The Shadow in the Glass by: Justin Richards and Stephen Cole

 

The Shadow in the Glass is a book which should not be good.  It’s Doctor Who tackling post-World War II conspiracies involving the survival and lineage of Adolf Hitler, yes Adolf Hitler survival conspiracies are the main drive of this book.  Justin Richards and Stephen Cole also only had a limited time to write the novel after Gary Russell’s Instruments of Darkness was delayed and they needed a Sixth Doctor book to fill the slot stat.  This is kind of indicative of the issues at BBC Books, if this were Virgin Publishing there would have been a delay a la So Vile a Sin and the slot would have been essentially skipped over that month.  Because this is the BBC and they are pushing out a lot of Doctor Who content in the early 2000s, with 2 books a month, the final VHS’s and by this point the growing DVD range, there seems to be no time to stop and let a release just deal with the delay.  Now having Richards and Cole cowriting this actually helps with the compressed writing time, the ideas are allowed to bounce off one another and the novel is wrapped around a fairly simple idea: an alien craft shot down during World War II near the British coast cause a legacy of military occupation guarding a secret which involves a conspiracy about the Hitler lineage surviving the apparent suicide in the bunker somehow.  The book has the Doctor being called in by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to help investigate and eventually unravel the conspiracy, culminating in a climax that travels to the bunker to see how it is done.  It's very much a novel going from point A to point B with little subplots or diversions, except the alien aspect which is perhaps where the book fails.  The alien threat is such a non-entity that despite often being brought up it leaves the reader’s mind quite quickly as the historical elements from Richards and Cole are far more interesting.

 

This is also hyped up as one of the best of the Past Doctor Adventures, and while it is very good, it still is a book that underutilizes its science fiction elements, though that is buffered by coating it in mysticism almost in parallel to Terrance Dicks’ Timewyrm: Exodus.  There’s also the more egregious example of essentially fridging the main and essentially only female character of note, Claire Aldwych, a journalist who serves the role of companion.  She is a wonderful character who honestly could have been a perfect match for the Sixth Doctor had the decision been made to keep her on, but her death is essentially the wrap up of the novel so Adolf Hitler Jr. can exist…or possibly not exist as it implies history is rewritten.  She is shot and her body burned to be the body double for Hitler’s wife and lover, no seriously.  This is a plot point that Richards and Cole try to treat with severity, but as it comes at the end outside of some genuinely painful reactions from the Doctor and the Brigadier, the ramifications of the death just aren’t dealt with and literally the entire plot, a plot involving almost exclusively other male characters, is hung on this brutal death.  It’s an added shame as the climax itself is excellent, there is some brilliant tension work as the Doctor, Brigadier, and Claire figure out some of the conspiracies before liaisons with Winston Churchill and Soviet forces, and having Hitler Jr. brought back in time (who could have easily been the body double as he is quickly shot by his father).

 

Overall, The Shadow in the Glass is a book with some genuinely shocking elements, some terrible uses of fridging, and a Doctor Who book with Adolf Hitler on the cover (luckily completely redesigned for the 2015 reprint).  It’s also a book that genuinely works at telling a good story from writers who were on a terribly short deadline but managed to include a lot of researched history, something Richards happened to be doing at the time, and tries to take some care with the subject matter.  It’s also a book that somehow manages to be leagues ahead of the previous Past Doctor Adventure, Rags, which is somehow more offensive than the one that literally features the son of Hitler so it’s weird that I actually recommend this as at least an interesting and really fun read.  8/10.