PREFACE

The JFK quotations: I though it would be a nice touch to begin each section with the words of US President John F Kennedy, to help remind readers of his importance to the book. This opening quote is lifted from the Shona Laing song 'Glad I'm Not a Kennedy', a chart hit in New Zealand and Australia during 1987. I transcribed the quote wrongly, it should be: 'We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the course of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths...' This apocalyptic quote was a neat lead-in to the opening sequence of the novel.

22 January 1964: This short what-if sequence suggests what could have happened if JFK's wife Jackie had been assassinated at Dallas instead of the president. The sequence was suggested by former Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel when I told him about the book I was writing. The 30th anniversary of JFK's murder had generated a lot of useful reference material and inspiration for my novel. There's some dialogue Clint Eastwood says during the film In the Line of Fire here, transposed to the thoughts of JFK.

22 January 1996: Who Killed Kennedy was written almost entirely as a first person narrative by a fictional character, journalist James Stevens (my middle names are James and Stephen), assisted by me. I've since revived Stevens as a pen-name for some of my other fiction writing. So far David Bishop is proving more successful.

During development of Who Killed Kennedy, the name of the first person narrator flip-flopped between a few alternatives. He was called Jack Marshall in the original proposal before becoming James Stephens early in 1995. Virgin wanted the character's surname changed to Stevens for reasons I can no longer remember. I preferred Stephens but felt it wasn't worth an argument. The character's name was derived from my own middle names to underline that the two authors named on the cover are actually one and the same.

Using a first person narrative was a typical feature of conspiracy books like David Yallop's Carlos: Hunt for the Jackal. It gave the reader a strong insight into Stevens' thoughts and feelings, and also helped keep the familiar characters of the Doctor and UNIT at arm's length. Virgin editor Rebecca (Bex) Levene was worried this would become too much to sustain for a whole novel. We overcame that with short insert chapters, as you'll see later in the book.

James Stevens relates how he was on work experience at Auckland's Saturday afternoon newspaper 8 O'Clock newspaper when JFK was assassinated. The 8 O'Clock was an odd paper, essentially a vehicle for publishing the results of sports fixtures in the days before teletext or the internet. Unsurprisingly, it has long since folded. In the 1980s I did work experience at the 8 O'Clock's parent paper, the Auckland Star. That's gone too now.

Stevens' origins as the illegitimate son of a US soldier stationed in New Zealand during the Second World War was inspired by seeing John Wayne supposedly in NZ during some war film \x96 The Sands of Iwo-Jima perhaps.

The preface quickly establishes the tone and style of the book, while outlining the central character's background and philosophy. Like him I had been a daily newspaper reporter. I grew disillusioned at simply reporting what others did in impartial terms; I felt the best journalism came from a quest for the truth - hence Stevens' quest for the truth about UNIT and the Doctor. His character is forced to sacrifice everything for his quest; he undergoes a fundamental change over the course of the book. In most Doctor Who novels the central character is the Doctor, who cannot change. WKK's unusual format enabled him to overcome that restriction.

PART ONE: BAD SCIENCE

'Bad Science' had been a working title for the novel, before the JFK elements were added. It was borrowed from a graphic novel collection of old Judge Dredd comics stories.

One: October 1969

This chapter relates to events seen in Spearhead from Space, the first adventure of the Third Doctor. Indeed, the phone call from the porter Mullins is actual dialogue lifted from the first episode. That provided the name of the newspaper for which Stevens was working, The Daily Chronicle.

The chief reporter is based on a man I worked with in New Zealand - I didn't like him much. The photographer in this chapter, Ross 'Tubbs' Tubberty, is an amalgam of two photographers from the New Zealand Herald, Ross White and Michael Tubberty. The paragraph about the crazed driving habits of newspaper snappers is all too accurate in my experience.

Stevens visits Ashbridge Cottage Hospital, has his first encounter with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and meets the poacher Sam Seeley. But all mention of UNIT is excised from his story at the orders of the newspaper's editor. Stevens begins investigating this hush-hush organisation. His contact in the Chronicle's clippings library, Catherine, is based on a woman who did the same job at the New Zealand Herald.

A crucial part of WKK was interpreting how the events seen on-screen in Doctor Who would be perceived by the rest of the world. So the Nestene invasion seen on TV in Spearhead from Space became Black Thursday, a series of terrorist incidents with the authorities hinting the IRA might be responsible.

Two: November 1969

The continuity references start coming thick and fast. Books like The Discontinuity Guide by Cornell, Day and Topping, and Lance Parkin\x92s A History of the Universe and Jon Preddle\x92s articles in TSV were essential reading for trying to join the dots of Doctor Who continuity. For example, this chapter opens with mentions of the British Space Centre and the Mars Probe, setting up subsequent references to The Ambassadors of Death. Inspired by Remembrance of the Daleks, I also worked in a reference to the old British Rocket Group from Nigel Kneale\x92s Quatermass series. Plus there\x92s links to The Invasion (the collapse of Tobias Vaughn\x92s International Electromatics company), Ashley Chapel from Craig Hinton\x92s Missing Adventure Millennial Rites, and Professor Kettlewell from the Fourth Doctor story Robot.

