Doctor Who: The Romance of Crime by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Romance of Crime Reviews

• 
  David Sarkies

  Mystery on the Supermax
  28 January 2012
  
  This is the type of Doctor Who story I liked, namely the ones that were set in space on board a spaceship or an asteroid of some sort. There were not many of them (probably because doing a story set entirely in space was not the easiest, or cheapest, of episodes to make, though when one comes to books that is a different story). Some suggest that Doctor Who is little more than 'Monster of the Week' but I would see it as one's weekly dose of Science-fiction. That is what I saw Star Trek: The Next Generation as being, though I never really liked Star Trek.
  
  This book stars Romana II, the Fourth Doctor, and K9 and they arrive on an asteroid that has been turned into a supermax prison. On the asteroid they meet up with a detective who is investigating a murder of survey team. The method of death suggested a criminal that was on the rock, however the catch was that this criminal had been executed three years ago. As one can expect with Doctor Who, not everything is as it seems, and when one comes to alien powers, the proverbial sky is the limit.
  
  This book brings back the Ogrons. Their only appearance in Doctor Who was in the episodes the Day of the Daleks and The Frontier in Space, where they were used as the Dalek's grunt force. The Ogrons are basically big hulking humanoids that seem only good for war and guard duties. The Daleks on the otherhand are a race of creatures that were on the brink of destruction during a war on their home world, and they survived simply because a scientist invented a way of removing their brains from their bodies and inserting them into machines. I originally believed the Daleks were robots, but they are not. If anything they are cybernetic organisms, sort of like if we were to remove our brains and insert them into our cars, so that we become one with the car.
  
  There is always the joke about the Daleks not being able to climb stairs, and we even had one silly Doctor Who episode where he runs up stairs to escape them only to discover that they can levitate. In the original episode (Doctor Who and the Daleks), they could only glide along metal roads, however they later developed the ability to cross rough terrain. As for their levitating ability, I would suggest that they have had that ability for a while, it was just not possible with the budget and the special effects at the time of the original series to have them act in such a way. These days, in the new episodes, the Daleks basically fly, and even travel through space without the need of a spaceship.
  
  It seems that I have drifted off to talk about Daleks when this book does not involve them. None of the Virgin books seem to deal with Daleks, though they do exist in the background. There is mention of the Dalek War that is fought between the humans and the Daleks in the future, however no specific book was written around them. I believe that it is because they did not have the rights to use them.
  
  While the books themselves are not canonical, it really does come down to the interpretation. Also, while it might be interesting to turn some of these stories into an episode, to remain faithful to the series it would be very difficult, particularly since at least three of the actors that played the Doctor are now dead, and others are simply too old. Tom Baker, when he retired from the role, did not want to have anything to do with Doctor Who again, to the point that in the Five Doctors the creators used stock footage to represent his appearance (as they also did with the first Doctor, who at the time, was dead).
• 
  Kris

  When I tried to remember this story two things stuck out to me; Ogrons running around a space station and Stokes. Revisiting this book these are still two of the most memorable factors but also the most problematic.
  
  The Ogrons were undeveloped heavies in Jon Pertwee era that could just slot into any story but there appearance and speech patterns made the dangerously close to stereotypes of black people. Here Roberts dives head-first into this. They are cartoonishly stupid (due to their evolution), described as being a slave race and impossible to tell apart from each other. The entire experience is unpleasant to read.
  
  Menlove Stokes is a cliche of the self-important artist but the problem comes in where hes is constantly really creepy over Romana. Once might have been close to amusing but how often it happens it becomes distasteful to read.
  
  On top of this the female characters in this story are just appallingly treated, Romana spends much of the story been captured or shooting Ogrons, Madeline is said to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Xais is a violent murderer. The only other one mentioned is Spiggot's unnamed family which he constantly mentions.
  
