…they play something called jazz. Old Earth retro is all the rage just now.
~ Sara correctly identifies nostalgia as the flavour of the month
In hindsight, it would probably have felt fundamentally wrong for 1997 to end in any other fashion. More than anything else, the single strongest unifying thread running throughout these past thirty books or so has been the gradual transformation of all of our assumptions regarding what Doctor Who looks like and what it can do. The Wilderness Years status quo as it stands with Mean Streets is practically unrecognisable from that with which we rang in the year in Eternity Weeps some eleven months ago.
The nature of this transformation, as we’ve implicitly stressed time and time again, is effectively nothing less than the death of Doctor Who, and the fact that this should seem at all remarkable is, in and of itself, worth commenting upon. After all, death has always been a part of the programme’s unfolding text dating back to October 1966 at the very latest, with every iteration of the show gradually becoming consumed by the march of time and used as raw artistic biomass to fuel the metamorphosis of its successor.
(Pedants, of course, may want to point to the fifth episode of The Chase as an even earlier candidate for the first intrusion of Doctor Who‘s death into the narrative.)
And yet none of this can quite alter the very real sense in which this latest death is, indeed, wildly different, primarily on account of the actual nature of the McCoy/McGann transformation never seeming remotely settled.
One possibility that was shot down in flames almost immediately, ironically enough, was the one that everyone had assumed and hoped would be the case going into May 1996, with the original twenty-six season juggernaut of BBC One programming finding a new lease on life as an American co-production with the likes of Fox and Universal. When the programme managed a meagre 5.5 million viewers on its American broadcast on the Fox network, tying with a rerun of Cops as the 75th most-watched broadcast of the week, any such hopes of a trans-Atlantic revival were dashed hard against the harsh and unforgiving rocks of Ellis Island.
Even this minor televisual apocalypse proved to be a curiously deferred one, however, as was perhaps befitting of a decade like the 1990s in which all the presumptive eschatons seemed to ultimately fizzle out in a quietly embarrassing fashion. As late as April 1997, it was theoretically possible that Universal might choose to extend their option to expand the McGann television movie into a fully-fledged series, but there was never a sense that anybody that considered themselves to be even slightly “in the know” as to the ins and outs of television production seriously rated the probability of such a decision as anything more than a statistical trifle.
So Doctor Who died, six and a half years after it kicked the bucket the first time around. In this respect, Segal’s TV movie provides us with the perfect visual analogy in its much-delayed regeneration scene. Far from the classic series’ half-hearted blurring of the camera with a cheap visual effect, or even from the revival’s eventual fiery yellow splendour, the regeneration of the Seventh Doctor into the Eighth stands out as a moment of supremely ghoulish horror.
Having been the victim of an ill-advised attempt at medical intervention – at revival, even – Sylvester McCoy lies gurning in a mortuary cabinet, his skin limned by ethereal blue electrical discharges that offer fleeting glimpses of the skeleton beneath. On a television set, a lone technician watches a late night showing of James Whale’s classic 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein. As the newly transformed Paul McGann sits bolt upright in his steely confinement, the voice of Colin Clive as the eponymous mad scientist rings out through the hospital: “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
The appeal of this to those of us who like to create overly neat readings out of entirely extraneous snippets of an old television movie should be obvious. As a stand-in for the necromantic ritual that all television revivals are to one extent or another, it’s pretty much everything that one could ask for, and the only detail that might have conceivably improved the gracefulness of the parallel would have been to use one of the classic Peter Cushing-led Hammer Horror films instead, providing you as it would with a regeneration scene containing three separate Doctors.
From a cynical perspective, the very fact of Doctor Who‘s having been imbued with life for that all-too-brief ninety minute span is treated here as something inherently monstrous, its new visage having been assembled out of sundry cult television cast-offs from the turn of the millennium rather than the extremities of a host of rotting corpses.
And in case this hasn’t become glaringly obvious over the course of these past however many dozen reviews, I am undeniably one of those who takes a cynical perspective on the TV movie, not least because of what happened next. Well, OK, technically speaking “what happened next” in the immediate sense was that the New Adventures found themselves thrust into an unforeseen metatextual Greek tragedy-cum-existential crisis.
With Virgin staring down the barrel of a revoked licensing agreement, the novels that had almost single-handedly shepherded the Doctor Who brand for nigh on half a decade were forced to make way for a “revival” that was broadly acknowledged to be dead in the water, but not quite dead enough that the BBC didn’t think they could make a pretty penny by taking the books in-house.
This sense of inevitability and narrative determinism was only further heightened by the troubled production of So Vile a Sin, leading to a strange situation in which, for a full five months, contemporary readers of the NAs were acutely aware of the ruinous ends of two thirds of the line’s latter-day regular cast, despite only having actually seen one of those ruinous ends play out in full. If there exists a situation more likely to make the head of your average modern spoilerphobic fanboy spontaneously explode into a million tiny pieces, I truly cannot fathom what it might be.
But as fascinating as this period might be as a rare example of Doctor Who‘s past clinging on to life well beyond the point at which we as fans have been conditioned to expect it to be supplanted by the nominal “future” of the series, it has become increasingly clear by the end of 1997 that it was little more than that. Just nine months after it formally wrapped up, the McCoy-focused run of novels between Happy Endings and Lungbarrow feels like a peculiar footnote in the larger arc of the Eighth Doctor books’ rapidly attaining ascendancy over their Virgin predecessors.