Part of the challenge in writing Who Killed Kennedy was squaring events shown in the TV stories with contemporary events on Earth in reality. I chose to set the broadcast adventures close to their broadcast date, deciding most of the fashions and technology on show were contemporary. But the likes of The Ambassadors of Death present special challenges \x96 Britain still hasn\x92t sent manned missions to Mars. So there needed to be a plausible explanation for how the Mars Probe was possible. Happily, the cybertechnology left by Tobias Vaughn provided an answer. Bex was responsible for a lot of cross-pollination between Who Killed Kennedy and other Doctor Who novels being written at the time, hence Ashley Chapel\x92s mention.

But the main story source for this chapter is Doctor Who and the Silurians. I remember being scared almost senseless by this story when it was first broadcast and gripped by Malcolm Hulke\x92s Target novelisation - Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (complete with illustrations of groovy flares). The Silurians was one of the broadcast stories that provided lots of great material for Who Killed Kennedy. When rewatching the story I chuckled with delight at discovering Lethbridge-Stewart having an angry phone conversation with a reporter from a daily newspaper. That went straight into the novel, strengthening the links between Stevens and the characters on-screen. Discovering moments like that were akin to winning a prize without buying a raffle ticket, a little moment of joy and glee.

The paragraph about Stevens trying to overcome writer\x92s block by going to the toilet is exactly what I used to do at the New Zealand Herald. Some of my best opening paragraphs were composed in that bathroom. When I left the Herald in January 1990 to emigrate to Britain, the use of new technology such as computers had yet to be introduced to the paper. We were still typing stories on typewriters, using scratch pads and jealously hoarding our precious supplies of carbon paper. It seems arcane now in an era of desktop publishing, but the experience provided valuable background material for Who Killed Kennedy.

This chapter has Stevens commit adultery with a woman he meets at the Savoy Hotel. I was all set to write a steamy sex scene but chickened out at the last minute. Somehow it didn\x92t seem appropriate for the tone of the book.

Three: December 1969

While researching Who Killed Kennedy I thought it was important to show that continuity reached backwards as well as forwards. For example, The Daemons introduces the TV channel BBC3. Why not use that and incorporate it into earlier stories? Thus BBC3 makes it first appearance in this chapter which is focused on The Ambassadors of Death. When both stories were made, BBC3 was the stuff of fiction. (The channel now exists in Britain, although it is not available to all viewers yet. It\x92s best known as a testing ground for new comedy.)

Another example of this cross-fertilisation comes with the mention of C19, used in Who Killed Kennedy as a shadowy secret service ministry. The government department is first mentioned on screen during Time-Flight, but was transformed by various authors into a more sinister force. Gary Russell\x92s book The Scales of Injustice was the novel that ret-conned C19. His book also provided the sinister character of the man with the lisp who menaces Stevens in WKK. Bex suggested the inclusion of this character. I tried and failed to contact Gary for more information about his character, as our books were being written simultaneously. I think the Glasshouse - a sinister mental hospital used for UNIT soldiers suffering post traumatic stress disorder - was my creation and then incorporated into Gary\x92s book. I recall it being inspired by watching the film A Month in the Country, in which the central characters are shell-shocked veterans of the Great War.

Stevens meets and interviews Isobel Watkins, who talks about her experiences in The Invasion. This is a crucial turning point in the story, as for the first time Stevens learns about the existence of the Doctor. It also picks up the Doctor John Smith alias, first used by Jamie in The Wheel in Space and subsequently adopted by the Third Doctor during Spearhead from Space and The Time Warrior.

Stevens goes for a drink in a pub called the Lord John Russell in Marchmont Street, near Russell Square tube station in London. This was the pub I frequented in the second half of the 1990s while I was working around the corner in Tavistock Place at Egmont Fleetway Ltd. The pub also appears in my Eighth Doctor novel The Domino Effect on page 170.

Four: The UNIT Dossier

There's a term for authors who reuse TV continuity as back story material in their books: 'fanwank'. This chapter probably has the highest level of fanwank per page in any Doctor Who novel. It only occupied twelve pages in the published version of Who Killed Kennedy, but managed to reference nearly a dozen different TV stories. Playing this dot-to-dot game of linking all these adventures together was great fun but required many, many hours of research. Eyes down for a full house\x85

The Intrusion Counter Measures Group picks up a reference to Remembrance of the Daleks in the 1991 Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special, UNIT Exposed, that suggested the ICMG led to the creation of UNIT. Group Captain Ian 'Chunky' Gilmore's first name comes from Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation. Who Killed Kennedy mentions Professor Rachel Jansen having worked with the codebreaker Alan Turing. He later turned up as a central character in Paul Leonard's wonderful EDA The Turing Test and in my own EDA, The Domino Effect (which had a working title of The Turing Shroud).

'The Shoreditch Incident' covers events seen in the very first episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child. This section also alludes to Ian and Barbara's experiences during The Aztecs and suggests the pair got married after returning home in The Chase. There's also more references to Remembrance and the development of Steven's theory of the 'Doctor syndrome', the journalist's attempt to explain how the same man can turn up with different faces at different time periods, always in the middle of some crisis or disaster.

'The C-Day fiasco' is Stevens' interpretation of events seen in The War Machines.

'The Doctor syndrome: other examples' notes the appearance of the Seventh Doctor and Ace in Northumbria during World War II (The Curse of Fenric) \x96 some twenty years before the Shoreditch Incident. The same Doctor was also seen at a holiday camp in South Wales (Delta and the Bannermen). Stevens notes the sighting of a man he calls the Gatwick Doctor (actually the Second Doctor, as seen in The Faceless Ones) on the same day the First Doctor was coping with The War Machines elsewhere in Greater London.

