Before we go any further I better put my hand up and admit a small conflict of interest here. The editor and several of the writers in Big Finish’s latest Bernice Summerfield anthology, Secret Histories have written for Obverse and are friends of mine. I even get a couple of thank yous in the acknowledgments. With that in mind, you would be forgiven for assuming a lesser man might be nice and say good things about the book even if it were rubbish.
Have no fear, though – as one of the authors in this book once said of me, there’s no need to worry I’m just being polite, because I’m really quite rude and unpleasant. So I’ll mention if anything’s a bit crappy, I promise.
First things first, then: the framing sequence. I do like the framing, eh, frame which links together Benny story collections more than the often tenuous thematic links which generally bound together the Big Finish Short Trips collections. Editor Mark Clapham’s excuse for telling a few stories is no better or worse in concept than any other one, and he has a nice turn of phrase which makes the segments in between stories proper always readable. At times the reasons given for telling any one specific story seem strained to the point of snapping but any collection with a reasonable range of stories will inevitably suffer from this. Perhaps something like the Richard Salter-edited ‘Transmissions’ Short Trips book where a theme is glued together by a framing sequence is the best way to go, but in the case of Secret Histories, a couple of stories do feel as though they’ve been dropped into the uber-narratibe for very little reason.
Never mind that, though. This is a book full of arresting imagery – flocks of flying alarm clocks, lasers made from flowers, a creature made of rainbows – and sparkling writing (‘that’s fairly atypical behaviour, even for the most persistent of white goods’ being a particular favourite line). It feels a bit short in terms of page count, it has to be said, but the decision to have only nine stories, each a little longer than the more common Big Finish short story, pays off with a succession of thoughtful, intelligent stories.
In passing, it’s good to see Big Finish continuining to experiment with the format of their Benny anthologies in a way they never did with Doctor Who (possibly because the BBC wouldn’t let them, of course). After the successful ‘three novellas in one’ collections which I liked a lot, Clapham’s preference for fewer but longer stories is another success and one I hope Big FInish try again in the future.
Moving on to a quick run through of the stories themselves, Lance Parkin turns in his usual solid and workmanlike story to kick things off with “A Game of Soldiers”. There’s nothing here to astonish or astound, but Parkin rarely turns in a poor short story and this is as professional a tale as ever. He knows how to write Benny, and if he does lean on ‘hey look – she likes a drink’ rather more than I hoped it’s an issue many writers have with Ms Summerfield. It’s perhaps a litte bit Benny by Numbers, but there are worse things to read.
Paul Farnsworth, on the other hand, pops up next with a story that starts like a suitcase full of spanners. Living household appliances have of course already made appearances in Paul Magrs’ Doctor Who and Iris Wildthyme stories, but filling an entire jungle with evolved kitchenware works fantastically well here. I guessed what was going to happen very early on, but these aren’t mystery stories after all, and more importantly I laughed out loud several times at this story. I’d never heard of Farnsworth before, but all in all was mightily impressed by ‘Cooker Island’.
Jim Smith’s ‘A Gallery of Pigeons’ has a far more traditional setting and is a welcome return for the author to the era of Mycroft Holmes which he’s previously explored in the Benny audio, ‘The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel’. I marginally prefered the audio to this prose effort, but it’s a close run thing and in any case that’s no particular put-down as the audio was really excellent. Smith is obviously comfortable with this style of writing and with the period in general, the story makes an unusual-for-Benny use of time travel and the plot does for once slot very neatly in with the framing arc. Another solid effort.
Eddie Robson’s ‘The Firing Squad’ is probably my favourite story in the collection. As with all these stories it’s a little longer than is the norm in a Big Finish collection and Robson makes good use of the extra space to craft a beautifully layered tale, which manages to shed some light on Adrian’s thoughts and motivations while still remembering to provide an engaging story.
‘You Shouldn’t Have’ by Cody Schell is exactly what you expect to get, given the author’s previous work. A distinctive voice, funny, unexpected and slightly mad by turns, it’s undoubtedly the least obvious plot you could come up with for Adrian, the eight foot tall Killorian, and features a very well handled, intriguingly alien society.
Jon Dennis’ ‘Redacted’ takes a potentially grim occasion, as a military dictator sets himself up in power and people start disappearing, and turns it into a black comedy of mistaken identity. Dennis has a real knack for this sort of slightly askew humour and it shines through here.
Mark Michalowski is among my favourite writers, so it’s no surprise to find that I love ‘The Illuminated Man’. Like his earlier Benny tale, ‘Let There Be Stars’, this is another story which concentrates on someone other than Benny, and like that other story this is a strange and lovely bit of writing. For any fan of Tod Browning, the story of Dog Boy Peter living with pinheads, strongmen and other freaks in a travelling circus is bound to ring a bell, and his encounter with a haunting man with an angel’s heart is deftly and movingly done.
Richard Freeman is a crypto-zoologist for a living (how cool is that, incidentally!) and it really shows in his story. It’s a welcome sight to find a story set somewhere other than Britain or the States – Tasmania just as white Europeans first arrive – and the knowledge that the Aborigines Benny is living with will all be murdered within a generation is a sobering and effecting one. Perhaps a little too much of the story is taken up with describing legendary (as opposed to real) animals in detail and to no real narrative purpose, but for all that the ending is nicely done and the generally downbeat tone has a pleasantly elegiac feel to it.
Finally, Nick Wallace brings the collection to a conclusion with another grim story in which Benny is again alone and in danger. To say much about the story would be to give too much away, but suffice to say that it’s a fitting story with which to end the book, and for me at least occasionally reminisent of Wallace’s excellent Doctor Who novel Fear Itself.
I like the Benny books a lot and Secret Histories shouldn’t be embarassed to stand alongside the other books in the series. You can’t really ask for more than that.