  What does raise this up is Robert's strong dialogue and understanding of structure of stories of this era. This moves it up from being a terrible novel to being a really bad Doctor Who story that could just about fit into the era (albeit with added violence, gore, racism and misogyny)
• 
  Mark

  In the human-colonized Uva Beta Uva system, justice is dispensed from the Rock of Judgment, an asteroid converted into a roving courtroom in which cases are heard and sentences carried out. When the Doctor, Romana, and K-9 arrive, they quickly become entangled in an investigation by a newly-arrived lawman into suspicious activities on board. For despite all of the seeming normality aboard the Rock, events are unfolding that are tied to the inexplicable murder of a survey team on the eleventh planet, one that suggest the return of the most feared criminal in the history of the system — despite her execution aboard the Rock years before.
  
  Gareth Roberts was at the beginning of a prolific career as a writer and contributor to the Doctor Who franchise when he wrote this novel, the first of four he would contribute to the Virgin Missing Adventures series. It is a work that evokes the "base-under-siege" trope familiar to fans of the series, albeit one that was less in use by the time of the Fourth Doctor. It helps that the base in the story is not the typical scientific station or military outpost but a floating courthouse, one that allows Roberts to draw upon his experience as a Court of Appeals clerk for an unusual setting for the franchise. Combined with a pair of narrative twists that keep the plot going in the later chapters, it all comes together to make for an entertaining adventure that fans of the characters will enjoy.
• 
  Mel

  I've read over 40 Doctor Who novels in the past two years and this one is by far my favourite!!! I was reading an interview with Gareth in the current Doctor Who magazine and saw that he'd written novels with Tom Baker's Doctor and Romana II and on the strength of his past couple epsiodes I thought I'd get a copy. It was SOOO funny. I was laughing out loud so many times and the different things the characters were saying. He had the characters of the Doctor, Romana and K9 down PERFECTLY!!! It was just like watching a lost and very good episode. I didn't even mind that Romana was possessed at the end and not able to do much, as (like Gareth was I'm sure) I was having such joy picturing Lalla getting to act the evil bitch. He did also make it clear throughtout the novel that Romana was just as capable, if not more so, than the Doctor. It was just brilliant. He's written 2 other Doctor/Romana novels. I bought the next one when I was only 30 pages into this one and will have to get the third. My mind is also much more at peace with the idea of him writing a novel version of Shada. At first I didn't like the idea at all of anyone writing one of Douglas' stories after his death, but now I'm sure that Gareth will do it perfectly. Definitely recommend these to any Doctor/Romana fans.
• 
  Chris Jenson

  Great 4th Doctor Story. Roberts gets the characters and the feel of the show right.
• 
  Steven

  I felt like the narrative just bumbled along more than a Fourth Doctor tale normally does. Just terrible characters abound in this confusing mystery tale.
• 
  Van

  Doctor Who – The Romance of Crime, by Gareth Roberts, Virgin Publishing, 1995. 257 pages, paperback. ISBN: 0-426-20435-2.
  
  This adventure features the 4th Doctor, Romana II, and K9. This is a Virgin Missing Adventure not based on a television script. It takes place between television episodes The Creature from the Pit and Nightmare of Eden.
  
  This review is opinion only, no summary.
  
  Gareth Roberts does an excellent job of capturing the style of season seventeen in this novel. Douglas Adams was the script editor during season seventeen and the televised episodes had a definite style of humor that often went over the top. Roberts shows his knowledge of the era in the situation in which he’s placed the main characters in The Romance of Crime. It feels like an episode from season seventeen; a bit absurd but with a good story behind it. The story itself is kind of a slow burn but it seems to work like a solid six-part episode. The cliffhangers work well to keep you reading.
  
  The dialogue comes across as pointedly tongue-in-cheek in many places. Just as often, the dialogue is of the same very direct commentary of British life of the late 1970s as was Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who. As was true then, K9 still gets some of the best lines.
  