The journalist traces the formation of UNIT to another appearance of the Gatwick Doctor, when Central London was evacuated due to a deadly fog (The Web of Fear).

'First blood' refers to the events of The Invasion and suggests the Gatwick Doctor had some involvement in the death of Tobias Vaughn. Stevens suggests the Doctor is a codename used by various agents provocateur, the only credible way he can explain the presence of all of these Doctors across so many decades.

One of the earliest tasks I set myself during the development of Who Killed Kennedy was to trace all of the 20th Century appearances of the Doctor on Earth, to see how they could be incorporated into the book. There proved to be only a handful from before the Second World War and none that were helpful to the narrative. I saw no point in trying to squeeze in a gratuitous reference to Horror of Fang Rock, especially since only the TARDIS crew survived to bear witness to what had happened. Unsurprisingly, most of the Doctor's adventures on Earth are contemporary to when the show was being made, so they are predominantly clustered between 1963 and 1989.

(I also contemplated incorporating all the New Adventures that fit this period as well, before deciding against that. A few references to the NAs crept in, but I think leaving them out was the right decision in retrospect. Keeping to the core of Doctor Who, the original TV tales, kept the fanwank elements purer rather than puerile.)

Five: February 1970

The bulk of continuity references in this chapter revolve around Inferno. Stevens meets Petra Williams at Imperial University in London's South Kensingston area. This was where my wife Alison got her degree and thus is an area I knew well enough to set a sequence there. The journalist encounters brash Australian Greg Sutton and they go for a drink in a nearby pub, the Queen's Arms. My wife's choir used to rehearse at Imperial on Sunday evenings and then go to that pub afterwards for a pint, so I've warmed the benches inside the Queen's Arms many times.

Re-reading this chapter, I enjoy Stevens' description of Inferno's plot as a 'science fiction potboiler'. I think he's being a bit harsh on a gripping yarn, but if you take the events of almost any Doctor Who story and boil them down to a few sentences they do sound rather fanciful. During research for Who Killed Kennedy I was bemused and amazed by some of the Pertwee era stories. The Master's convoluted plan in The Mind of Evil, for example, beggars belief.

Stevens is summoned to meet the editor of The Daily Chronicle, whose description is based on the New Zealand Herald's editor at the time I was working for that paper. I spent more than two years at the Herald but only spoke to the editor three times. He seemed nicer than the Chronicle's boss.

At the start of Part One Stevens is a Fleet Street hack whose motto is never let the facts get in the way of a good story. By the end of Part One he turns down fifty thousand pounds to keep quiet, quitting his secure job in pursuit of the Doctor and UNIT. His pregnant wife walks out on him after being sent evidence of Stevens' one-night stand. But despite all of this, the ending is upbeat. Stevens has rediscovered a little of his soul, he's intent of finding the truth and redeeming himself. If this were a three act screenplay, this is the end of Act One.

Part Two: Mastermind

The subtitle for this section was obvious. Part One essentially was all about Season Seven, so Part Two was all about Season Eight in which Roger Delgado's portrayal of the Master dominates Doctor Who. In fact the Master has already made several appearances in Who Killed Kennedy despite the fact that Terror of the Autons would seem to suggest he has just arrived on Earth for the first time. But The Mind of Evil suggests the Master has been around for months, having had time to treat more than a hundred patients with his Keller Machine.

Six: Good Friday 1970

Virgin Publishing editor Rebecca 'Bex' Levene felt Who Killed Kennedy needed something to break up the constant first person narrative from Stevens. Between us we concocted the idea of dropping in letters from a UNIT soldier, Private Francis Cleary. These became a useful way of introducing exposition, giving an alternate point of view on events and illustrating Cleary's mental collapse.

Cleary's first letter makes mention of Sergeant Benton, a character that first appeared in The Invasion and became a UNIT regular during The Ambassadors of Death. Cleary also refers to real world current events like the Vietnam War (something mostly went unmentioned in Doctor Who on TV) and the Asian Flu. These were attempts to ground Who Killed Kennedy in the reality of its times.

Seven: April 1970

Stevens is now a freelance journalist and starts writing for Metropolitan, a fictional magazine first mentioned on screen during Planet of the Spiders. Sarah Jane Smith would also contribute to the title. Stevens goes for a literary lunch at Simpson's in Piccadilly, a venerable department store in central London. Since Who Killed Kennedy was published Simpson's closed down and the building is now a branch of the booksellers Waterstones.

Stevens negotiates a deal to write a book speculating what would have happened if JFK had lived. This was a quick way of reminding readers about the link to Kennedy, as I was conscious the assassination was not being integrated with the rest of Who Killed Kennedy. Virgin were very jumpy about my making mention of US Senator Edward 'Teddy' Kennedy and the incident at Chappaquiddick, because that Kennedy was still alive and could sue if we libelled him.

The chapter ends with some references to events from Terror of the Autons. Part of my research for Who Killed Kennedy was examining not just what happened in various TV Doctor Who stories, but also assessing what impact those events had on the world at large. The effects from Terror of the Autons were surprisingly limited; just a few dead scientists, an increase in asthma attacks and some plastic daffodils being recalled \x96 hardly the stuff of apocalypse.

