Fiction Reviews
Doctor Who
The Chimes of Midnight(2025) Robert Shearman, Ebury, £10.99, pbk, 233pp, ISBN 978-1-785-94960-9
'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring... But something must be stirring. Something hidden in the shadows. Something which kills the servants of an old Edwardian mansion in the most brutal and macabre manner possible. Exactly on the chiming of the hour, every hour, as the grandfather clock ticks on towards midnight. Trapped and afraid, the Doctor and his companion, Charley, are forced to play detective to murders with no motive, where even the victims don't stay dead. Time is running out. And time itself might well be the killer...
Doctor Who will eat himself, but it is actually a pretty neat idea for BBC Books to bring out novel versions of the Doctor’s Big Finish audio adventures, penned by the very writer who wrote them in the first place. Thus, we have The Chimes of Midnight – a very ominous title – written by the always reliable Robert Shearman, writer of that seminal 2005 TV episode Dalek. In The Chimes of Midnight, he is writing about the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann, and his companion Charley, played by India Fisher, told over a Prologue, and three parts – Without, Within, and With Edith, which are split into fourteen chapters.
I have to confess, that while a fan of Doctor Who, I’m not an obsessive one, and have only dipped into it occasionally since the end of David Tennant’s original run. I’ve not seen all the Matt Smith adventures, nor all of the Peter Capaldi ones, and while I watched most of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I hardly caught any of Ncuti Gatwa’s. And here’s the big confession, I’ve never listened to a Doctor Who audio adventure from Big Finish, so The Chimes of Midnight is all new to me, although having read the book, I might give the audio version a go.
As for the story, it might easily be described as Upstairs Downstairs meets Sapphire and Steel meets Doctor Who, with a smattering of The Shining added in, as we join the Eighth Doctor and his companion Charley Pollard in an old house at Christmas where strange things are happening – “it’s reality, Jim, but not as we know it” – and a murder is committed. The Doctor and Charley find themselves unable to access the TARDIS. The staff of the house are acting strangely; time is acting strangely. Could the murder have anything to do with all this…strangeness? There is only one way to find out, by solving the murder, and hopefully things will go back to normal.
Shearman’s prose is as solid and delightful as ever as the Doctor ponders over the consequences of saving Charley from certain death in the 1930s, but in doing so, he has changed the timeline, and at what cost? Having given a wide-eyed Charley control of the TARDIS might not be another great idea of his either, as they arrive in a place of total darkness which reveals itself to be a kitchen, the same kitchen where the servants are busy at work in an Edwardian kitchen. The scullery maid is one 15-year-old Edith Thompson, the lowest of the low in the grand scheme of things and not allowed to forget it, and Charley seems to recall that her parents had an Edith in their 1930s household. Could they possibly be the same person? But before any secrets are revealed there will be more murders, and resurrections, and even more strangeness such as a cooked turkey coming to life, people being sucked through keyholes, mirrors with too many reflections, and let’s not forget a certain cracker joke.
Shearman’s Eighth Doctor is a wonderful creation – irreverent, funny, caring, a rebel; while Charley revels in the adventures she is having, but also her growing love for the Doctor which can never be reciprocated, and will that realisation and ultimate heartache spell her doom?
I’m guessing that if you have heard the original drama you will want to read this version of it, and I’m also guessing that Shearman has given it an upgrade in this different form. This is certainly one of the best Doctor Who books I’ve read, and I look forward to Shearman adapting some of his other Big Finish audio dramas in the future.
Ian Hunter
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