The Fourth Doctor Novelisations (Kind Of): The Five Doctors (1983)

Okay, so while The Five Doctors may be a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in the sense that it's a novelisation with the fourth Doctor in it, it's not really a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in any meaningful sense. I mean, even by the standards of multi-Doctor stories, it's clearly not a fourth Doctor one, as the Doctor appears in just two small bits!

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novel originally published: 1983
Acquired and read: December 2024

But I'm reading it as part of this sequence because 1) it felt weird to read four of the five books included in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, but not read the fifth, and 2) I don't have any unread fifth Doctor novelisations to lump it in with, so it made most sense to read it here. This is the one book in this sequence that's a reread, because I own the individual book (though I don't have an entry for it on my reading log, meaning I must have read it before September 2007, when I started tracking).

Anyway, as novelisations go, this is one of those ones that doesn't really add much to the televised story; it's pretty much the script put on the page. There's no extra bits, no added depth. You could imagine a writer adding more continuity references, or working in stuff that wasn't feasible to do on screen—Dicks, after all, wrote the script, and must have been keenly aware of its limitations!—like giving us more Tom Baker, but he doesn't. Unfortunately, that means it doesn't have much to offer a reader, a modern reader anyway. To be honest, The Five Doctors isn't a very exciting story... but it is a deeply pleasurable one to watch, it's just fun to see all these characters on screen doing their thing in the same story. I enjoyed it even when I was a neophyte Doctor Who fan and had never seen Jon Pertwee or Patrick Troughton in a story before; in fact, I remember even my kid sister (not a classic Who fan by any stretch of the imagination) getting drawn in when I watched the DVD.

But take out Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee (and Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney and...), and frankly, this story doesn't have a lot going for it. Which is fine for the script, it was meant as a vehicle for seeing old friends again, and it accomplishes that perfectly. But that means on the page, the story has little to recommend it beyond reminding you of a tv story you'd rather be watching. I can see how this would be helpful in 1983, when you had no way to watch the story again, but in 2025, I can just stick in my DVD.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) and The Horror of Fang Rock (1978)

People tend to lump Terrance Dicks novelisations into three periods, is my understanding: his early period, where the idea of a Doctor Who novelisation was relatively brand new and he was still going all out; his middle period, where he was cranking them out, but they were solid renditions that expanded on their screen counterparts; and his late period, where they were just the scripts with "said the Doctor" stuck in occasionally.

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novels originally published: 1977-78
Acquired and read: December 2024

I haven't read enough of them to know if this is a fair characterization, to be honest, but it does seem to me that if it is, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang and Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock clearly belong to the middle period. I don't think either of these will set your world alight, but it did seem to me that both stories must have engaged Dicks's imagination enough that, like The Pyramids of Mars (1976), he gives the stories enough embellishment and energy to bring it all to life for a reader whether you've seen these stories or not. (I've seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang a number of times over the years, Horror of Fang Rock just the once almost two decades ago.)

I am of the camp that considers Talons one of Doctor Who's best stories, and Dicks captures it on the page well, especially its characters: Tom Baker's moody Doctor and Leela's directness are both on the page, and Dicks does particularly well, I thought, by Jago, Litefoot, and Li H'sen Chang, each of whom gets some nice moments of internal characterization that complements and expands on his screen performance. I imagine there are times cramming a six-parter into (in my Essential Terrance Dicks edition, anyway) just over one hundred pages could backfire, but it works well here, as we fairly rocket through an engaging story. Dicks clearly enjoyed Robert Holmes's script and brings it to life.

He also does well by his own script in The Horror of Fang Rock, another pseudo-historical of an alien trapped on Earth. There's good period details here, and he (of course, I suppose) captures the complications of the script well. I did find the guest cast somewhat thinner, though. The lighthouse crew are strong enough, actually, but the survivors of the yacht crash don't feel very lively; I'm guessing (it's been a long time since I saw the tv serial) that skilled performers brought them to life more. Still, this is good stuff, especially the early parts where Dicks is setting the scene.

