Doctor Who - Foreign Devils

WRITTEN BY

ANDREW CARTMEL

RECOMMENDED

PURCHASE

TELOS DELUXE HARDBACK (ISBN 1-903889-11-1) RELEASED IN NOVEMBER 2002.

BLURB

China, 1800, and the Doctor, Jamie and ZoE arrive at the English Trade Concession in Canton, WHERE a young man BY THE NAME OF Carnacki, an expert in all things mystical, HELPS THEM TO investigate a series of bizarre murders...

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Foreign Devils

NOVEMBER 2002

I really don’t see what made Foreign Devils such a popular release back in 2002. A paranormal mystery cut from the same cloth as his Big Finish audio drama, Winter for the Adept, the only thing extraordinary about Andrew Cartmel’s contribution to the Telos range is that it features William Hope Hodgson’s supernatural detective, Carnacki - a gimmick that I’d have been blissfully ignorant of, were it not for Mike Ashley’s introduction.

Usually a great admirer of Cartmel’s work, I found this little novelette doubly disappointing. Cartmel’s scheming second Doctor reads like the seventh in a mop wig; a facet of this story that, particularly when fused with some incongruous sexual allusions and the absence of the stalwart Jamie, really knocks Foreign Devils considerably off beam. Which is most probably the point, I suppose.

“Her nipples were revealed as perfect pink rose buds sprouting from the inhumanly smooth domes of her milky breasts.”

Of course, Cartmel’s story does have its moments – Celandine’s stunning transformation into a plant is a notable highlight, though even this feels a little unbefitting thanks to the number of times her nudity is highlighted. I’m all for a bit of oomph in the New Adventures and the like, but in what purports to be monochrome Who? It just feels wrong somehow. Brave, and I dare say commendable, but wrong nevertheless.

Overall then, I found Foreign Devils to be an extremely unsatisfactory read; so much so, in fact, that I didn’t even bother with Hodgson’s “Whistling Room” that rounds out the book’s page count.

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design

and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Neither this novella’s blurb nor its text offer any firm clues as to its placement. Given the companions used and how they are portrayed, we suspect that this story is set somewhere between the television serials The Invasion and The Krotons. Within this gap, we have placed it between the novels The Indestructible Man, which appears to follow The Invasion quite closely, and The Colony of Lies, which was released later.

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