Eight: April 1970

Another letter home from Cleary. He makes mention of Captain Yates, who first appeared on screen during Terror of the Autons.

Nine: July-November 1970

Like BBC3, this chapter borrows The Passing Parade from The Daemons. TV reporter Alex MacIntosh was a real life BBC television reporter who made an on-screen appearance in Day of the Daleks. He got lifted and transplanted into Who Killed Kennedy as well. The Passing Parade's producer, Vincent Mortimer, is based on an old school friend of mine. I've recycled his name in several other fictional projects, as finding appropriate names for characters is always a tiresome job. In a recent Judge Dredd novel I borrowed names from actors in the film Escape to Victory. For my Fifth Doctor and Nyssa novel Empire of Death (published March 2004, order your copy now), I got character names from a war memorial at New Lanark where much of the book is set.

Much of the chapter is devoted to the events seen in The Mind of Evil. Stevens blags his way into the demonstration of the Keller Machine at Stangmoor Prison and gets his first sighting of the Third Doctor. Much of the dialogue in the middle of this chapter is cheekily lifted from the TV story. If you own a copy of The Mind of Evil, see if you can spot which of the observers is Stevens.

Ten: November 1970

Another letter home from Private Cleary. The soldier is in shock after shooting a killing a rioter during The Mind of Evil. This is the first step towards his mental collapse.

Eleven: December 1970

Stevens makes a public appeal for information about the Glasshouse, a mysterious institution that is apparently involved with mind control experiments. He gets crank calls from members of the public, including a woman attacked by a plastic daffodil (a reference to Terror of the Autons). Another caller complains about propaganda against deadly nightshade and says the plant isn't deadly at all in small doses. He is based on a man who accosted me in Taranaki when I was a cadet reporter to complain about an article on deadly nightshade. Unsurprisingly, we didn't do anything about it.

Stevens is approached by Dorothea 'Dodo' Chaplet, who wants to talk about her experiences in the Glasshouse. They meet in a caf\xE9 near Clapham Junction. I used to go through Clapham Junction on my way to work when I was writing Who Killed Kennedy, but the caf\xE9 was based on a greasy spoon in Fulham Broadway round the corner from my previous flat.

What happens to Dodo is probably one of the more controversial aspects of Who Killed Kennedy. She was a late addition to the cast of the cast and was originally only going to appear in this chapter, passing on information to Stevens. But once she appeared on the page Dodo wanted to stick around. It's a strange experience when a character takes charge of their own destiny while you're writing and Dodo was the first time this had happened to me.

During research for Who Killed Kennedy I watched The War Machines and was amazed at the off-hand way in which Dodo was discarded from the show. She gets her brain scrambled by WOTAN and is sent to the country to recover. The Doctor leaves and we never see her again, goodbye Dodo! I felt the character was ripe for resurrection, having been given such short shrift by the TV show. So I suggested she had not recovered after a few weeks in the Home Countries but was left permanently scarred by her experiences.

When Stevens first meets Dodo she is staying in a halfway house for the homeless. She talks about having flashbacks to events she could not have witnessed, events Doctor Who fans will probably recognise from the TV stories The Gunfighters, The Ark and The Celestial Toymaker. Dodo says she suffers blackouts and memory losses, tracing these all back to the events of C-Day \x96 July 16, 1966. Since then she hospitalised several times, given electric shock therapy and almost raped, Dodo only escaping the sexual assault by accidentally killing her attacker. Not the happiest of post-TARDIS lives\x85

Dodo moves in with Stevens and begins recovering from her years of ordeal. The pair eventually become lovers, a sequence of events that invented themselves as I was writing the book. I never intended Dodo to be such a significant character but she started taking charge, so I let her.

Twelve: December 1970

Another letter home from Private Cleary, this one heavily censored by the authorities to delete references to Nuton Power Complex. The letter indicates Cleary was assigned to guard the facility during The Claws of Axos and had an almost fatal encounter with the alien invaders.

Thirteen: January-March 1971

Stevens continues his investigations into the workings of UNIT, as preparation for writing an expose in book form. He meets with a source within the intelligence community called Cassandra, a character inspired by the infamous Washington source Deep Throat who helped reporter Bob Woodward investigate the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

Stevens uses the alias Whiti for his dealings with Cassandra. Whiti was a Maori nickname I acquired while on a journalism course at ATI (now the Auckland University of Technology). Since Stevens was effectively my alter ego in the novel, he got to share my nickname.

Who Killed Kennedy did its best to blend fiction with reality, attributing the troubles of the 1970s Heath Government in Britain to the consequences of TV tales like The Mind of Evil. The novel required research into the television continuity as well as real life contemporary events, a lot of extra effort.

It was hard to resist the temptation to include extraneous facts simply because I had spent the time uncovering them during research.

Cassandra tells Stevens about the fate of Whitehall buffoon Horatio Chinn - exactly the sort of thing the TV series never mentioned. Who Killed Kennedy was as much about the consequences and ripples caused by the actions of the Doctor and UNIT as it was about those actions.

In late February Stevens decides to stop researching and start writing his tome. Research can be one of the most interesting aspects of a novel, but it can easily overwhelm the story. There comes a time when you have to bite the bullet and start telling your own tale.