Which allows us to circle back around to what I originally meant by “what happened next.” Whatever might have transpired in that prolonged interregnum – and make no mistake, it was a period containing several books that ought to be qualitatively assessed as, at a bare minimum, “really damn good” – the launch of the EDAs came to so strongly overshadow any other events that the elision of the twelve or so months between the airing of the TV movie and the publication of The Eight Doctors doesn’t actually feel entirely unjustifiable.
Unfortunately for us though, not all stories attain notoriety by virtue of being good, or even basically competent, pieces of entertainment, and indeed in the case of the early Eighth Doctor Adventures it’s tough to escape the impression that the books repeatedly bore out the exact antithesis of that notion by being… well, let’s not make any bones about it, by being downright terrible.
The Eight Doctors quickly gained a reputation as one of the most widely derided Doctor Who novels of all time, and its placement as the third-worst of the EDAs’ eventual seventy-three total books on the Shannon Sullivan rankings becomes an even more scathing vote of no confidence when one considers its status as a product of perennially beloved former script editor Terrance Dicks. When the inaugural outing in a series of original, novel-length Doctor Who stories, written by one of the figures who practically defined the parameters of what prosebound Doctor Who could even look like for an entire generation of fans, is met with such widespread scorn and derision from the moment of its release, something has gone very, very wrong indeed.
And go wrong it did. In a stunning display of artistic self-sabotage Dicks rapidly squandered thirty years’ worth of goodwill on a paper-thin, continuity-saturated mess of a novel whose unrelenting tedium was only broken up by moments of extraneous passive aggresiveness towards those parts of the programme that failed to meet with the author’s approval. Failing that, readers could expect to be treated to a spot of clumsy moralising and/or barely-veiled sexism that served as an all too painful reminder of the book’s having been written by a sixty-two year-old white British man who started working in television before the advent of colour transmissions.
In the wake of the EDAs’ quite literal failure to launch, the subsequent months did at least play host to a substantial uptick in quality. Vampire Science, The Bodysnatchers and Genocide demonstrated that a higher standard of novel was achievable if the range’s authors were willing to engage in a greater degree of artistic collaboration, with Orman, Blum, Morris and Leonard each chipping in to try and find a workable niche for a Doctor-companion duo that had found itself extremely lacking in definition for reasons largely outside of its control.
Yet if the laws of gravity are held to be a universal constant even in the publishing realm, what goes up must inevitably come down, and in War of the Daleks John Peel inadvertently ended up proving the truth of that maxim. After things had begun to start looking up for the nascent series, the erstwhile Dalek noveliser’s attempt at a big clanking Skarosian epic of his own quickly descended into a deeply regrettable morass of interminable battle sequences intercut with a series of po-faced lectures on the nature of war with all the moral sophistication of a Looney Tunes short.
What’s more, Peel continued to display his persistent inability to write for women without constantly reminding the audience of their outstanding physical beauty or threatening them with the lingering spectre of unwanted or otherwise generally creepy sexual advances.
Then, just as the novels seemed to have hit their lowest ebb for the second time in just five months, along came Lawrence Miles with Alien Bodies. Shooting almost instantly to the top of countless fan rankings of the Wilderness Years novels and remaining there for no small period of time, it was nothing short of a game-changer, transforming Miles from a purveyor of intriguing novelistic oddities like Christmas on a Rational Planet or Down into a leading light amidst the churning sea of the BBC Books line’s inadequacies.
Name a recurring concept from the Eighth Doctor books and there’s a fair chance that it can trace its lineage back to Alien Bodies in one way or another. Humanoid TARDISes, Faction Paradox, the War in Heaven, Dark Sam, the bottle universes; you name it, Alien Bodies started it.
At this juncture, particularly astute readers might be inclined to write all of my waffling off as a totally extraneous exercise in reiterating a loose paratextual arc that I’ve already spent some several thousand words expounding upon in reviews gone by. However, I do think that offering a condensed summary of the past few months is the only remotely effective way to underscore just how drastically the foundational rules by which I conduct these reviews have changed in a little over half a year.
Where before I could take some small solace in the familiarity of the steady New Adventure/Missing Adventure rhythm that we’ve been sticking to since I first covered Blood Harvest and Goth Opera some four and a half years ago, with the occasional detour into the Decalogs, I now have to contend with three new books from two separate companies almost every month. On the off chance that I hit a month with a Decalog or, to skip forward a little, a Short Trips anthology, that number goes up to four.
(Incidentally, yes, I am mildly terrified of the forthcoming Year in Review post, why do you ask?)
More than that, Virgin’s loss of the Doctor Who license has resoundingly impinged upon the applicability of many of the usual critical frameworks that I’ve built up over the past six years and change, altering the nature of the game even further.
But in all of this, I’ve consciously avoided the question of what the New Adventures were doing around the same period, and in truth my reasoning for this largely boils down to the simple fact that they’ve mostly just been turning out good, solid science fiction fare. And while my use of the qualifier “just” there might come across as an attempt to frame that observation as a criticism, in reality nothing could be further from the truth.
Of the first seven Bernice-led New Adventures – or six and Deadfall, if you want to be really picky about your terminology – there hasn’t really been an outright, unpardonable misfire in the bunch thus far. Even the lesser novels like the rather generic Dragons’ Wrath or the aforementioned periodic Gary Russell outing in Deadfall have managed to be generally entertaining reads, even if they’re unlikely to ever go head-to-head with books like The Left-Handed Hummingbird or The Also People for placement on anybody’s personal list of the Top Ten NAs or what have you.
