Written by Terrance Dicks, based on Robert Holmes’ scripts for the 1977 TV serial.

This begins with a fantastic opening chapter that vividly captures a late Victorian audience’s experience of the theatre – the toffs in the stalls, the povs stuck at the back of the highest balcony. It sets the scene for a classic Dicks adaptation, pulling on the TV serial’s Hammer Phantom of the Opera meets Jack the Ripper vibes, with a dash of Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer. Dicks’ Doctor Tom has never been better (“He was against killing of course. But he was also against being killed“), and he nails Leela on the page: important, given he’s going to novelise every one of her episodes. “Leela gave the Doctor a look. ‘You ask only so that you can tell me.’“

Impressively, Dicks also perfectly captures the perfect double act of Jago & Litefoot. Jago’s florid language and personality contrast with Litefoot’s neatness and propriety (he’s very worried about being alone with Leela at night), and he provides some splendid backstory for the Professor: “A member of a wealthy upper-class family, he could. if he wished, have had a fashionable practice in Harley Street. But after a spell in the Army, he had deliberately chosen to come and work at a hospital in London’s East End. Here he could do real and useful work. instead of, as he put it himself, ‘dosing a lot of silly women suffering from the vapours’. Worse still, he had taken the post of police pathologist, deliberately involving himself in the crime so common in the area. His aristocratic relations had long ago given up trying to make him see reason. Litefoot went his own way, and he always would.” And even minor characters get some fleshing out, significantly including Greel’s victims who become more than just East End “unfortunates” – we hear about Teresa Hart’s job as a waitress, and the domestic affairs of Emma Buller.

Dicks also builds on the tantalising hints of future history provided by Holmes’ scripts. The Supreme Alliance was (or will be) a “league of ruthless dictators”: Findecker, Greel, the Peking Homunculus sent to assassinate the Icelandic Commissioner. “All these reflections from a history that had yet to happen flashed through the Doctor’s mind.” The result: a novelisation that stands up to the quality of its source material, and a triumph for Dicks at a point when some were writing him off as a “he said, she said” hack. Nothing could be further from the truth. Grade 1.

Next Time: Doctor Who And… The Masque of Mandragora.