The journalist's flat is burgled by unknown intruders but they fail to find the bulk of his notes, hidden in a floor-safe. Stevens acquired the safe from an old pawnbroker called Saul, a character named after a mysterious accountant I used in the early 1990s. Saul would never meet a client face to face, he only dealt with people by phone or post, but he saved me thousands of pounds so I was willing to forgive this behavioural quirk. I wonder what happened to Saul?

Stevens meets Professor Elizabeth Shaw and recognises her as the woman with Lethbridge-Stewart during Spearhead from Space (see Who Killed Kennedy Chapter One). Shaw smokes a pipe, a habit introduced in BBV's unofficial videos like The Zero Imperative. The pipe was suggested by Caroline John, the actress who played Liz Shaw in Season Seven on television.

The journalist is subsequently accosted by a blond man, a character borrowed from Gary Russell's novel The Scales of Injustice.

Stevens falls in love with Dodo, a relationship with tragic consequences. He also makes the first mention of Victor Magister - an alias used by the Master in The D\xE6mons. That story features in the next chapter.

Fourteen: May 1971

This chapter begins with Stevens and Dodo watching events from The D\xE6mons as they were broadcast on BBC3. Who Killed Kennedy suggests some British newspapers would draw comparisons between what happened at Devil's End and the infamous radio version of The War of the Worlds broadcast on Halloween in 1938 that fooled many listeners across America. Orchestrated by actor Orson Welles, the broadcast was featured in an Eighth Doctor audio released by Big Finish in 2002, Invaders from Mars by Mark Gatiss.

Stevens calls on his old friend at the BBC Vincent Mortimer to get a private replay of what happened at Devil's End. In the print edition of Who Killed Kennedy, the journalist drives to White City in West London and then walks to Broadcast House to see the footage - a blunder noted by several reviewers.

Stevens should, of course, be walking to Television Centre where BBC TV is still based. BBC Radio is at Broadcast House near Oxford Circus - several miles and quite a stroll away from White City.

Before Stevens can hurry to Devil's End he discovers the crisis there is already over and a suspect has been captured, a terrorist called Victor Magister. The journalist describes a photograph of the Master to a satanic image lifted from a Dennis Wheatley novel. Wheatley was a bestselling author specialising in sex and occult romances such as The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil, a Daughter - both subsequently adapted for cinemas by Hammer Films. His books are estimated to have sold 45 million copies.

Looking back it seems quite an adroit swerve to have Stevens kept at arm's length from The D\xE6mons. It would strain credibility if the journalist was able to interact directly with the events of every TV story from the Pertwee era.

Fifteen: May 1971

Another letter home from Francis Cleary. The soldier has suffered a mental collapse after being involved with the events of The D\xE6mons. With the exception of Captain Yates, few UNIT soldiers ever showed the effects of the mind-boggling scenes and horrors to which they were exposed. The slow degradation of Cleary helped broaden the scope of Who Killed Kennedy and give it an impact greater than just Stevens' story alone would have had.

Sixteen: June-July 1971

As research for Who Killed Kennedy I watched lots of Path\xE9 newsreel footage from the appropriate years. Someone had kindly issued these on video earlier in the 1990s and they proved an invaluable resource for providing background colour. The idea of a Cod War with Iceland and the Master being tried by media both fighting for headlines seemed a delicious contrast to me.

Stevens gets himself invited on The Passing Parade to debate the fate of Victor Magister. Among the other guests are a fictional editor, a fictional civil servant based on a friend of my wife (I won\x92t name him to spare my own blushes) and the very real Malcolm Muggeridge. For the life of me I\x92ve got no recollection how Muggeridge ended up in this chapter. In retrospect he seems an odd inclusion.

Anyway, Stevens starts ranting about C19, UNIT and Government conspiracies. The TV show is pulled off air and Stevens is berated by his contact Cassandra. The journalist realises he may have gone to far and put Dodo\x92s life in danger as well as his own. He rushes home but all seems well - until their house is firebombed. Stevens has a confrontation with the blond man from Gary Russell\x92s novel Scales of Injustice. The blond man takes an old service revolver Stevens had bought to protect himself and Dodo. The provenance and movement of this handgun creates some confusion in subsequent chapters, so keep an eye out for it.

The journalist goes to New Scotland Yard to file a complaint about the firebombing and attempted murder (why doesn\x92t he just go to the local cop shop, I wonder? He lives in Wandsworth, not St James Park). Instead he gets beaten up and abducted. The identity of the person who taunts Stevens in the final sentences of the chapter will be revealed next time!

Seventeen: 16 June 1971

Mike Yates sends a letter to Francis Cleary's mother to notify her about the soldier's mental breakdown. I borrowed Siobhan Cleary's first name from an Irish woman at the company where I was working when writing Who Killed Kennedy, Siobhan Geraghty. Yates alludes to Cleary being sent to the Glasshouse, but does not name the institution.

Eighteen: Dates unknown, 1971

As he regains consciousness in the Glasshouse, Stevens has a blurry dream premonition of visiting Dallas on the day JFK is assassinated, although he does not recognise it as such. As I approached the final chapters of Who Killed Kennedy, I was aware that the Kennedy elements of the plot were hardly integrated with the rest of the narrative. So from this point onwards I tried my best to sow the seeds of what was to come, hoping it would smooth over the gaps. In retrospect, it wasn't that successful.

