Mean Streets by: Terrance Dicks

 

Mean Streets is a breath of fresh air after Ghost Devices.  Terrance Dicks as a writer can be summed up as incredibly readable; his prose isn’t particularly special, the style doesn’t stand out in a line up of some of the greats, but it is one that gets the point across quick enough for whatever effect Dicks is going for.  Mean Streets is Dicks’ homage to noir style detective stories, the title coming from an already cliché about private eyes travelling mean streets full of criminals.  There’s a noir detective who splits the perspective with Benny in the form of Garshak, the intelligent Ogron from Shakedown, and the plot involving a series of grisly murders on Megacity.  The perpetrators are seemingly Wolverines, an alien animal like gang with several descriptions of red eyes associated with a mysterious drug on the street.  Meanwhile Bernice Summerfield has been chased off Dellah and charged with fraud in the company of “murderer” Chris Cwej, leading them both to Megacity to find a way to clear their names while Irving Braxiatel behind the scenes on Dellah attempts to stall the authorities finding them.  This plot is two pronged, but simple with both parties essentially looking for the same thing and eventually intersecting.  Benny and Chirs are looking for a mysterious Project and Garshak is trying to discover what has been causing these murders (and attempted murders).  The simplicity of the plot is also a hallmark of what makes Terrance Dicks stories work, they aren’t trying to be universe spanning and the stakes are personal to Benny, Chris, and the people of Megacity (through the eyes of Garshak) which immediately hits the reader.

 

Chris and Benny also have amazing chemistry, with Dicks using the prologue to recount an unseen adventure where Chris and Roz were on Megacity.  This was already a pleasant surprise, does a really good job of setting up the novel (and the eventual reveal), and actually felt integrated between the Doctor Who New Adventures and the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures without having to file serial numbers off a Seventh Doctor appearance.  Terrance Dicks clearly understands how to characterize Chris, including his growth from his time with the Doctor without losing the brightness to his personality.  Chris is one of those Doctor Who companions that fits the archetype of a himbo without making him too dumb, he’s the one to initiate the plot with Benny after all and the one who eventually puts things together.  It’s also a really nice parallel to his relationship with Jason Kane in Deadfall that despite Benny and Jason’s messy divorce and that whole situation, there’s no side for Chris to take.  He cares about both of them and would trust Benny with his life because of their mutual experience.  With the two of them Benny is the one whose point of view is prominent, so everything of Chris outside of the prologue is seen through her eyes.  Benny is also put in the position of private investigator, putting many of the bigger plot points together and not looking at things from a surface level.  For instance there’s a character called Lucifer, a demonic alien mobster from a planet which has appropriated Christian theology into their culture for power, who is immediately a red herring of the culprit, but that is a very red red herring as he is immediately attacked after Benny negotiates a semi-working relationship that Chris strengthens by saving him.

 

Megacity is a setting which feels alive, Lucifer has his own operations and while Dicks does homage The Godfather occasionally because who wouldn’t in this situation, its gangs feel alive.  The prologue establishes what it was which Dicks uses as a springboard to have evolved and fallen apart with Garshak losing his position of chief of police along with his Ogron comrades who have left policing together and moved into security, often at nightclubs.  Garshak is the fascinating Ogron because of his intelligence yet his perspective isn’t just a human with silly Star Trek head bumps.  Dicks makes an important distinction in his point of view chapters, being in first person while Benny’s are in third person, and a slight stylistic shift makes things feel off from the normal human perspective.  It also helps that Garshak doesn’t enter the novel until about one third of the way through the book: he is spoken of quite a bit along with people who knew him which builds him up as an unknown entity.  It’s played with that he could be a threat for Benny and Chris, which is easily sold because he is an Ogron and the cover casts him in shadows.  The subversion of course comes and that makes their eventual team up all the more interesting.  Garshak actually cares about the people of the city, it’s why he went to become a private detective.

 

Overall, Mean Streets is a triumph for the New Adventures, with Terrance Dicks writing one of his best Doctor Who stories all without including the Doctor.  A friend of mine remarked only he would be able to get away with using the word Dalek, and that’s somehow an apt description for the book.  Brilliantly steeping itself in Doctor Who and that fictional universe while telling its own story with its own small cast of characters wrapped up in an homage to film noir.  Endlessly readable and one I will be coming back to.  10/10.