The Gunfighters by: Donald Cotton

The Gunfighters was written by Donald Cotton, based on his story of the same name.  It was the 101^st story to be novelized by Target Books.

 

Donald Cotton managed to pull the same trick twice, and considering he also contributed the novelization of Dennis Spooner’s The Romans, it’s possible he did it a third time.  When looking at Target novelizations, especially those 1984 and later, you realize less and less that they were being published to relive the story as the BBC had begun the VHS range at that point, but really to complete the range.  The exceptions to this are of those serials that were missing and several of the Seventh Doctor serials, the former attempting to recapture the missing episodes in some way while the latter would often be expanded as tests to see if proper Doctor Who novels would work.  It makes The Gunfighters a weird beast of a novelization.  Published in 1986, the VHS range had started but was still limited to a handful of Baker stories, The Five Doctors, and The Seeds of Death, and there was a copy of The Gunfighters in the archive as well to draw from, yet it seems Cotton didn’t have access to draw from.

 

Cotton clearly was interested in adding characterization to much of his supporting cast.  In television there certainly was characterization and larger than life performances, but Cotton seems to understand he can’t really replicate some of those performances in prose.  Instead, he decides while sticking to a lot of the original script (or perhaps an earlier version with some differences lacking some improv), Cotton keeps a lot of the humor to more wry dialogue.  Johnny Ringo is the character perhaps most expanded by this, much time is spent going into how he’s motivated by wanting enough money to buy a particularly expensive set of Latin classics.  He and the Doctor speak to each other in Latin, and is generally calmer and more collected.  His shooting of Charlie the barman is changed from a sudden act to this genuine buildup of suspense.  Cotton writes it as if Charlie is dead as soon as Ringo enters the bar.

 

The same can be said for Dodo, a character already served well by the comedic stylings of the serial, Cotton makes the decision to make her completely competent.  There seems to be an injection of the original, more working class less BBC English version of the character here.  Dodo plays poker and actually puts Holliday out of money in a very brief description that nevertheless says a lot more for the character than nearly anything on television ever did.  It helps inform her actions when she threatens Holliday at gunpoint to get back to Tombstone.  There is time given to both Dodo and Steven’s pasts, though Cotton seems to think Steven is actually an American which kind of reflects the 1980s view of where space travel was going which is an interesting addition, even if his dialogue is still very much Peter Purves’ Steven.  The one character hurt by the change in style of comedy is Kate, while she’s still proactive and there is some added characterization to specify she is Big Nose Kate Elder, the dialogue being reserved means she isn’t nearly as fun or flirty as Sheena Marshe’s television portrayal.

 

Overall, The Gunfighters is just a plain different interpretation of essentially the same serial from the same author.  It’s just about as enjoyable in almost every different way, and perhaps if you’re one of those Doctor Who fans stuck in the ways that the television serial is bad, you may actually enjoy the more reserved take, even though the comedy is where it excels.  8/10.