  The chemistry between characters remains true to the era, sometimes like static electricity, sometimes serious, and always brilliant. All of the characters get something to do and each character arc is neatly tied up in the end. The concept behind the main villain is sort of a trope but Roberts uses the device to good effect. The secondary villain is understated at first but graduates to over-the-top status by the end of the book. The detective, to me, comes across as a bit like the detective from City of Death, but I think he’s supposed to. The interaction between the detective and the older artist feels a bit like some of the duos from Robert Holmes’s stories. The Ogrons are used well in the story.
  
  All-in-all, The Romance of Crime is good, solid Doctor Who.
• 
  Drew Perron

  With The Romance of Crime, Gareth Roberts takes a big step toward the Adams-esque light, satirical comedy he's best at, but he's not there yet; he's trapped between two genres, and can't quite get at the good parts of either.
  
  In terms of moving into comedy, having the Fourth Doctor and Romana as his focus helps quite a bit - just writing them like the characters in the show makes them instant humor generators, and they're absolutely the best part of the look. He's also reached out to include some broad comedic archetypes in his supporting cast, but honestly, they're not great; the best part is Frank Spiggot, a cop who is constantly thinking and speaking in cliches, but he really could've been played up more if that's the route Roberts was going to take.
  
  The more New Adventures-y aspects of the book just come out kind of bland. There's attempts at social justice relevance, but when the only effect of a literal genocide on your story is to create a cackling supervillain for an antagonist, it's a Bad Look. The blood-n-grit parts just drag - they're neither suspenseful nor thrilling, and there's not much for the comedy characters to do with them.
  
  This is a compromise of a book; it's trying to combine the good parts of both Adams-y light comedy and gritty '90s noir-thriller, synergizing them into something greater; instead, they cancel out into something less. Not terrible, just meh.
• 
  Leticia

  A good story, but written in a slightly uneven way, so that some parts have too much description, others have so little I had to read them twice to understand where things were happening. The author knew how to write the Doctor, Romana and K-9, so every part of the story in which they had any part was elevated, much in the same way a good actor elevates a scene. The other characters, however, seemed to spend a lot of time repeating the same dialogues and thoughts, which helped to make them seem like caricatures (something that wouldn't have bothered me so much in a Doctor Who TV story, but somehow is taboo for me in books). And then there was the way the narrator pulled things from the character's minds, a debatable technique* itself made worse for its use for infodumping secondary characters' pasts.
  
  In any way, this is an enjoyable book and a well crafted tale, if not very well written. The story is interesting and fast-paced, filled with perfect little moments of 4th Doctor goodness (even ogrons like jelly babies, after all) and a very fine villain. It would make for a great movie, if nothing else because a multimedia version of this story would cut out Spiggot's inner dialogue, all of which was a long running joke with a terrible punchline, and that itself would upgrade the story in one star.
  
  
  * Honestly, reading this book taught me a lot more about how I see the limits of the omniscient narrator than debating this with other writers.
• 
  Trevor Smith

  Embarrassed to admit it but I'd never read any of Gareth Roberts Who books before his recent wonderful adaptation of Shada but since then I've been catching up & this is my favourite so far.
  It's not as good as Shada, but then what could ?, but it's not far off.
  Gareth gets the 4th Doctor, Romana & K9 perfectly. You can hear the voices in your head, the Doctors humour & bluffing, Romana's aloofness & frustration with her fellow time lord & K9's inscrutable logic & whirring engine.
  All the rest of the characters are well rounded & interesting & the story zips along at a cracking pace.
  The Ogrons get a nice little back story as well, though my one disappointment with this book I'd that the Ogrons are own the front cover & so the surprise of them suddenly turning up some way into the story has been removed.
  That little quibble apart this book I one of the best past doctor books, in any range, I have ever read. Highly reccomended and it can only be hoped that Gareth Roberts gets to write more past Doctor books in the future.
  
  
• 
  Pietro Rossi

  Gareth Roberts totally captures the feel and characters of the Doctor, Romana and K9 from the TV series 17 season.
  
  The jokes and joyous walk-through the story works well. Sadly, the story isn't engaging. It is a shame the Ogrons are on the front cover as that would've been a good twist (and I'd love to see them again on TV). Sadly, because of lack of interest in the story, it's got to be 3/10.
  