Furthermore, the spirit of gonzo experimentation that allowed the novels to keep Doctor Who alive as an active, if diminished, piece of popular culture remained a pervasive part of the series’ DNA even after its transition. You had your more traditional books like Beyond the Sun or Dragons’ Wrath, yes, but these were routinely offset against far less readily quantifiable efforts like the irrepressibly metatextual mania of Ship of Fools or Down.
The period spanning the tail end of 1997 and the dawn of 1998 is particularly instructive in this regard, being perhaps the most aesthetically nostalgic era of the novels to date. Deadfall was conceived of as “a boys’ own adventure in outer space,” albeit one that was lent a certain degree of novelty by Russell’s decision to filter that premise through the lens of Reg Watson’s Prisoner and a deliberate queering of the “women in prison” genre of exploitation films. Mean Streets, as we’ll get into in due course, sees Terrance Dicks homaging classic hardboiled detective novels, while Christopher Bulis will offer up the NAs’ second extended meditation on the works of Agatha Christie in Tempest next month.
In amongst all these more traditionalist works, though, the novels still found room for bolder experiments like Simon Bucher-Jones’ Ghost Devices, a book which unflinchingly centred its plot around high-concept temporal paradoxes while also including a subplot in which a sentient air vent led a robot uprising.
None of this, I’ll admit, comes close to making Mean Streets a less conventional novel in and of itself. There’s very little here that will play as a genuine shock to an audience possessing even a passing familiarity with the tropes of hardboiled detective novels, save for those elements that belong to an equally orthodox strain within the genre of science fiction.
Mean Streets unfolds in a world of rugged lawmen with outstanding personal vendettas to settle, opportunistic mercenaries, and shady criminal organisations with informants lurking in every bar and speakeasy to be found in the smog-cloaked city. The very title of the book is directly lifted from The Simple Art of Murder, one of the most iconic essays ever penned by pre-eminent hardboiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler. Indeed, Dicks is so fond of the line that he’s actually referenced it with varying degrees of directness in every single one of his novels to date bar Exodus, though Mean Streets certainly takes the cake for the proportion of the quote that it’s willing to reproduce.
In other words, we’re dealing with a book that makes very little effort, if any, to disguise the fact that it exists for no reason more complex than Terrance Dicks’ simple desire to write the exact kind of story that Terrance Dicks likes to write.
The first question we’re likely to ask ourselves here is, naturally, why this isn’t a flaming disaster. After all, The Eight Doctors was equally Dicksian in many of its impulses, from the disproportionate focus on the parts of the programme’s history for which he actually wrote scripts through to the aforementioned chronic sexism and Nancy Reagan-esque handling of crack cocaine.
But Mean Streets is, against all odds, a perfectly enjoyable book. I mean, yes, it’s not a scintillating classic the likes of which will echo through the ages, but that hasn’t actually been a level of quality to which Dicks has aspired to since at least the time of Exodus if we’re being charitable, and with the benefit of hindsight even that novel was propped up considerably thanks to its being surrounded by books of the calibre of Genesys and Apocalypse.
Still, Dicks’ fourth and final New Adventure delivers everything that you’d expect from its title and premise, and I don’t mean that as a pejorative in any sense. Nearly a quarter of a century on from The Auton Invasion, the man’s prose is just as crisp and readable as ever, without being gummed up by the mountains of continuity that plagued The Eight Doctors.
Meanwhile, the villains are all black-hatted moustache twirlers who speak of themselves and their plans entirely in terms laced with the definite article and some judicious capitalisation (the Director, the Project, etc.) while Chris Cwej is an unambiguous paragon of stout, square-jawed masculinity, every inch the “best man in his world and a good enough man for any world” in the classical Chandler tradition. As you might imagine, this doesn’t exactly lend itself to the most sophisticated sense of morality or drama, but… damn it all, it’s fun.
After a month like November 1997 in which the actual nuts and bolts business of whether a given book was any good was largely overshadowed by our consideration of the dim outline of the franchise’s future, it somehow feels entirely appropriate that it should be Terrance Dicks who should be there for the year’s proverbial curtain call. Sure, he might bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the unfortunate state in which the EDAs have found themselves at this moment in time, but the essential difficulty of consistently decrying a generally well-intentioned figure like Dicks remains in full force here, in spite of his many, many shortcomings and blind spots.
In fact, it probably behooves us to make an acknowledgment here of those shortcomings, because for all that I generally had a good time with Mean Streets, I’d be lying if I said that some of the same old issues didn’t raise their head at least a little bit.
For starters, Dicks sketches out the contours of life in Megacity with a characteristically simplistic view of crime and its attendant social pressures. The vast majority of the faceless bruisers that populate the novel are drawn in accordance with the broadest possible template for what constitutes a criminal.
In practice, this leads Mean Streets to throw a steady stream of simple-minded, violent, generally unclean and implicitly – or sometimes, as in the case of the miners who make up the bulk of the DevCorp Project’s victims, explicitly – working-class individuals at our more respectable and svelte protagonists, with a minimal examination of any of the undertones that might come with declaring a professor of archaeology and two ex-cops to be more “respectable” members of society.
Even what little interrogation of Megerran social structures exists here proves very revealing of Dicks’ general artistic worldview. The prime candidate for discussion here is undoubtedly the reveal that the mysterious Project that so piques Chris and Benny’s curiosity here – having been stumbled upon by the late Roz Forrester in a heretofore unseen part of her investigations alongside Chris in Shakedown – boils down to nothing more poetic than an effort by a rich and powerful mining corporation to improve its workers’ efficiency through illicit genetic manipulation.
