do albeit eventually disgraced Admiral who found herself forced into a position of outsiderhood, only able to claw her way back to something resembling social prestige by engaging in a protracted pantomime of status and Professorship.

It’s little wonder, in short, that she should find herself drawn most strongly to outsiders and masters of disguise like Khaarli and the Cat’s Paw, given their intimate understanding of the rather farcical nature of the structures of class and species that the rest of the passengers take for granted as having inherent worth.

(Perhaps appropriately enough, given the context, it should be noted at the last that Christie herself was no stranger to archaeological digs after her marriage to her second husband Max Mallowan in 1930, and her maternal grandfather, Frederick Boehmer, was also a man of military extraction much as Isaac Summerfield was. The chances of Paul Cornell having thought of any of this while writing Love and War are, of course, so low that they would actually be less than zero if such a thing were mathematically possible, but it speaks well to Stone’s command of the character in exploring his chosen theme that even these smaller attributes should feel so apposite.)

Ship of Fools is, by and large, a delight from start to finish. It might lack the strange, brooding beauty of a novel like Beyond the Sun, but it’s very probably the most accessible Dave Stone book you’re ever likely to find, maintaining his traditionally zany authorial voice while keeping things restricted to a comparatively simple setting and premise. If this is the kind of work we can expect him to turn out for Virgin moving forward, then the future is looking bright indeed.

Miscellaneous Observations

I know the consensus on the Interludes seems to be that they’re pointless, unfunny bits of fluff that only serve to weigh down an otherwise bubbly and energetic novel, but I think they actually manage to tie in quite nicely with the book’s central thesis as to the entrenchment of societal class structures through the tropes of seemingly disposable pulpy paperbacks.

Admittedly, the two Sandford Groke segments do feel like they skirt up against Poe’s Law – or Po’s Law, as the case may be – a bit at times, but the absurd degree to which Stone heightens some of the unquestioned subtext that accompanies these kinds of “gentleman adventurer” tales is still just about entertaining enough that it works, and it’s certainly a more barbed and pointed critique of Yellow Peril stories than anything you’re likely to find in the pages of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang.

And naturally Doctor Who fandom seems to have tended to overlook most of the salient points in the character of Doctor Po and convinced themselves that he’s just a Doctor Who parody. I mean, he has a time machine and there’s a token cheeky not-quite namedrop poking fun once more at the particulars of Virgin’s current copyright arrangement, but the similarities to Fu Manchu are far more pronounced, and consciously so. Then again, I guess I’ll point you back to my earlier observation about the attitudes to the giant rat, and conclude simply by saying that I’m not surprised, just disappointed.

Speaking of disappointed, I’m not really a huge fan of the casual way Stone bandies about “autistic” as one of his many quirky adjectives of choice. I was just about prepared to let the first instance slide given its generally unobtrusive nature, but the second instance felt far more jarring to me, so I’m mentioning it here.

It’s not even necessarily that it’s all that offensive – I mean, it kind of is, but we have The Mary-Sue Extrusion coming up eventually, about which I have heard… things, to put it mildly, so we’ll save the bulk of the outrage for now – but it just smacks of a lazy attempt to spice up an already fairly shocking and strange “song” with an adjective that the vast majority of the audience will probably consider to be synonymous with “strange.”

With all of that being said, there is something very Dave Stone – and I mean that in a positive sense, this time – about the way in which he casually brushes up against the age-old “Was Miss Marple/Jessica Fletcher a serial killer the whole time?” fan theory through the character of Agatha Magpole, only to dismiss such a possibility as being far too implausible and instead opting for the much more level-headed option of “She actually possesses mental powers of which she is wholly unconscious and which turn perfectly normal individuals around her into stark, raving homicidal maniacs.” Natch.

Final Thoughts

Huh, I wasn’t honestly expecting that one to go on for quite so long, but hopefully there were some interesting points to be made regardless. My inspiration to read and write has admittedly been rather spotty of late for a variety of health-related reasons, so I do apologise if things are a bit more sporadic and haphazard than usual for the foreseeable future.

Regardless, join me next time as we welcome noted horror author Mark Morris to the world of Doctor Who with a tale of sinister duplicates on the streets of Victorian London. Oh and there’s also a Zygon on the front cover. But I’m sure that’s unrelated to anything of import. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper