Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks
In Brief: 1920s Chicago, The Doctor and Ace join forces with Al Capone to fight vampires. Meanwhile Benny investigates a rustic planet in the side-universe of E-Space and meets a mysterious Time Lady...
Once upon a time having a Doctor Who story that mixed historical figures and monsters would have seemed bizarre and somewhat silly (with 1985's "Timelash" H.G.Wells/Aliens combo being the definitive example of why it's "a bad idea"). Of course now we live in a world where we've had the Doctor meet Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie *and* Winston Churchill so a plot mixing Al Capone and vampires seems more like modern Who than it did back in 1994. However that's about as close "modern" as anything in Blood Harvest comes since as a book written by Terrance "I created the Time Lords" Dicks things are decidedly retro. The Great Vampire, Time Lords, Romana and E-Space are all involved in the story, which means that this is definitely a book for someone who knows at least a little about Doctor Who history (you really need to have at least seen "State of Decay" and "The Five Doctors" to get much of what is going on).
Another big problem is that none of the non-regular characters (or even the plot itself) ends up being anything more than clichés ("You Dirty Rat"-spewing gangsters in Chicago and standard terrified villagers on the Vampire Planet in E-Space). Well except for Romana, but then it's hard to screw up writing Romana. However despite the novel being not very good, Mr.Dicks, with his decades of writing experience, knows how to craft a real page-turner. Even though the result isn't very good you JUST HAVE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT (so the Doctor Who equivalent of Dan Brown perhaps). Another issue is that everything *really* falls apart at the end, with rather than the plot-lines based in Chicago and E-Space coming together everybody suddenly ends up on Gallifrey for a big non-climax/run-around.
But despite these annoyances the book is very enjoyable, but really as a guilty pleasure. Terrance really knows how to keep a reader's attention even if he's a bit on auto-pilot. Not much more to say really.
Addendum:
Somewhat clunkily Blood Harvest fits in with the first of the Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures books which centred around previous Doctors by having a couple of minor characters appear in both books. While I did read several of the MAs back in the day I was never overly impressed with them and gave up after a while. However they sold well enough that for the next 11 years there was a "Previous Doctor" book available every month or two (ironically ending just after the show came back in 2005 with a 7th-Doctor & Ace story).
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