It's a horrible feeling to be writing a novel and knowing in your gut that something is going wrong. You can't easily identify the problem; it's more of a subconscious nagging doubt. When a book is flying, you don't want to stop. When it's going off the rails, starting again the next day is painful beyond belief. I suffered from this a little at the end of Who Killed Kennedy. I felt the Kennedy sequence ill fit the rest of the narrative, but I was committed to including it.

Anyway, Stevens comes face to face with the Master, the director of the Glasshouse. There's a lovely mistake in the published edition of Who Killed Kennedy on page 200, where the Master's "words were smoothing, and his tone friendly and charismatic." The Master's words are meant to be soothing - not smoothing!

The journalist realises the Master has been manipulating him almost from the start of the book, but the full implications of this are still beyond his grasp for the moment. Soon after Stevens meets Cleary, finally bringing together these two narrative strands on page 203 of the novel. Cleary has a Time Ring, a plot device that made its first and only appearance in Genesis of the Daleks (and Revenge of the Cybermen). It seems the Master either stole a Time Ring from Gallifrey or made a replica for Cleary's use. At this point in the story the Time Ring is not identified as such, since Stevens has no way of knowing its function or name. I wonder how many readers recognised it when they first read Who Killed Kennedy?

When Stevens first wakes up in the Glasshouse, he is attended by a nurse with a gun holstered behind her back. But when Stevens and Cleary begin their escape bid by overwhelming the nurse, she has no gun. Either the Master took away her gun to enable Stevens and Cleary to escape or else I forgot she had been armed seven pages earlier. It's probably the latter, if I'm honest, and tends to indicate there was a gap between those two sequences being written.

Stevens and Cleary escape the Glasshouse and discover they are near Evesham, some distance from London. That location and the description of the Glasshouse exterior are based on a country house hotel I visited in 1995 for a sales and marketing conference. A very nice part of England it was too.

Stevens and Cleary get a train back to London, the soldier musing about travelling back in time on a mission. There's some confusion over money here. Cleary seems to buy their train tickets, yet Stevens goes off to the buffet car on his own. The journalist has enough money to make several phone calls when they reach Paddington, but Cleary pays for their taxi to Wandsworth Common. Oh well.

Stevens is briefly reunited with Dodo, who says she has a surprise for him. But the journalist rushes away with Cleary to lead a live TV investigation into the Glasshouse, aided by Vincent Mortimer and BBC3. Stevens' life is about to go from bad to very much worse...

Nineteen: August 1971

Stevens returns to the Glasshouse as part of a live BBC3 TV show. The director of the outside broadcast unit, Bill Jeffs, gets his surname from a friend I had at school, Michael Jeffs. We both loved Doctor Who and used to swap Target adaptations, grateful to have someone of a like mind. Michael is now general manager of a massive financial company in Auckland.

The Glasshouse has been emptied out since the journalist escaped with Cleary earlier that day. The private from UNIT also disappears and Stevens is left to carry the blame for this \x91hoax'. He has to fight his way through a scrum of news media upon his return to London, a sequence that was inspired by my experiences as a reporter for the New Zealand Herald during the infamous Peter Plumley-Walker murder case in 1989. A dominatrix and her boyfriend were accused of murdering a client. Their trial was a media circus of levels previous unseen in New Zealand. Every day you would emerge from the courthouse to be blinded by the TV camera lights and photographic flashes going off. I was lucky; my associates in the news media didn't want to talk to me. I can't imagine what it must be like to suffer such total scrutiny. Anyway, Stevens gets a taste of that scrutiny, transformed from being the reporter to being the story.

He returns home to discover his lover Dodo has been murdered. I may be wrong, but I think Who Killed Kennedy was the first novel to kill off a former companion. I wasn't sure I could get away with it, but as Who Killed Kennedy wasn't part of the regular New or Missing Adventures published by Virgin it seemed exempt from some the rules that it faced. Nearly a decade later, killing former members of the TARDIS crew is old hat and turns up all the time in books like Bullet Time, Heritage and Loving the Alien. Back in 1996 this was pushing the envelope. I felt it gave the reader of Who Killed Kennedy a serious jolt - if a former companion like Dodo could be killed off in this book, then anything was possible.

On screen Dodo had been one of the least developed companions, although few of the Hartnell era TARDIS team were ever given more than one or two dimensions. Anyway, Dodo was something of a blank slate and book authors were not afraid to make her suffer. Daniel O'Mahony had her engaging in a fairly steamy relationship and contracting an illness interpreted by some as a form of space herpes during The Man in the Velvet Mask. Who Killed Kennedy went even further, killing her with three bullets. I always felt I should apologise to Jackie Lane, the actress who played Dodo on screen, but since I've never met her that hasn't happened yet!

For those of you keeping track of the disappearing revolver, Stevens' gun reappears at the crime scene, having been left there by Dodo's killer. It's taken as evidence by the police. The cops tell a still shocked Stevens that Dodo was pregnant - something she had been hinting about but never got the chance to tell the journalist. For the second time Stevens is denied the chance to be a father to his offspring, here by murder. Babies and pregnancy are also a repeated motif of my forthcoming Fifth Doctor and Nyssa novel Empire of Death. One question - how did the police know Dodo was pregnant? I don't think this is answered in the text of Who Killed Kennedy, although there are several rational explanations - a pregnancy test being found elsewhere in the house, or Dodo having told the killer about the baby whilst pleading for her life and the killer passing this information on somehow. As Stevens is being taken away he sees a young man with a lisp addressing the news media. This is a cross-reference to another of the Virgin novels, Gary Russell's The Scales of Injustice. (By a happy coincidence, while the eBook of Who Killed Kennedy has been running on this site, the BBCi Doctor Who site has announced The Scales of Injustice will be its next eBook - watch out for it.)