Naturally, this leads to some solid moral outrage from Bernice, and Dicks at least has the decency to avoid being quite so obscenely cack-handed as to presage Kerblam!‘s glorious thesis of “The systems aren’t the problem!” Moreover, there’s an appealingly nineties quality to the specific kinds of anxieties being expressed here, with the fearful reaction to genetic engineering fitting comfortably with the unease occasioned by the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in July 1996 and the ongoing furore surrounding the Human Genome Project.
Compare, for instance, Chip Johannessen’s Sense and Antisense over on Millennium, which aired just two months prior to the release of Mean Streets and posited a connection between the real-world Project to such atrocities as the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing practiced during the Bosnian War. Setting aside the monumental awkwardness inherent in tackling such weighty and recent human cruelties in such a heightened, pulpy fashion, the underlying concept of powerful governments and corporations turning impoverished folks into mindless killing machines by essentially “flipping a switch” in their genetic makeup is strikingly similar between the two texts.
Even the revelation that DevCorp engaged in this experimentation “under the cover of an elaborate programme of medical care” evokes the emphasis placed by Johannessen’s script upon the Tuskegee Syphilis Study – for which President Bill Clinton had apologised in May 1997 – as a historical antecedent to the racially-coded exploitation taking place in modern times. None of this, of course, is to suggest that Terrance Dicks ever so much as watched a single episode of Millennium, and indeed if I were a betting man I might even be inclined to place good money against that very prospect. Rather, it is suggestive of a common thread of disquiet running through nineties popular culture.
But for all that Dicks presents the miners’ treatment as an obscenity, he is conspicuously quick to hedge his bets when proposing a resolution to the problem. As you might expect from the man who had the Sixth Doctor lecture the Shobogans on the necessity for them to reform Gallifreyan society rather than contemplate any sort of revolution in The Eight Doctors, and assigned Benny to the all-important task of bringing British parliamentary democracy to E-Space in Blood Harvest, the resolution he floats is not one in which DevCorp is shut down or forced into irrelevancy by the exposure of its misconduct.
Rather, the book gives every impression of sincerely believing that that misconduct starts and ends with President Joseph Devlin himself, and that the remaining shareholders will be able to turn DevCorp around in the wake of his untimely death at the hands of his augmented Security Chief.
Certainly, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain appealing naivety to this logic, mostly on account of its quaintness when juxtaposed against relentlessly cynical works like Ghost Devices or Down. All the same, it serves as yet another exhibit in the decades-long procession of evidence suggesting Dicks’ politics as being that of a well-intentioned centrist who, like all good centrists, has an alarming proclivity for acting, thinking and speaking in a manner functionally identical to your average conservative.
At the end of the day, this is the type of thing that can be placed within the same ball park as the patronising treatment of feminism in The Time Warrior, or the suggestion in The Monster of Peladon that the miners’ strikes of the mid-seventies were merely the result of the National Union of Mineworkers’ being manipulated by devious foreign powers.
(From the standpoint of wrapping up our recurring political and narrative preoccupations for 1997, we also cannot in good conscience overlook the neatness of a March 1997 interview given by Tony Blair to a Sheffield-based radio station in which he named himself a Pertwee Era fan, tying together the uncanny PR sheen of New Labour with the ever-evolving trajectory of Doctor Who. Hell, it was in the very same issue of DWM which reported on the youthful Labour leader’s Doctor of choice that Dave Owen reviewed The Eight Doctors as part of his regular Shelf Life column. I mean, if you wanna talk about synchronicity…)
This glorification of the centre is, appropriately enough, reflected quite handily in the presentation of Megacity’s criminal schema. Crime, Dicks seems to suggest, can come from two main sources: the teeming, violent masses of the poor and disenfranchised, and the glimmering towers of the ultra-rich. The only workable option to avoid the taint of criminality, it seems, is to walk in an eternal middle ground between the two, whether it be as ex-Adjudicator, private eye, or well-intentioned university professor.
(This, in hindsight, also perhaps makes sense of one of the more baffling moments in Dicks’ oeuvre, namely his lionising of Al Capone as “a businessman” who isn’t quite as bad as the historical record paints him in Blood Harvest. Implicit in that declaration, repeated by Dekker in service of his argument that “Al’s not like the rest of them,” is a certain quality of middle-class respectability. Notably, Mean Streets‘ most sympathetic gangster, the ironically named Lucifer – Satanic visage and all – is explicitly identified by Bernice as appearing to be “Megacity’s equivalent of Al Capone.” She means it as a disparagement, at least initially, but the fact that she comes to be rather smitten with him over the course of the novel suggests that Dicks might not bes quite as uncomplimentarily disposed towards ye olde Scarface’s spiritual successor.)
There are also some irritating issues when it comes to gender, with Dicks leaning hard into “women like shopping and men like guns” in his characterisation of Chris and Benny without even a trace of irony. I mean, yes, we know from SLEEPY at the very least that Benny lands squarely on the “frock” side of the age-old gun/frock dichotomy, but with the added context that this is a book from the guy who very unapologetically believes that the role of the companion should be to look pretty, ask questions and scream a lot it can’t help but feel a little iffy. Similarly, the decision to lean into tired routines about women being catty and constantly sniping at each other in the interactions between Bernice and Sara is overly hackneyed and, frankly, quite lazy to boot.
But it’s here that we find something approaching… well, it would be inaccurate to call it an excuse for these issues as such. Those issues are still present, and they count as substantial knocks against Mean Streets that hold me back from ever being entirely unreserved in my enjoyment of it.