As of this writing, I've read six novelisations reprinted in the Essential Terrance Dicks range, the five in this volume plus The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977) from volume one; I don't know what happened, but Talons and only Talons contains a large number of typos—missing quotation marks, incorrect words, line breaks in the wrong position. (See the last page of ch. 12 on p. 268 for an example of the latter.) Not having access to the original book, I don't know if this faithfully reproduces an original copyedit that was not careful enough, or if it's a product of whatever OCR process converted these twentieth-century books for a twenty-first-century reprinting.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Pyramids of Mars (1976)

Back when I read my way through the first Doctor novelisations, I noted how the very idea of a "Doctor Who book" was emerging. Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was literally the only Doctor Who book in the universe when it came out; Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965) was the second.

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novels originally published: 1976
Acquired and read: December 2024

But by the time the first two books collected in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two were published, things were very different. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars were the fourth and fifth novelisations to feature the fourth Doctor—and the 23rd and 27th Target novelisations overall. By this time, there was no need of the novels to stand alone, to work for people who hadn't seen the television programme, or even the stories being novelised. The function of these books are very different to those earlier ones, part of a project to pump out the books to meet the demands of an enthusiastic child readership. And of course, no one was better at meeting that demand than former script editor Terrance Dicks.

When I read Dicks's Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), I observed that the novel's unfortunate weak spot was the Daleks themselves:

I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; [...] I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!

I felt the same way here, and I would extend that observation to Davros, the Daleks' creator. Maybe something about the Daleks doesn't capture Terrance Dicks's fancy (I haven't read any of his third Doctor Dalek novelisations yet), maybe he more broadly just can't vibe with a Terry Nation script, I don't know. But I felt like The Genesis of the Daleks had all of the to-ing and fro-ing of its tv counterpart, but little of the atmosphere or intensity. I know the inclusions in The Essential Terrance Dicks were determined by fan vote, but I kind of suspect fans were more voting on the quality of the original stories than that of the books in question per se. Of course, I can see how this book would be invaluable in 1976, when there was little chance you were going to see Genesis of the Daleks again, but while this book was of course an effortless glide to read, I found it had little to recommend the 2024 reader.

Pyramids of Mars, on the other hand, seemed to have lit up Terrance's imagination. This might be an unambitious novelisation of a story I've seen several times, but I found there were a lot of nice little touches here. While The Genesis of the Daleks seemed to go from dialogue sequence to dialogue sequence, faithfully recapitulating the script, The Pyramids of Mars has an original prologue about the Osirans, an original epilogue about Sarah Jane after her travels with the Doctor, and a number of long bits of dialogue-less prose that set the scene atmospherically or provide backstory. I suspect, based on all the original Dicks novels I've read, that the historical setting did more for him than the science fictional one of Genesis. This is pretty straightforward stuff (though Dicks carefully removes all references to "1980"), but it works on its own to a degree that Genesis did not. My current litmus test is to imagine my six-year-old reading these (I haven't actually tried to foist one on them yet, though), and I felt like I could imagine them getting a complete novelistic experience out of Pyramids that I don't think they would Genesis. 

I think it also helps that this is the first of the books I've read in this sequence where Tom Baker comes through. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (1976) was too early for Dicks to have a sense of how Baker plays it, and Nation always writes a pretty generic Doctor, but here Dicks captures the moody, capricious nature of Tom Baker on the page pretty effectively. I look forward to seeing how this is handled in future novelisations.

The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, by the way, has a foreword by Robert Webb of Mitchell and Webb fame, and it's a good one. "If I told you that Terrance Dicks taught me to read, I would be exaggerating. But not much."

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Loch Ness Monster (1976)

As mentioned around here previously, I've been on a mission to read Doctor Who books I've owned along time but never gotten around to. Next up on that list is a Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter. But when such a book on my list is a Target novel, I read through all the Target novels featuring that particular incarnation that fall into either of two categories: 1) I already own it, or 2) it was (re)published in the current century, and I read them in publication order. For the fourth Doctor, then, that sequence will be The Loch Ness Monster (1976), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), The Pyramids of Mars (1976), The Ark in Space (1977), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Horror of Fang Rock (1978), [The Five Doctors (1983),] The Stones of Blood (2011), The Androids of Tara (2012), and Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2019). Quite a few! As I did with the first Doctor novelisations (see the sequence of posts starting here), I want to chart how the approach to novelising the show changed over time.