  Scoring: 0 bad; 1-3 poor; 4-6 average; 7-9 good; 10 excellent.
• 
  Clare Jackson-Bramwell

  The start of Gareth Roberts' extension to season 17 of classic Who is full of silly details and bonkers characters just like the actual tv season it is based on, but with details that only modern television could handle. The apparent top villain has a sympathetic backstory which almost excuses her murderous behaviour. Roberts is spot on in his handling of our heroic trio. I'm so glad Menlove Stokes lived to appear in other stories.
• 
  Jim Davis

  DNF. I started watching Doctor Who in the Tom Baker era. I have read a few novels with mixed results. I kept reading until the Doctor, Romana and K9 showed up but it was still flat and uninteresting. I was hoping for a more interesting bit of interaction between some of my favorite characters but it wasn't happening.
• 
  Laura

  Definitely an improvement on Roberts' VNAs - he's much better as a knockoff Douglas Adams than whatever he was trying there - but I didn't find myself all that enthusiastic about it either, and the use of the Ogrons (who have all kinds of unfortunate implications to them) and the failure to go into the implications of the villain being a victim of genocide let it down a lot.
• 
  Danny Welch

  One of the greatest Doctor Who books I have ever read, seriously if you haven't read it, read it! It's got a great story, it's funny, with great characterization with superb villains! One of my all time favorites now. 10/10
• 
  Andy Stehr

  Captured the feel of Classic Who during this particular era. Has an almost Douglas-Adams-like quality that I very much enjoyed. Also, 3 chapters from the end I was asking myself 'how is this going to wrap up in 3 chapters' and then it did and I was very satisfied with the conclusion.
• 
  Iain

  A fun outing with Romana and K9 accompanying the Doctor. For a TV tie-in in particular, the plot is decent, the characters we know from the show are well realized, and the supporting cast well done.
  
  I'd go so far as say this is a must read for fans of the Fourth Doctor.
• 
  Sammy

  Always in good hands with Gareth Roberts.
• 
  James Lark

  Gareth Roberts certainly understands the period of Doctor Who he has positioned this book in, and one of its great joys is the way it flies off the page almost as if it is a novelisation of something you saw UK Gold a few years ago. Roberts absolutely captures the voice of Tom Baker's Doctor and his slightly barbed but witty relationship with Romana, and the cast of characters is as colourful as anything you'd expect from Douglas Adams' era as script editor. (Fun game: create your own cast from the television regulars of the day.)
  
  The accuracy of tone even runs to a boring subplot involving K9 and the 'episode 4' section of the story self destructing in a way that exposes the lack of substance concealed by the style. I found myself getting a bit bored towards the climax, as characters run up and down corridors or make pantomimic grandiose statements - but let's face it, that IS what Doctor Who used to do.
  
  And what a pleasure it is to immerse yourself in the story, imagine it on 3rd generation VHS with a cast of actors camping it up a little too much while Tom Baker owns the screen AND GETS TO MEET OGRONS! Not that I'd wish to play down the stylish writing either. If anything the book contains a few too many ideas, and that's no bad thing. It's clearly a book by a fan aimed at fans, and I wonder whether anyone unfamiliar with this bit of the show's history would really get it.
  
  Well sod it - I did and I loved it.
• 
  Jacqueline

  The Romance of Crime is an original paperback novel in the Doctor Who Missing Adventures series published by Virgin Publishing. The story features the Fourth Doctor as played by Tom Baker, and the second Romana as played by Lalla Ward, plus K-9. The Doctor and Romana land in a corridor, and soon find a "spaceship" bar where the drinks and the air are drugged. They are about to leave, when, as often happens, they get interrupted. The ship is actually an asteroid that's rocket-powered, it's also a high security prison, a series of court houses, and even an execution chamber. The worst criminals from the local system as sent to "the Rock" for trial, prison, and in most cases, execution. And it's meant to be escape-proof. So, of course...
  The plot starts with an impossible murder, and moves very quickly. It seems an executed master criminal and mass murderer isn't as dead as everyone assumes. And, there are Ogrons!
  I really enjoyed this book! It's a fun and enjoyable read. It's not too deep, but it feels like a Doctor Who adventure. Everyone was in character - I could "hear" John Leeson's voice as K-9, though at times, Romana seemed to be written more like Mary Tamm than Lalla Ward. The other characters worked as well. Overall, it's a fun read, recommended - especially to fans of Classic Doctor Who.
• 
  Shane

