Toby Hadoke remembers this novelisation as really bringing out the murder-mystery element of the story, something he feels fades into the background in the TV episodes (3). Oddly, I found exactly the opposite – without the Christie-era costumes and set design, I’m not sure you’d even know you were supposed to be guessing at the culprit.

    For a start, barely any of the characters exist as more than a couple of adjectives. Yes, Uvanov gets a lot of lovely details – with his ‘lined, weary face’ half-disguised under over-elaborate make up, his excessively fashionable hat (4), the patheticness of his ‘pretending to be young’ (5), the torch he seems to carry for Zilda (6), whether motivated by actual affection or just by the aristocratic background, and his automatic professionalism when there’s actually work to be done (7) – but no one else gets much of a look-in. Toos is ‘elegant’ (8), ‘attractive’, older than Zilda and ‘sophisticated (9); Chub is ‘sly, round-faced’ (10) and has an aggressive sense of humour (11) that involves ‘tormenting’ others (12); Poul is casual and ‘watchful’, belying his undercover role; Dask is ‘Neat and precise’ (13); Borg is ‘burly’ (14); Cass ‘young and muscular [and] dark-skinned like Zilda’ (15); and poor old Zilda is just ‘dark-skinned’ (16).

    Tying in with this, there’s very little in the way of discernable motives. Again, Uvanov gets the best service, the cover-up of his apparent murder of Zilda’s brother on a previous expedition seemingly served by the murders (17). No one else gets even the hint of a motive.

    Actually, that’s not quite the problem it might at first appear. It’s clear from the very first murder (assuming Chub’s murder precedes Kerril’s) that it’s the robots doing the actual killing. That explains the story’s barely even fleeting interest in alibis – it would be the times at which the robots are reprogrammed that would be relevant not the times of the murders – but it also means that what’s really relevant is who would be capable of a task everyone seems to think impossible rather than who would want each person dead. Only problem is that Taren Capel and his possible infiltration of the crew only gets mentioned a few pages after Uvanov’s motive is revealed and that’s about two-thirds of the way through the book. There are in fact a few nice clues pointing to Dask as the undercover Capel – his ‘quiet satisfaction’ at Uvanov’s chess defeat by a robot (18), his ‘impassive face’ at times of stress (19) and, most on the nose, his ‘voice as calm as that of the robot’ (20) – and it’s possible that for some they might well click into place once the plot reveals the mystery is the assumed identity of the robot revolutionary, but it still all comes off as a bit unfair on anyone invested in spotting the culprit.

    None of this, however, is to suggest Doctor Who and the Robots of Death is a poor cousin to the broadcast episodes. Despite the book being visibly short, even by the standards of Doctor Who novelisations (21), Dicks strives to add an awful lot to the TV story’s already impressive world-building. The status of the founding families is clarified (22), for instance, as are the hard times upon which Zilda’s family have fallen (23), though it could be argued both are clear enough and even more evocative onscreen. More of an addition is the revelation of a Wild West past and an ‘all-powerful Company’ (24), which hint at a rather more authoritarian Kaldor than the TV episodes. Dicks also reinforces the pre-War feel of the civilisation, taking Zilda’s father’s elision of cowardice with robophobia (25) and emphasising the parallel with old-fashioned attitudes to conditions like shell shock (26).

    More intriguing are the details of the humans’ attitudes to robots. It appears that the robots are not as uniform as might be expected – Chub, for example, unaware and unbothered which robot has joined him in the storage bay, what with their lack of ‘individuality’ (27) – differences apparently detectable even from their voices and only unobserved thanks to a complete lack of interest (28). They’re an underclass, allowing the likes of the crew to, for example, indulge in such ornate dress that’s only possible in a ‘society […] in which no human needed to perform any manual labour’ (29), who are extraordinarily simultaneously despised, as in Uvanov’s off-hand snark that ‘robot efficiency’ is ‘unaccompanied by any trace of initiative’ (30), and ignored, as when Chub remains utterly unaware of the threatening movements of the robot that joins him in the storage bay until the very moment ‘metal fingers closed about his throat’ (31). Yes, it’s thanks to a blend of dependence and complacency that a robot killer would spell ‘the end of this civilisation’ through ‘technology grinding to a halt’, but it’s also thanks to their stubborn refusal to recognise the individuality of each robot that the humans would destroy robots indiscriminately in response and thanks to their recognition of how badly they have treated the robots that they would respond to any hint of sentience with such ‘blind panic’ (32).

    With this in mind, it’s interesting that the novelisation, despite the cause of the robot murders simply being the work of Taren Capel, suggests that the robots do in fact have a hint of sentience. When reprogrammed, the robots follow their new instructions because ‘A new truth had been revealed’ (33), as if they’re not so much rewired as persuaded – tellingly, the detail that ‘a robot could feel no emotion’ is heavily hedged with the phrase ‘strictly speaking’. These aren’t mere tools that have had their safety protocols overwritten, this is an underclass that has seen the light and fanatically embraced the need for revolution. Backing this up is the fact the Laserson probe isn’t apparently necessary when it comes to converting them to the cause – SV7’s change of allegiance is explicitly brought about with mere ‘visual signals’ (34). To some degree, the robots are actually engaged in the desire to achieve ‘freedom’ from subjugation.

    Also new to the novelisation is a touch of sympathy for Capel. Where on TV, his childhood spent in the company of only robots (35) is left vague, the book explains that it occurred as a result of an ‘absence of any kind of parental love’ (36) or ‘human affection’ (37). Furthermore, it is made clear that ‘the upbringing at the emotionless hands of robots […] turned Dask's brain’ rather than his preferment of robots leading him to seek only their company. Whether this was caused by a lack of parents and the disinterest of all other people or came about because his parents preferred to leave their child with the robot help rather than engage with him themselves is unclear, but it does recast Taren Capel from a lunatic misanthrope to a damaged product of Kaldor society and accordingly transforms the murders into a product of the treatment of and attitudes to the robot underclass. As such, especially if you decide Dicks is embracing the TV story’s design choices and strengthening the links between Kaldor and Britain in its supposed heyday, there’s an echo of Dicks’s work back around the adaptations of The Planet of Evil and Doctor Who and the Mutants. Question is, is this just a symptom of the strength of this one story or are things looking up for the future?