A review by saroz162
Doctor Who: Foreign Devils by Andrew Cartmel

2.0

Awful, awful writing from Andrew Cartmel, masking what could otherwise be a halfway decent murder mystery. After the initial opening - which is kind of exciting in a vintage, moustache-twirling, 1920s-pulp-thriller sort of way - the story just falls lifeless to the ground, and nothing Cartmel does ever gives it very much life again. For one thing, the characters he calls the Doctor and Zoe are almost nothing like their television counterparts, the Doctor being overly formal and Zoe rendered a generic female companion type. Poor Jamie barely gets anything to do at all; he spends most of the story completely out of commission. And Carnacki - a public domain character Cartmel has borrowed to add color to his tale - goes through the motions that resemble his classic stories, but he never really contributes very much beyond that which a generic detective would. To add insult to injury, the book (or at least the paperback edition) is appallingly proof-edited, with a host of typos that stand out a mile. It's not a terrible story - it moves along at a fair pace - but at the end, I found myself asking, "What was the point of that exercise?"