Dying in the Sun by: John de Burgh Miller

 

The Second Doctor is a tricky Doctor to get right.  Patrick Troughton’s performance was layered and often relied on quite a bit of improvisation (especially with Frazer Hines) to get right.  While this is difficult for actors to recreate, Frazer Hines, David Troughton, and Michael Troughton have done so exceptionally well on audio, it makes it even more difficult for authors to capture in prose.  From the novels I have read only Steve Lyons and Justin Richards have really managed to do so well, and in terms of the Past Doctor Adventures, he is a Doctor who appears less often as the main Doctor than others.  Dying in the Sun is the sixth Past Doctor Adventures novel to heavily feature the Second Doctor and the second to place itself in the gap between The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders.  It is also the only Doctor Who novel to be written by John de Burgh Miller, an American interested in film noir and the Golden Age of Hollywood which works incredibly well as a setting for a pseudo-historical.  It’s a setting that would be far too close for the production team to actually realize, plus the lavish Hollywood parties and film premieres being too expensive to realize on the show’s budget.  Something about the setting, however, just feels right and I believe that’s down to de Burgh Miller’s almost old fashioned style of writing.

 

The Second Doctor just feels at home in Hollywood, able to mingle using humor and his often clown like nature to get himself into parties and explore just exactly what is happening with the film Dying in the Sun and the grisly murders that have been taking place.  Ben is also incredibly well characterized as the sidekick to the Doctor, though de Burgh Miller has this tendency to rely on the fact that he’s cockney and a sailor as his only two character traits.  I understand where that is coming from, at the time of publication only The War Machines would have been available on home media in visual format while The Power of the Daleks, The Highlanders, and The Macra Terror were available on audio format, so there wasn’t as much you could see from Michael Craze’s performance but de Burgh Miller makes an attempt.  It is certainly a performance that’s better replicated than de Burgh Miller’s attempt at crafting something for Polly Wright.  Polly is perhaps where the book really falls flat.  She starts out fine, with some of the snark and optimistic attitude that the character was known for but because this is a film noir novel she gets propositioned by a film producer and then hypnotized by the aliens by the end of what would be the first episode if this were a serial.  After that, she’s basically gone from the novel which is kind of a shame as she and Ben barely get to work together as characters and that’s when they’re at their best.  It’s also something that extends to the supporting characters, they’re kind of stock characters which does work for the setting of Dying in the Sun.

 

John de Burgh Miller does also excel with crafting the narrative around the titular Dying in the Sun while paralleling the Golden Age of Hollywood and the influence that art can have on somebody.  In the novel, it’s not just influence but mania and madness, drawing people into the events of the film but without the ability to describe what made it great.  Part of it feels as if de Burgh Miller is exploring the idea of film as a spectacle, the effects are impossibly good and the projectors have to be specially altered to properly play the film reels.  The director has his magnum opus and has snuck in an entire alien species into the film stock itself.  Aptly called the Selyoids, we have a very 1960’s science fiction idea for a Doctor Who monster which allows for some grisly gore and sequences of them literally emerging and embodying film.  Their desires are essentially parasites obsessed with creativity so this time period is perfect for an invasion as the film industry is about to explode in terms of style in the post-World War II environment which I absolutely love.

 

Overall, despite being a Doctor Who novel not a lot of people discuss it’s one that I found myself enjoying quite a bit.  It’s a genuinely rare success in characterizing the Second Doctor and the ideas contained in it just jump off the page despite the rest of the characters kind of suffering.  7/10.