All the same, the bulk of these issues are, in the final tallying, largely just outgrowths of the underlying structures of detective fiction as a genre, and indeed of adventure fiction in the broader sense. Writing in Finding Room for Black Hope, Black Justice, and Black Love in Noir Fiction of the overwhelmingly white perspective that had historically come to define the genre of noir and hardboiled detective stories, novelist Alaya Dawn Johnson even singled out Chandler’s own Farewell, My Lovely as a particularly prominent offender:
I nearly stopped reading [the Philip Marlowe] books after the sickening opening scenes of Farewell, My Lovely, which features the murder of a black man that no one, not moral Philip Marlowe and certainly not the deeply corrupt police, cares is dead. Marlowe even describes a black man being thrown out on the street in tones of such dehumanization that the man is not ‘he’, but ‘it’. The story moves on from there; the unnamed dead man’s loved ones are unmentioned, his death unremarked-upon except as a stepping stone to the bigger (whiter) story. It struck me as interesting that Chandler could understand that the white cop’s racism was part of his corruption, but not make the leap that Marlowe himself was part of the same system in his behavior and attitudes. It seems particularly apropos given our current cultural moment to consider that police corruption is as much a staple of the noir genre as murder, theft and beautiful women with suspect motivations. You can’t go ten pages without encountering corrupt cops in a Marlowe novel; nevertheless, one of the principal avenues by which that corruption is expressed—maintaining the racist systems upon which their society is built—is depicted in only glancing, incidental moments. The real moral issues, according to Marlowe’s worldview, are when the police go beyond harming the black community and let their rot spread among good, hardworking whites. You cannot dismiss this as attitudes of the times—for one, Marlowe himself would rain contempt upon you for judging him by the worst of his fellows. For another, the text itself, by placing the brazen and unpunished murder of a black man in the opening act, invites you to think of racism and the mistreatment of black victims in the context of police corruption as a whole. The problem with Farewell, My Lovely is not the black victim. It is the lack of black justice, or even an attempt to achieve it. White victims in this novel are mourned. Police corruption affecting hardworking whites is deplored. The unnamed black man, his family, his story never come back. They are an afterthought, a joke, a prelude to the real story. And black women—well, they don’t even exist. Certainly not in a speaking role. Mighty white of you, Chandler.
So yes, Dicks has a tendency to embody these structures and attitudes far more readily and intensely than a lot of other Doctor Who writers, particularly when he’s setting out to do an unrepentant and straightforward pastiche of Chandler’s work. Free from any of the finely honed cynicism that Dave Stone brought to the works of Agatha Christie in Ship of Fools, it can hardly be considered surprising that Dicks ports over some of the implicit biases in the source material from which he’s working.
Even so, the fact remains that the ways in which he slips up in Mean Streets are largely problematic in a more generic sense, removed by some considerable distance from the more egregious and idiosyncratic issues that usually plague Dicks’ work.
Now, granted, it’s not as if that’s a particularly high bar to clear coming from the man who gave us a high school teacher joking about his students’ breasts in The Eight Doctors, or the Doctor complaining about Romana’s not conforming to the bland “peril monkey” archetype of companions gone by. And really, the less said about the shamelessly trashy “Dekker swoops in to save Ace from impending rape” scene in Blood Harvest, the better. But against those more quintessentially Dicksian moments of horror, an unsophisticated, centrist view of crime coupled with tired, “Women be shoppin'”-esque punchlines are still relatively minor offences in the grand scheme of things.
Underneath all of this, there also exists the faintest sense that Dicks is trying his hand at a surprisingly deft and intriguing treatment of the history of hardboiled detective novels, as well as the wider cinematic tradition of film noir.
It’s here that we ought to touch upon a particularly significant distinction about Mean Streets that tends to get elided in the common truism – well, common by the admittedly skewed standards necessary to clear rather basic hurdles like finding a place where anybody is actually discussing the Bernice Summerfield novels with any degree of regularity, at least – that the Benny-led NAs had a penchant, around this time, for casting their protagonist in the role of a detective.
On one level, it’s true that novels like Ship of Fools and Tempest represent straightforward parodies and pastiches of classic detective stories. Even a book like Ghost Devices nodded towards this conception of Bernice by having her solve two separate murders in the course of its overall plot.
All the same, Dave Stone and Christopher Bulis’ contributions to the range were always pulling from conspicuously different source material than Dicks is here. More specifically, both Ship of Fools and Tempest are very obviously pulling from the classics of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and particularly from the novels and short stories of Agatha Christie. The former included direct lampoonings of the Queen of Crime’s most famous creations in the form of the elderly female sleuth Agatha Magpole, as well as Emil Dupont, the greatest detective in all of Nova Belgique, while the latter bore the working title of Murder on the Polar Express before being truncated at the request of Virgin’s editorial staff.
The corpus of hardboiled detective stories from which Mean Streets is pulling, meanwhile, is a distinct strain of crime fiction all its own. Indeed, from a historical point of view, the original hardboiled school of thought arose as something of a reaction to the stylings of Golden Age writers, while simultaneously playing to the public’s Prohibition and Great Depression-era appetites for salacious stories of the criminal underworld. In effect, one probably wouldn’t be too far off base in arguing that the interplay between these two distinct subgenres constituted a proxy conflict of sorts for the competing attitudes towards the interwar period, with the fine upstanding Golden Age detectives on one hand and the rugged, gritty and masculine hardboiled investigators on the other.