  The Fourth Doctor and Romana II are very well known to me from the TV episodes. I remember Tom and Lalla so well the first time around and now get to revisit these old friends in book form. Gareth Roberts does a fantastic job here in capturing the Doctor and Romana as they find themselves embroiled in an investigation on a rocket powered asteroid called The Rock of Judgement. A humorous, run-around reminiscent of the classics that have the Doctor and co. 'running through corridors' and generally managing to engage the reader in a story that's smart and silly and everything in-between all at once. With never a dull moment(I won't count what amounts to a text-dump by the Doctor at one point in a bid to catch us all up on proceedings by 'telling' rather than 'showing') the pace keeps us on our toes and builds to a nice climax and a satisfying conclusion at the end.
  
  Happily, the next one I've chosen to read is set directly after this one, even though it wasn't written until later in the Missing Adventure series. It's An English Way of Death and if it's only half as good as this, Ill be very, very happy.
  
  Highly recommended.
  
• 
  F.R.

  The Doctor, Romana and K-9 arrive on a prison built on an asteroid shooting through space, where they find murder, a vainglorious investigator and everyone’s favourite ridiculous thug army, The Ogrons. This period of Doctor Who frequently aimed for the light and comic end of the Doctor Who spectrum, and there’s nobody more adept at rendering that in print than Gareth Roberts. ‘The Romance of Crime’ is fun, frothy and never more than a paragraph or so away from a joke.
  
  Whilst reading it I did wonder – even though the book is set in the far off future – whether Roberts had his head in the 1960s. There’s a couple of gangsters who couldn’t be any more reminiscent of The Krays if Tom Hardy was playing them; while in the character of the older, bald, hack artist who finds himself caught in a relationship with a young, beautiful, impudent, much more talented man, we surely have shades of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton. It would be somewhat fitting to the rich tapestry of Doctor Who, that rather than wait for a 1960s novel, Roberts just throws those concepts into the far off future – mixes with them with some Ogrons and a homicidal mutant – and makes them thrive.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1208304.html[return][return]I liked this much more than the other Four / Romana II / K9 novel I've read, The Well-Mannered War, which as it happens is by the same author. Our heroes arrive on a sinister prison asteroid, where they find themselves at the centre of a plot involving miners, corrupt judges, criminal brothers based on the Krays, Ogrons, and a dead mind-stealing criminal. The Doctor accuses K9 of never knowing the answer when it's something important, a glorious reference to the famous Tom Baker out-take. It all pretty much hangs together, Russell juggling multiple viewpoint characters without losing track of the story. One of the good ones.
• 
  Callum

  I bought this book about a year ago, and since I'm on holiday, I found time to read it.
  I liked this book. Having previously read Shada, featuring the same main characters, and also written by Gareth Roberts, I noticed many similarities between the two books (i.e. Ramona instead of Romana) Much of the time I read was at night, so occasionally the plot became confusing for me, but wide awake it was easy to follow. An excellent read overall, I only wish this range of books weren't so rare!
• 
  Daniel Kukwa

  If one single book manages to encapsulate the late Tom Baker-era of Doctor Who -- the manic energy, the humour, the epic ridiculousness...and the ridiculous epicness -- then THIS book does it in spades!
  
• 
  Timothy Jenson

  I liked it, my favorite era of the show, my favorite Doctor and companion, look forward to reading "The English Way of Death." Gareth Roberts is one of my favorite Doctor Who authors.
• 
  Gabriel Mero

  It took at least 100 pages for me to get into this one.