Stevens is eventually cleared of Dodo's murder and set free, but his life and reputation have been scarred by the experience. The journalist believes it was Cleary who murdered Dodo, under the Master's control. Stevens leaves his and Dodo's home for good, taking the abandoned Time Ring with him.

Twenty: 7 September 1971

The final Cleary letter, dropping more hints about the denouement of the novel.

Twenty-One: September 1971

Stevens flees to Brighton and adopts the name Gartside, borrowed from the lead singer of top 1980s pop combo Scritti Politti. The journalist has Dodo buried, on a hillside overlooking the sea.

I'd never been to Brighton when I wrote that, so I've no idea if there is a cemetery near the town on such a hillside. While grieving on a wooden bench, Stevens is visited by a short and slightly dishevelled man with a sadness about his face. He says a few brief words of comfort to the journalist before placing a white rose on Dodo's grave. This is a cameo appearance by the Doctor, but the description leaves it open to the reader's interpretation of which Doctor it is. He speaks about death being the start of a new adventure, hinting that he is the Seventh Doctor, but I prefer to think of him as the Second Doctor, come to pay his last respects to Dodo.

Stevens mourns while the world is tearing itself apart with an international crisis. A peace conference is to be held in Britain, hosted by Sir Reginald Styles at Auderly House. In other words, it's the preamble to Day of the Daleks. Stevens sees the Brigadier being briefly interviewed about security precautions at the conference, for which UNIT will be responsible. The journalist determines to expose the truth about UNIT as he sees it, so Dodo has not died in vain. He returns to London and buys a new revolver from a gangland contact in the East End. Presumably the police still have his revolver as evidence for Dodo's murder, should someone ever be brought to trial for the crime. Stevens never explicitly states why he needs a revolver, but considering what he's been through in recent chapters I can't say I blame him for wanting it.

The journalist mentions the trial and imprisonment of Victor Magister, using events from Malcolm Hulke's adaptation of his scripts for The Sea Devils.

Stevens travels to Auderly House, arriving towards the end of Day of the Daleks as the Ogrons attack the peace conference. He is almost killed by the Ogrons (not that he knows their name or species at the time) but is saved by - of all people - the Doctor. Afterwards Stevens bumps into Sergeant Benton and is taken to see the Brigadier. Lethbridge-Stewart persuades the journalist that the Master's infiltration of C19 is nothing to do with UNIT. He even shows Stevens the body of an Ogron, proving beyond doubt that aliens were behind the attack on the peace conference. Stevens realises he has wrong about almost everything, from start to finish. He has stood on the sidelines, reporting what others were doing rather than doing something himself. I quit daily newspaper journalism for similar reasons (not about aliens and my conspiracy theories being proved wrong, the latter reason - wanting to do things rather than just report them).

Reading it back, I love the short scene with the Brigadier. Hopefully I'll get the chance to write a whole novel featuring Lethbridge-Stewart one day.

Anyway, Stevens decides to commit suicide. This is where the confusion about multiple revolvers must have come from. My original draft supplied to Virgin featured the following paragraph:

I slumped onto my bed and felt something in my jacket pocket jab into my side. I reached into the pocket and pulled out my revolver. The weapon I had bought to protect myself and Dodo, which instead was used to murder her and frame me. Another joke at my expense, another error.

Of course, Stevens no longer has that first revolver - the police still have it. If the journalist did still have it, he would now be carrying two guns. Virgin spotted this and cut the last two sentences quoted.

Before Stevens can pull the trigger this chapter ends, as does Part Two of Who Killed Kennedy. Just the finale to come!

Twenty-Two: 14 September 1971

Deciding how to end Who Killed Kennedy was always a problem. Even when the Kennedy assassination was adopted as the setting for the book's finale, finding a credible way to weave that into the narrative was challenging. To be honest, I don't believe I succeeded. This chapter is the awkward transition from a British conspiracy involving UNIT to the murder of a US president nearly a decade earlier.

Stevens gets a message to call the Doctor, who rattles off a bunch of technobabble and sends the journalist back through time to prevent a plan hatched by the Master involving Private Cleary. 'You can't expect me to actually believe any of what you're saying,' Stevens says repeatedly. I was once given a list of terms coined by science fiction writers about recurring clich\xE9s of the genre, called something like the Turkey City Lexicon. Among these clich\xE9s is characters who mouth the thoughts of the writers; often without the author realising it is happening. The phenomenon is known as 'Signal From Fred' and in this chapter Stevens keeps trying to give me a Signal From Fred. Alas, I wasn't paying attention. Such is life.

During the phone conversation the Doctor says Dodo died before her time. Looking back on Who Killed Kennedy now, if the Kennedy element had not been included, then the Doctor's line of dialogue might have provided another ending. Stevens could have used the Time Ring to travel back to Dodo's murder and saved her. Cleary would have been present and perhaps even the Master. During early discussions for Who Killed Kennedy, Virgin editor Rebecca 'Bex' Levene and I batted around many ideas for how to finish the book. Among them was explaining how the Delgado Master had to regenerate into another incarnation. All that could have been worked around the attempt to murder Dodo. At least it would have kept the finale of the book within its own milieu, rather than suddenly jerking the reader across the Atlantic to Dallas of 1963.