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I begin with the novelisation of Terror of the Zygons, which went out under the title Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. This wasn't the first fourth Doctor novel; that would be Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975), but that one hasn't got a modern reprinting. It is, however, the second, and I think that comes through in that the personality, the force of Tom Baker does not come through on the page. In fact, I usually found it easier to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines!

I assume that on screen, Tom put his own spin on it all, but Terror of the Zygons is a story I have only seen once, probably a little less than twenty years ago, so I was very much dependent on the novel itself to conjure imagery and sensation. I don't think Dicks does a bad job of this, especially at the beginning; I like the sequences of Broton observing our protagonists from a distance as they scramble across the moors. But I also don't think he does a great job of it, either. The Zygons are one of Doctor Who's great visual creations, and their spaceship interior an interesting one (I think, but if not, it's the kind of thing that in prose could be), but there's not a lot of atmosphere here in these parts of the story.

What's interesting to me is that while many of those early first Doctor novelisations were clearly novels, this is clearly a novelisation; there's a lot of cross-cutting between different locations in the same scene (usually Dicks puts one location's prose in parentheses), which is much more of a tv move, and the kind of thing you might expect a prose version to move away from. But Dicks very much embraces the fact that this originally went out on screen. I think this probably makes it less interesting to the adult modern reader, but I imagine it probably works well with kids; this is one I can imagine to handing over to my six-year-old reader of chapter books who is (we might say) "Doctor Who curious," which isn't so true of, for example, The Daleks (1964) or The Crusaders (1966)! I might be the target audience of the 2012 BBC Books reprint I own, but I wasn't the target audience of the original.

My reprint, by the way, has an introduction by Michael Moorcock; it's fun enough, but I see little in it that indicates he has much appreciation for or has actually even read the book in question! He clearly likes the tv serial, though.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

The First Doctor Novelisations: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977)

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One
by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was the second first Doctor novelisation of the Target era, and the first by the venerable Terrance Dicks. Like The Tenth Planet (1976), it picks out a key moment from the series's history as yet unchronicled in prose, the return of the Daleks and the departure of Susan, an event mentioned but unseen in The Crusaders (1965).

Collection published: 2022
Novel originally published: 1977
Acquired and read: August 2024

People like to bandy about the word "workmanlike" when describing Terrance Dicks. I think Dalek Invasion shows the positives and negatives of that approach. He's not interested in making this a book book like the writers of those first three novelisations were... but on the other hand he's much better at writing a novelisation than Gerry Davis was with The Tenth Planet. (That said, he's got better source material to work with!) Terry Nation's original script features a lot of convoluted moving backward and forward across a devastated London and England, and Dicks captures that perfectly well, occasionally smoothing out some bits of the tv serial. (On screen, the Doctor says this preceded the events of The Daleks, but Dicks changes it to take place afterwards; there's one bit where Ian admits to himself that his plan doesn't make a lot of sense, which felt like a bit of a lampshade moment.)

My favorite part of the book was the first chapter or so, where the characters are exploring the deserted London. "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" is a fantastic opening line, one I knew before I even read the book. In fact, I once played a game called Liebrary with a number of friends where you get a card with the title, author, and synopsis of a famous book; each player then has to write down an imagined first line for the book (the genuine one is also included in the mix). If more people pick your line than any other, you score points. When Orwell's 1984 came up, in a moment of inspiration I wrote down "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" and won the round handily... even though most of my opponents were also English graduate students! Has Terrance ever written such a great line before or since?

The part that didn't quite work for me were the Daleks themselves. I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; the famous cliffhanger where one comes up out of the Thames is curiously undramatic, and I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!