Granted, the reality is undoubtedly more complex than this simplified narrative captures. In truth, key moments in the development of the two schools of thought happened almost in parallel throughout most of the 1920s. The first of Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, saw print in October 1920, a mere six months after the inaugural issue of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s influential pulp magazine Black Mask. Subsequent Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw, whose tenure saw the publication attract such luminaries of detective fiction as Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and of course the aforementioned Raymond Chandler, took the pulp’s editorial reins in 1926. That same year, Christie was publishing one of her most acclaimed and enduring works in the form of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
But while there may not be a perfectly straightforward causal relationship between the two traditions, the generalisation still holds some considerable sway as a means of differentiating the forms from each other. In this regard, it’s perhaps akin to the way in which the notion of hardboiled detective fiction as a predominantly American genre as opposed to the more British sensibility of the Golden Age writers lingers on in spite of the existence of any number of anecdotal counter-examples like pre-eminent British hardboiled writer Gerald Butler or the American Golden Age author Elizabeth Daly.
Either way, the interwar period proves to be a hugely important element in the artistic composition of both genres, and the transposition of these styles into the post-Cold War milieu of the long nineties could hardly feel like a more natural fit. Caught between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the World Trade Center, the nineties have always been defined in large part as a lacuna of sorts, Charles Krauthammer’s unipolar moment made flesh. As such, the era felt like a supremely suitable backdrop for the age-old tensions between Golden Age and hardboiled fiction.
On the surface, the fall of the Soviet Union and the relative peaceability of the ensuing decade ought to have occasioned the kind of upbeat, nostalgic mood that generally accompanies thoughts of a Golden Age of any kind, whatever Invasion of the Dinosaurs might have to say on the matter.
To a certain extent, this is exactly what happened. The mid-to-late eighties and early nineties proved to be something of a Golden Age for Golden Age revivalism, with a number of high-profile adaptations of classic works in the genre vying for cultural oxygen, even as brand-new contributions to the school were squeezing their way into the marketplace.
We already touched, in our Ship of Fools review, upon the Joan Hickson-led Miss Marple series and Poirot starring David Suchet, to say nothing of ITV’s Midsomer Murders, adapting Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels, but even this is barely scratching the surface of the boom in Golden Age-styled detective stories at around this time.
Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse series, based on the writer’s own books, had already run for an impressive seven seasons from 1987 to 1993; about a month prior to Mean Streets‘ publication, the programme aired the third of the five annual specials that comprised its eighth and final season. A similar fate had befallen the staggeringly successful Murder, She Wrote, which wrapped up its own twelve season run right as Happy Endings was hitting shelves across the United Kingdom, and was in the process of transitioning into a series of TV movies.
Even Columbo, a show which had run its course as a stalwart of The NBC Mystery Movie all the way back in 1978, was revived by ABC in February 1989, and would continue to air new episodes as late as January 2003. We could continue like this for some time, taking in everything from Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series of novels which had, by the end of 1997, grown to encompass nine books, all the way through to the surprisingly robust business of Clue/Cluedo adaptations, but I trust my point has been sufficiently made.
(In the interests of “infodumping about rabbit holes I went down while writing these reviews,” however, I’ll specify that the body of Cluedo-related works from the 1990s includes an eighteen-book series of children’s novels, four separate video games – five if you include 1989’s Clue: Master Detective in the tally, and really, who wouldn’t? – a critically-panned Off Broadway musical that opened mere weeks before the publication of Mean Streets, and a British game show subsequently adapted for Australian, French, Italian, Swedish and German audiences. Which seems a bit excessive to me, but what do I know?)
Yet, as ever, the glitz and glamour of the Golden Age found itself accompanied by the murky shadows of the hardboiled and the noir. For Chandler’s most famous creation, the nineties were a comparatively fallow period when measured against the contemporaneous boom in Philip Marlowe adaptations during the forties or the latter-day revival of the sixties and seventies. After Michael Winner’s 1978 adaptation of The Big Sleep, the investigator would not return to the big screen until 2022’s Marlowe.
Throughout the nineties, Marlowe was largely confined to the realm of television, whether portrayed by Danny Glover in the penultimate episode of the Showtime anthology series Fallen Angels, or by James Caan in an HBO television film based upon Chandler’s posthumously completed Poodle Springs.
But to focus in on a singular fictional character is, of course, hardly ever a particularly fruitful line of inquiry. No, if you’re talking about film noir in the 1990s, well, you’re probably going to wind up not actually talking about classical film noir at all, but rather about its spiritual successor, neo-noir.
Although neo-noir was by no means a genre exclusive to the 1990s, having already seen something of a boom in popularity in the seventies with such films as The Conversation, Chinatown and Dirty Harry, the turn of the millennium brought with it a whole slew of fresh examples of the form. Listing off the quintessential neo-noirs of the era feels akin to breezing through a procession of the decade’s most iconic films: Basic Instinct, L.A. Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown (so in other words, just about any Quentin Tarantino film), Fargo, Fight Club, et cetera, et cetera.
On television, creators like David Lynch freely dabbled in the trappings of neo-noir to create the heady genre-bending cocktail that was Twin Peaks, supplanting his past and future excursions into the genre in such films as Blue Velvet or Lost Highway. Characters were routinely named in homages to such classic noirs as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo, though the classification of the last as a bona fide noir continues to be a lightning rod for controversy among film critics. The nineties Star Trek shows would occasionally flirt with an embrace of classic noir sensibilities as well, though the effectiveness of these efforts was always hamstrung by their having essentially hit a hole in one with Deep Space Nine‘s Necessary Evil, with episodes like Voyager‘s Ex Post Facto suffering from a chronic sense of diminishing returns.