The Master's plot involving JFK is pretty hard to fathom. Does he want the president killed? Or is he trying to pervert the course of history by averting JFK's assassination? I got into the same sort of muddle in The Domino Effect, an Eight Doctor novel I wrote that was published in 2003. I didn't believe my own ending and, as a result, the book comes unstuck at the finish - just when it should be coming together. As a writer you always hope to progress, to learn from your mistakes. But some mistakes keep coming back to haunt you\x85

The Doctor ponders out loud whether free will is or isn't an illusion - a reference back to Inferno, if I recall correctly.

Twenty-Three: 22 November 1963

Stevens travels through time and space to the Dealey Plaza and the scene of JFK's assassination. I read more than a dozen weighty tomes about the events of that day, watched numerous documentaries and researched the hell of the location. I even contemplated flying to Dallas for 24 hours just so I could visit the scene for myself, but decided Virgin wasn't paying me enough to justify such a trip.

The Master pops up, appearing as Black Umbrella Man - a mysterious figure seen in photos from Dealey Plaza. He mocks Stevens with a catchphrase from the TV quiz show Mastermind ('I'm sorry, I'll have to hurry you') and the inevitable expression in a book like this ('dead as a Dodo'). In the Who Killed Kennedy version of history, Lee Harvey Oswald is an unlucky bystander who catches Cleary preparing to shoot JFK. Stevens is given the dilemma of shooting the president and preserving history, or shooting the Master. He chooses to kill the Master but misses. Someone else assassinates JFK, preserving history, but their identity remains secret - for the moment...

Twenty-Four: 14 September 1971

Stevens returns to his present, taking Cleary with him. But the soldier is brain damaged by the journey back and hospitalised. The Doctor thanks the journalist and decides it is time to check whether the Master is on his private prison island - thus setting in motion the events of The Sea Devils. But the Doctor leaves Stevens completely in the lurch, with no job, no reputation, no lover and no future.

The journalist is a broken man, weighed down by a terrible secret. A typical happy ending for a David Bishop book!

Epilogue: January 1996

Stevens details what has happened in the intervening quarter of a century. He is reconciled with his son William, who is now grown up and a partner in a publishing law firm. William was originally called Grant but Virgin thought that name was too common for the grandson of landed gentry, no doubt influenced by the character of Grant Mitchell, then a balding bruiser on BBC soap Eastenders.

Cleary never recovers from his ordeal but his hospital bills are funded from an account at Coutts Bank in the name of R J Smith. The Doctor set up this account during the New Adventure Birthright.

Lethbridge-Stewart retires to teach mathematics at a minor public school, as seen in Mawdryn Undead. Stevens becomes a journalism tutor. His favourite students are Sarah Jane (Smith, a companion of the Third and Fourth Doctors) and Ruby (Duvall, a character in the New Adventure Iceberg). Rather a crass piece of continuity shoe-horning there, something now usually known as \x91fanwank'.

Who Killed Kennedy ends with Stevens revealing he saw an older version of himself assassinate JFK in 1963. The journalist finishes his book, all set to travel back in time and fulfil this destiny. It's left open whether Stevens will ever return from that mission. When Virgin lost its licence to published original Doctor Who fiction, Stevens was one of the characters listed as being available for use by prospective authors for the Doctor-less New Adventures Starring Bernice. Unsurprisingly, I don't think anyone took up that opportunity!

Some final thoughts

My original plan was for to write a new version of Who Killed Kennedy to appear online with the published novel. The alternate tale would strip out all the JFK elements and present a different finale. In the end I have put that plan to one side for now. Pressures of work from my career as a freelance writer mean I don't have the time or energy to tackle such a task - especially without any prospect of payment to fund such an endeavour.

Also, I haven't had the jolt of inspiration that's so necessary for creating fiction. Writing stories just for the money is a hollow, hateful task in my experience and I'd rather not rewrite Who Killed Kennedy's ending, flawed though it may be, and make matters worse. So, for now, I've decided to let sleeping dogs lie - and any other clich\xE9s.

There were vague plans for a sequel of some sort if Who Killed Kennedy was a success. The book did well, got better than average reviews and earned me several royalty cheques. Alas, within a few months of Who Killed Kennedy's publication Virgin learned it had lost the Who licence and the prospects for any more novels outside the New and Missing Adventures ranges became moot. Certainly I had done the research for all Earth-based stories set after Day of the Daleks, the point in Who continuity where Who Killed Kennedy effectively stops. TV tales like The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Robot and Terror of the Zygons would have provided plenty of grist for the story mill. But it was not to be.

In the Summer of 2002 I was stricken with an idea for a way of reviving the Who Killed Kennedy approach to Who continuity, but with a fresh approach of its own. Instead of a single protagonist involved with the events of a dozen different TV adventures, the novel would follow the effects of a single story on multiple protagonists in a single day. Magnolia crossed with 24 in the Who universe, if you like. I started doing research, wrote up a short pitch called Crossing The Rubicon and submitted it. The idea was well received but blown out of the water by problems with rights clearances. So, for now, the thematically linked sequel - definitely not to be called I Still Know Who Killed Kennedy - remains on hold.