I read Dalek Invasion as part of The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One, which collects five novelisations. A couple I already own, but I will save it to read The Wheel in Space when I get around to doing the second Doctor novelisations. The introduction by Frank Cottrell-Boyce is nice, and I do like the simple but elegant cover of the paperback edition, but the most interesting thing was that the list of famous fans of Terrance includes Sarah Waters, of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet fame. I would never have guessed! Does anyone know more about this? Googling "'sarah waters' 'terrance dicks'" just gets you the blurb for The Essential Terrance Dicks on a number of sites. (I did find a Guardian interview that says she was "a clever, solitary child lost in make-believe, reading widely 'but nothing memorable', and watching 'an awful lot of telly, sci-fi, horror and Doctor Who'" in the 1970s.) Maybe it's a cliché, but let's get her in to novelise a "Paternoster gang" story. Ooh, or a Thirteen/Yaz one.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Galaxy Four

Review: Doctor Who: Shakedown by Terrance Dicks

Trade paperback, 285 pages
Published 2014 (originally 1995)

Acquired May 2019
Read June 2019

Doctor Who: Shakedown: The Monster Collection Edition
by Terrance Dicks

The seventh Doctor, Benny, Chris, and Roz encounter both the Sontarans and the Rutan in a cosmic plan of the Doctor's to make sure their war doesn't spill over into the rest of the galaxy. Like a lot of New Adventures, it follows a number of distinct threads: Chris and Roz chase a deranged serial killer on a noir planet, Benny investigates on a university planet, the crew of a space yacht has to contend with a Rutan stowaway and Sontaran boarding party, and the Doctor lurks at the margins. The best part is Chris and Roz; Dicks has a good handle on their voices, and you can tell he really loves this kind of corrupt city stuff. He did it well in Blood Harvest, and he would return to this same city-planet and some of its characters in Mean Streets. I really enjoyed all the stuff featuring them, from the stabby rat taxi driver to the charming Ogron police chief. On the other hand, I don't think Dicks has ever had a great handle on Benny. Did you know she is a professor and likes to drink? That seems to be about all he has ever figured out.

After a good opening and a decent middle (I didn't love the space yacht stuff, but it worked), it all fizzles out at the end. The Doctor having joined up with Chris and Roz, their plot ends up tying up with Benny's in a mind-boggling coincidence-- the serial killer they are chasing just happens to escape on a cruise liner going to the planet she is on! The planet is important to the plot, so I don't get why Dicks didn't have him just pick his destination. Once everyone converges on the planet, the way the Doctor saves the day is, to be frank, quite silly. I don't think it's meant to be comic, but it plays that way, and as if Dicks had no idea how to wrap it all up in the ten pages he had left.

I like the cover of my "Monster Collection" edition, very swish, but it was a bit incongruous that Dicks kept saying the Sontarans had red eyes and no lips, neither of which was true of the one on the cover!

Next Week: All caught up with my reviews of the New Adventures, so I'm rotating back to another one of my long-running reading projects... the Transformers!

Review: Doctor Who: Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks

Mass market paperback, 287 pages
Published 1994

Acquired May 2008
Read September 2017

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Blood Harvest
by Terrance Dicks

The first couple hundred pages of Blood Harvest are hugely enjoyable: Doctor Who does 1920s noir detective fiction. The "Doc" and Ace run a speakeasy in Chicago at the height of Capone's power. There are gunfights galore, Ace shoots people, and occasionally the book is narrated in the first-person by a macho private eye. Like some of the most fun Doctor Who stories, it's a delightful combination of our series and some other genre, and of course Terrance Dicks is always effortlessly readable. In the meanwhile, Bernice is on the vampire planet from State of Decay in E-Space, teaming up with Romana to fight vampires. This isn't terribly well done, but there's not enough of it to be annoying. (Except that Dicks makes it annoyingly easy to get in and out of E-Space.)

It all falls apart in the end, though. I had thought vampires were somehow involved in the Chicago plot: it seems perfect for Prohibition-era Chicago, with maybe a vampire gang running a blood-smuggling operation with vampire speakeasies. However, the plots don't really connect that well: it turns out that a yawnworthy evil from the dawn of time is at work in both Chicago and E-Space, and he's been dispatched by a cabal of evil Time Lords, so all of a sudden the book shifts gears and we're not doing a State of Decay retread, but a The Five Doctors one for some reason. The dull bits of The Five Doctors, that is, the ones that were just there to justify why Jon Pertwee might be arguing with Patrick Troughton. So Blood Harvest switches from complete pleasure to thundering bore and then just putters out. Meh.

Romana and Bernice are both ill-served by this book, but I guess that's what we might expect of the man whose ideal female companion was Jo Grant.

Next Week: A trip back in time: the fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan deal with the fall-out of this story in Goth Opera!