And this was, as we’ve said, largely in keeping with the general mood of the nineties as the putative “End of History,” as suggested by Brian Raftery in a 2021 retrospective piece on the genre’s dominance throughout the decade:
But the millions of moviegoers who watched these noirs throughout the ’90s didn’t care too much about Oscar buzz or critical raves. They wanted gnarly little stories about gnarly little people, some of whom were more relatable than viewers cared to admit. The ’90s noirs focused on strivers and outsiders, most of whom were simply doing their best in a busted system: the lovestruck, mob-crossing heroines of Bound; the schemer-dreamers of The Grifters.
All of these characters were compromised; some were downright doomed. But to moviegoers, their stories were a reminder that everyone was fucked, both on- and off-screen. Today, the ’90s are remembered by many as The Last Time Things Weren’t Terrible. But the noirs of that time are a reflection of what was actually a disorienting, destabilizing era, one full of economic stressors and prime-time traumas: the L.A. riots, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War.
“There are a lot of parallels between the ’40s and the ’90s,” notes writer and film noir enthusiast Nora Fiore, who tweets about film as the Nitrate Diva. “The ’90s starts out with Americans being broadcast as liberators—which is the same as the feel-good end of World War II, even though there’s so much darkness there. And they’re both thought of as eras of prosperity. But it’s prosperity that comes with a price.”
Halfway through the ’90s, when national morale was ebbing, president Bill Clinton took note of the ’90s malaise: “What makes people insecure is when they feel like they’re lost in the fun house,” Clinton said. “They’re in a room where something can hit them from any direction at any time.”
That’s how life felt to the characters trapped in the ’90s noirs—and to audiences watching them. For a decade, these stories confirmed our suspicions that we were all lost in the funhouse. And then one day, poof: The big-screen neo-noirs were gone.
It’s not, to be absolutely crystal-clear on this point, that Mean Streets is at all trying to be a neo-noir, or even a noir in the classical sense, any more than the original Philip Marlowe stories were. While the conflation of hardboiled detective stories with noir might be common enough, it is by no means automatically correct, as the two genres comprise distinct subsets of crime/detective fiction all their own, albeit with some broad similarities between the two.
Taken in conjunction with the more Golden Age-inflected tone of the surrounding novels, however, parts of Dicks’ book play almost as if they’re engaged in an ongoing dialogue on the most appropriate kind of detective story for Benny to operate in. It is, from a certain point of view, an unexpectedly deft refocusing of the moral balancing act that underlies so much hardboiled detective fiction such that the suitability of the genre itself becomes the central moral/narrative question of the hour.
Where Chris throws himself into the role of the traditional macho, hardboiled gumshoe with all due gusto, Benny balks at the thought of carrying a gun, in keeping with her generally established disdain for the military and all its accoutrements.
Crucially though, her instincts are largely rewarded by the novel. Chris’ nearly getting into a scrap with Lucifer is halted by Benny when she realises the chillingly substantial consequences of such belligerence, suggesting that the ex-Adjudicator’s instinctual handling of the situation is, from a “not getting blasted” point of view, rather lacking. It’s only through following a more congenial plan of attack, as it were, that the dynamic crime-fighting duo manage to secure Lucifer’s aid in uncovering the true nature of the Project.
But the most important moment of all in revealing the traditional Dicksian moral framework under which Mean Streets operates comes at the climax of the novel, with Benny’s refusal to allow Garshak to send Devlin’s henchmen over the cliff. That this should be treated as the right choice cannot be considered all that shocking. Mr. Never Cruel Nor Cowardly was hardly ever going to give us something akin to our intrepid archaeologist’s casual (and, thirty-eight books later, still completely unmentioned) annihilation of a bunch of angry space Catholics in St Anthony’s Fire, after all.
Read within the larger context of the book’s hardboiled aspirations, though, it only serves to hammer home just how strongly Dicks’ most famous axiom about the Doctor – handily repurposed, in Beyond the Sun, to apply equally as well to Bernice – has always been suffused with a certain Chandlerian poetry, to say nothing of its morality. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from a man being “good enough” for a bevy of assorted worlds to the endeavouring of a man of peace to remain so in spite of being caught up in violent situations, and from there all the Benny novels need to do is tweak some of the more gendered language.
Yet in the classic hardboiled/noir fashion, we are left with a little nugget of ambiguity to really reinforce Dicks’ apparently sincere belief in Benny’s suitability for this sort of story, with the epilogue seeing her stand back and let the shadowy conspirators of the Advanced Research Department kill Security Chief Jarl Kedrick in retaliation for his killing one of her students. It’s a transparent last-minute attempt from Dicks to take his bow from the New Adventures by imbuing them with the spirit of a genre he clearly cares very deeply for, and the audacity of the manoeuvre is by no means undone by the fact that it turns out to fail, with the NAs leaping directly into another straightforward Golden Age pastiche come January.
Unlike the destruction of the Chapter of Saint Anthony, or even Gareth Roberts’ petty consignment of the Virgin books into the disconnected realm of fiction at the end of The Well-Mannered War, isolated from any sort of pressing real-world concerns, what makes this gesture work is really just the sheer sense of affection on Dicks’ part for his source material.
