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Introduction - Preface by Gareth Roberts

License Revoked
  

The Well-Mannered War was the third part of my Fourth Doctor trilogy for Virgin's Missing Adventures.

It was written against the background of Virgin losing the Who license; I think we always knew that it would get a smaller print run than normal because legally Virgin wouldn't be able to sell any copies to the shops after May 1996. But I had no idea it would end up selling for such silly amounts on e-Bay. If I had, I would have kept a few more copies.

The genesis of The Well-Mannered War was a combination of things. I knew it was the last Virgin Missing Adventure; I knew it was the last Who book I'd do for a while at least because I'd started doing TV; and I knew there was going to be a general election in May 1997 when the book was going to be published.

Let me entertain you
  

First of all, a bit of background. When I wrote my first Who book, The Highest Science, in 1992, the New Adventures had only just started, so nobody - least of all me - knew quite what the books were supposed to be. After a couple of years, Paul Cornell, Kate Orman and Andy Lane had set the tone - and I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I really admired Cornell's breadth of vision, but I knew if I tried to do something like that I'd fall flat on my face. I think I'm more of an entertainer than an artist; everything I've done has a kind of 'roll up, roll up' quality to it.

Doctor Who is an adventure serial with fantasy elements; I never saw it as science fiction, so I modelled the tone of my stuff on the sort of funny, rollicking whodunnits by writers like John Dickson Carr, Edmund Crispin and Pamela Branch. All three tragically out of print in this country! (If you come across a copy of Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, snap it up. It's more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who.)

Heroes
  

I thought it was important for us all to play to our strengths, and so many of the Virgin books were (rightly) quite experimental. So I wanted to be the traditionalist, and when the Missing Adventures started up it seemed a good idea to concentrate on those.

I was weaned on Tom Baker's Doctor, and I loved the stories with Romana and K9. I always prefer the Doctor to have a brainy assistant who can look after herself. When there's an incompetent or a child in that role who goes stumbling over their heels into traps I think one starts to lose patience (what I'd call the Tara King syndrome).

You need respect for your heroes. It's nice to have three of them, as well, because then you can split them up into various different combinations. In a regular series, in books or films and TV, you know people will want to keep their eyes on your regulars, so I tried my darndest to keep them central all the way.

Also, it means you have to make the guest characters as vivid and large as possible, just to make them compete.

The logical choice
  

The idea of K9 standing for election amused me - inspired by the November Five Avengers episode which I'd just seen, and an Edmund Crispin book where his hero Gervase Fenn stands for a seat. You're always looking for a fresh angle with Who, and it struck me that there hadn't been a Doctor Who story that dealt explicitly with party politics, which has always fascinated me.

I love court intrigue, powerplay and deception. Out of that came the notion of a war that had stalled, where the two sides had just settled down and became mates as diplomatic process dragged on and on. What would happen if it started up again?

The plot's pretty Byzantine; the length of the Virgin range meant they had to be more complex than TV Doctor Who, so I tried to take advantage of that by structuring layer upon layer of lies, and (hopefully) dropping clues as to what was really going on.

I always tried to keep the flavour of the TV series. I remember a review that said something like, "The Well-Mannered War reads like it was filmed in a power station in Leeds in 1978." I'm afraid I took that as a great compliment.