Review: Doctor Who: Exodus by Terrance Dicks

Speaking of evil alternate universes, UNIT fight that and more in Encounters, which I've reviewed (as always) for USF.

Mass market paperback, 234 pages
Published 1991

Acquired and read October 2016

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Exodus
by Terrance Dicks

Given the lack of quality both in Timewyrm: Genesys and in Terrance Dicks's later writing, I wasn't expecting much out of this... but it turns out that in 1991, Uncle Terrance could still write a cracking Doctor Who adventure like none other. He gloms right onto what makes the seventh Doctor and Ace work, and sends them through a fun adventure: Doctor Who on television probably could never have done the Nazis during its original run, but this takes a lot of those classic tropes of the Doctor infiltrating and bamboozling an occupying force, and inserts them right into the Third Reich. The whole thing is just a blast, as this is the Doctor at his most cunning and also his most clownish, pulling one over on the ultimate bad guys, but also being fairly direct about what makes Nazis the ultimate bad guys. I wouldn't have thought that making Hitler the pawns of two different aliens would work, but Dicks pulls it off, and with style. Trad, but with just enough rad to delight, basically the most you could want out of any New Adventure not written by any of the actual "rad" authors.

Next Week: The Timewyrm returns to bedevil the Doctor and Ace, with an Apocalypse!

Review: Doctor Who: Talkback, Volume Two: The Seventies edited by Stephen James Walker

Trade paperback, 225 pages
Published 2006 (contents: 1977-2006)
Acquired August 2008
Read November 2016

Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume Two: The Seventies
edited by Stephen James Walker

There are definitely interviews here with some old standbys: Terrance Dicks (script editor, 1968-74), Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who, 1970-74), Barry Letts (producer, 1970-74), Tom Baker (Doctor Who, 1974-81), and Philip Hinchcliffe (producer, 1974-77). Each interview, however, manages to be informative and interesting: I enjoyed reading about Pertwee's appearance on This Is Your Life, for example, and the Tom Baker one is somehow able to have anecdotes I hadn't heard before.

But it's also good to hear from folks who weren't/aren't often interviewed, especially the trio of late 1970s script editors: Robert Holmes (1974-78), Anthony Read (1978-79), and Douglas Adams (1979-80). Holmes has gone on to be quite lauded as both a script editor and a writer, but he died in 1986, meaning few interviews with him exist. Anthony Read I can't recall ever reading anything about at all before. And obviously Douglas Adams is quite famous, but this interview was done back in 1978, before any story he'd script-edited had even gone out, and before Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had gone further than a few episodes on the radio. All three provide great insight into the day-to-day script-writing of their era, which tended to lurch from crisis to crisis but produce excellence regardless. (Holmes, especially, was always rewriting failed scripts and producing greatness as a result.)

I was also surprisingly interested by the interviews with Pennant Roberts (who directed several serials from 1977 to 1985) and Peter Logan (visual effects on various serials from 1977 to 1982). Roberts's provides a detailed look into the making of The Sun Makers and The Pirate Planet in particular, explaining how he makes the production choices he makes, while Logan's is a detailed dissection of the effects of Destiny of the Daleks. One learns where to find a Plutonian dystopia in Bristol, why the flying spanner in Pirate Planet looks rubbish but couldn't look otherwise, and how Dalek props were loaned out to basically anyone between episodes and ended up in terrible shape as a result. The Roberts interview, especially, is a candid look into the decisions that result in what you see on screen. I don't rate Roberts very highly as a director, but he was clearly a thoughtful guy.

A solid collection of interesting anecdotes. Who knew that Jon Pertwee encouraged the creation of a rival Doctor Who fan club because he felt the official one too focused on Patrick Troughton? Or that Tom Baker personally paid for the postage of the Doctor Who Fan Club when the BBC refused to do so anymore!

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Hardboiled Detective Novel

It's been fifteen months since I read Ghost Devices.  My catch-up-on-the-Bernice-New-Adventures plan is not exactly working out, is it? (It's okay; I've got a new one!)

Mass market paperback, 248 pages
Published 1997
Acquired January 2011
Read April 2012

The New Adventures: Mean Streets

by Terrance Dicks

Well, I suppose Justin Richards is glad a book came along to dethrone Dragons' Wrath from its status as worst Bernice Summerfield New Adventure.  The dialogue is bad, the plot is dumb, the characterization is not even trying.  At least the bits where the book is narrated in the first person by an Ogron private eye are fun, but we're talking like a dozen pages in an interminable novel...