Despite how massively Uncle Terrance managed to fumble The Eight Doctors, Mean Streets feels like a much less cynical effort, buoyed by the sort of “Aww, bless” enthusiasm that elevated books like Blood Harvest and Shakedown before it. It’s not some sort of revelatory shattering of what the New Adventures can do, but again, the last time a Dicks-authored NA was anything close to that was Exodus, and even that was quickly overshadowed just four months later.
On a basic, nuts-and-bolts level, I think you could even argue that the disconnected string of action sequences favoured by Mean Streets, with the “hardboiled narration” dial occasionally being turned up to eleven if a given chapter happens to be narrated from Garshak’s point of view, isn’t actually that much more exciting or well-rounded a structure than the Magical Continuity Tour of six months prior.
But when you’re sitting there, reading Dicks’ famously unputdownable prose – I read half of this novel in a single day, and I can’t remember the last time I did that for this project – none of that really seems to matter, and one can’t help but smile and be whisked along, which is a good enough summary of the novel as a whole. Deeply, deeply inessential and imperfect, but strangely charming nevertheless.
Complaints about the New Adventures retreating into traditionalist yarns right as the Eighth Doctor Adventures seem to be finally getting their house in order and offering a real sense of competition, while not entirely unfounded, can’t help but seem a little ill-conceived at the end of 1997. That battle has been fought and lost over the past eight months, and while it’s certainly a shame to be standing here, at the conclusion of the last year to have the full complement of twelve New Adventures, it’s a battle whose outcome was practically set in stone from the moment Eternity Weeps dropped the Doctor Who logo from the front cover.
The New Adventures are coming to a close, and I’d obviously be remiss if I didn’t admit to a certain sadness at that knowledge, but with Alien Bodies offering a tantalising glimpse of a strange and wonderful future to come, there’s more than enough reason to be happy, too.
And I think, dear reader, that that’s the note on which we should close.
Things end. That’s all. Everything ends, and it’s always sad. But everything begins again too, and that’s always happy. Be happy.
Miscellaneous Observations
One of the many things that makes it crystal clear just how much of an indulgence this is for Dicks is the brief, but legally salient, mention of Garshak’s bank account balance “getting low enough to crawl under a Dalek.” The only explicit namedrop of Terry Nation’s infamous pepperpots across the twenty-three Bernice-led New Adventures, we should probably file this right alongside the reference to the psychic paper in World Game as an example of Terrance Dicks using his legendary stature in the realm of Doctor Who novels to test the limits of annoyed estates’ litigiousness, and completely getting away with it to boot.
Pleasantly surprised to see a small cameo appearance from the always-welcome Irving Braxiatel, as I had initially been under the impression that he didn’t show up again until The Medusa Effect next April. Then again, I can’t exactly rag on the various fan sites and wikis too harshly for failing to chronicle this appearance, as the operative word really is “small” and he never actually appears in person, merely on a communicator screen in conversation with Benny.
The long-awaited return of Garshak, surprisingly, wasn’t quite as much fun as I had envisioned. I’m uncertain whether this is just me growing warier of the Ogrons in the three years since I read Shakedown – and even back in July 2021, I recognised that the simian design and purposefully dark skin weren’t exactly the best look – or if something has changed in the process of having the character veer more strongly towards the pulpiness of their backstory.
Ironically, having Garshak become a standard private eye through watching old cop shows – or the Piece of the Action method, for any resident Star Trek fans in the audience – seems to distance him from any sort of satirical edge present in his original conception as a police officer who openly acknowledged the corruption and elitism of the system he served. Stripped of that, one is left with the uncomfortable impression that the joke or oddity of the character is simply meant to be “Wouldn’t it be weird if a member of an alien species embodying countless racist tropes about Black people was in a position of power?” which is… not the best, to put it mildly.
On the other hand, the death of the lovestruck Jeran serves as a minor subversion of the common tendency to kill off a main character’s female love interest/close compatriot in order to make the stakes more personal for said protagonist. I mean, again, given Dicks’ track record on gender I don’t expect he’d be a regular reader of Women in Refrigerators even if it did exist in December 1997, so I suspect the thought process here simply went as deep as “Well, the books have a heterosexual female main character now so I guess if I want to do this trope I’ll have to make the doomed character male instead.”
Which is, I suspect, an appropriate enough microcosm of the kind of serendipitous thinking that managed to allow Mean Streets to generally avoid becoming a sexist nightmare on the level of The Eight Doctors. It’d be nice to get a book where “not being too sexist” was the result of an intentional choice rather than a happy accident, but again, sixty-two year old white British men who have been writing for Doctor Who for thirty years are hardly the prime candidates for that sort of thing, are they?
Final Thoughts
1997, done and dusted. Never thought I’d actually be here. These past few weeks have been a lot, in all honesty, and being re-infected with COVID has thrown me for a bit of a loop. Hopefully my flagging energy hasn’t been too obvious over the course of these past few reviews, but if so, I do apologise and I hope they have been generally entertaining.
The obvious question here is to ask “When will the Year in Review post be up?” and… honestly, I don’t know. Probably later than it usually has been in the past, just considering how utterly bone-tired I am. Man, who knew that a tradition that seemed perfectly reasonable with just six books would become unbearable with thirty? By my calculations, not including the eventual Year in Review post, I will have written some 140,000 words in 2024 so far by the time you read this, so… I really need some rest, it’s literally a quarter to midnight right now and that’s not even the latest I’ve stayed up because of these reviews.
So stay tuned for the Year in Review, but don’t hold your breath, and I’ll be back to usher us into 1998 with Christopher Bulis’ Tempest… sometime. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 