Ten Years of Bernice Summerfield

Since the beginning of 2010 or so, I've decided to finally get back into Professor Bernice Summerfield, many years after I listened to the first two seasons of the audio dramas and read the early novels. I've been listening to an audio every now and then, but it occurred to me that I should be intermixing the books that go with them. (Bernice has a complicated storyline that constantly switches between prose and audio.) A Life of Surprises actually came out during Season 3, and now I'm on Season 4, so I've jumped back to fill in this gap:

Professor Bernice Summerfield II: A Life of Surprises
edited by Paul Cornell

Hardcover, 166 pages. Published 2002.  Acquired and read December 2011.

A Life of Surprises was published ten years after Benny debuted in Paul Cornell's Love and War, and the book claims to celebrate the full extent of her life, though for obvious reasons none of the stories feature her traveling with the Doctor, and most are set during her time working for the Braxiatel Collection.  It's a very nice anthology, with a lot of stories that tend to the more "literary" end of things, in terms of prose style and experimentation, which isn't a thing there's usually a lot of room for in tie-in fiction.  The looser nature of Bernice Summerfield works to its advantage here, I think-- there's no "franchise" or anything for it to be bound to, and so the authors are free to take the quite-varied tone of Bernice stories and spread their wings.

Most notable along these lines was "Kill the Mouse!" by the not-published-enough Daniel O'Mahony.  I mean, I don't fully get what happened or why, but it's an excellent look at Bernice under pressure, and it's dark without feeling overly so.  Paul Ebbs's "Something Broken" is similar, but less effective, maybe because Bernice is rarely so directly political as she is here. (I mean, I know she hates cruelty, but I feel that Beyond the Sun handled this more aptly.)  "Cuckoo" by Stephen Fewell was also a favorite; unlike many stories, it's set at a defintive point in the chronology (soon after Benny gives birth in The Glass Prison) and deals with the issue of Bernice's motherhood in a deeper way that we've seen in the audio series up until this point.

There are also weird or funny stories, such as "Alien Planets and You" by Dave Stone, which is written like an article about travel, with endnotes that explain what specifically happened to Benny. (For some reason, though, the endnotes are in a dark gray box, making them nearly illegible.) "The Collection" by Peter Anghelides is a strange time-travel adventure, but it works more than it doesn't, mostly thanks to the humor (though there's one bit that seems somewhat forced).  Steve Lyons's "Taken by the Muses" has a race of alien robots who must rhyme, and is worth it entirely for that joke.  "Time's Team" by David McIntee is also a fun romp, but surely the most humorous story in the book is Nev Fountain's "Beedlemania," features the Knyy'ds, a race compelled to use any pointed object once unsheathed before it is sheathed again.  Initially referring to swords, their honor code cause them to extend it to pens (they must write their mothers a letter) and more.

And then there's some continuity-pleasing ones (at least in theory), like Terrance Dicks's "A Mutual Friend," which takes a great premise (Bernice meets Sarah Jane) and manages to turn it into a complete non-event.  Mark Stevens's "Setting Stone" sees Bernice encountering the aftereffects of an adventure she had with the Doctor, but it didn't really come together to me-- perhaps because it's forced to be vague by its very nature.  "The Spartacus Syndrome" by Jonathan Morris is set during the old Virgin adventures, when Benny was based on Dellah, and is also disorienting but fun.  Lance Parkin's "Paydirt" is a nice tribute to Bernice (and her contradictory nature), but the best of these stories was "Dear Friend" by Jim Sangster, a simple letter from Bernice to the Doctor thanking him for what he's done for her.

There are a few stories I didn't mention, but most of those are dull at worst, not bad.  I have very mixed memories of Big Finish's previous Bernice Summerfield anthology, The Dead Men Diaries, but thankfully by this point, Big Finish had stopped pushing Bernice Summerfield as a series of sub-Indiana Jones adventures set in outer space, and let Benny return to the more literary and emotional tone of the Virgin stories.  A good celebration for a worthy character.