Between the leaves ... Bookmarks and Keepsakes

We come back to bookmarks. We leave them, sometimes in the heat of the moment, between chapters, as the bus arrives at our stop. Later, our fingers search for the familiar touch. Hardly think about it, but recognition: we're back. And perhaps it's more than a day later, perhaps several years, on a different bus in another town, and the bookmark brings us back to that moment precisely.

Sometimes a bookmark is just a bookmark. Look at that one from Skoob, with a handy map on the reverse. Because I go to Skoob several times a year, that's not exactly a moment in time being pinpointed (though I think, because it was inside a Mollie Hunter, that I picked it up the day I went with Hunter's label-mate Roy Gill). That said, the Bookmongers bookmark - from Brixton - is such a thing of beauty I have it on a pinboard, not even in a book.

And then there's that Hogarthian Room of Ones Own Inc. I've never been there. In the imagination it's more splendid than Skoob and Bookmongers combined, though such a place could only exist in the imagination...

Yes, that's really what I'm talking about, today. Not my bookmarks but the ones others have left behind. Like this Glyndebourne card receipt for Ms Julia Aries, uncovered in a Mary Webb novel. I've been to Glyndebourne actually - yes, I can hardly believe it either - and it's such a strange, unreal space, and any visit you make is fixed in your memory, who you were with, what you saw, the pic-nic you had, and what you talked about in that long interval in the twilight between arias. Was Julia reading Gone to Earth that evening? Were the two associated?

Sometimes the link is very strong, like this obituary for the great silent movie star, Louise Brooks, which I found long ago in a her autobiography. Brooks had the most extraordinary life: a star at the height of the flickering firmament, muse for a German director, then snubbed by Hollywood, forgotten, believed dead, belatedly feted by ardent cinephiles.

And can't you just imagine an ardent someone trimming that obituary from the paper and slipping it in this book, with a heavy sigh?

Some associations are more obscure. Why does my copy of Carrie's War have a £10 Monopoly note between its pages? What about this photograph, tiny, which fell out of  something - bugger me, if I can remember what book it was - showing Observation Point - Grand Canyon - Vancouver, B.C.?

And tinier still, perhaps my favourite. In a Brighton charity shop, a shop for an AIDs charity, a young me hunted through the many gay-themed books on the shelf, lighting upon a small pornographic novel from the 60s entitled Young Knights by Sir Todd Ritchards (sample line: 'Then Torre knelt between the legs and taking the small jar he had nearby, opened it and reached in and withdrew a kind of lotion Todd had remembered using when polishing silver in Lyoness.') It has a lot of black and white photo illustrations, and on the opening page, 'To Tony with love Rob xxx'

Are you tantalised by what might have been left among the pages of this mucky little touchstone? Simply a bus ticket, a single, in August, for the Maidstone & Dist. Motor Services Ltd. 26 pence, I think.

And right away, I'm there on that bus - I'm travelling through Maidstone, maybe heading to Hastings, Faversham or Tenterden, and I'm carrying this book with me. I'm probably reading it on the back seat. Or am I giving it to somebody, while we're waiting at the stop, saying goodbye, trying not to make it obvious to the other passengers? It's a tiny ticket - when I was hunting it out tonight, I thought with a sinking heart that I'd lost it. It would be easy to lose - but it made it to me, and hopefully I'll keep it there...

I thought I'd write about things found in books - marking a place or a time. I found this green bookmark yesterday, made by John Paul, probably in 1991 when Street Fighter II was released and the Simpsons were surrounded by an aura of cool although nobody at my school had seen an episode.

The bookmark was in a Reader - something I should talk about on here properly, before the blog closes. I'm especially fond of Classroom Readers because they're designed to engage the imagination and then be discarded. Most of us will have read one from some reading scheme. Last year I was fascinated to find that the same woman - Sheila McCullagh - wrote most of the ones I'd heard of: the houses with red, blue or yellow gables (denoting reading fluency), the red, blue or yellow pirates, the blue, green, orange and purple Puddle Lane books, Tim and the Hidden People.

Yes, I'll talk about that another time - but here was a book that was made to be put aside, and here was the bookmark inside it, and 'street' in Street Fighter II is spelled wrong... And you wonder, don't you, where John Paul is now, what he's reading now, and what he remembers of 1991.

We come back to bookmarks... What have you found?

Killers and Queens ... Further Tales of the City, and Babycakes, by Armistead Maupin

I read the first four Tales books in my early teens. I'm clocking up three decades in June, so that's quite a while ago. There have been a lot of books under the bridge since then, so it's interesting to revisit them: it would be odd to remember them all individually after so long, let alone to have the same taste.

(Or would it? I do find it interesting how formative reading, literary taste, character and memory intermingle. Anyway...)

In my memory they're a homogenous entity, but the striking thing about coming back to Barbary Lane has been the changes and discontinuity across the series.

Discontinuity? Well, after Tales and More Tales, Further Tales suddenly leaps a year in its characters' lives, refining its tangled narrative and jettisoning a central character. The leap was only noticeable because I moved straight from one book to another - a reminder of its origin as magazine serial - but it's no subtle adjustment: More builds to a romance between X and Y, but in Further, X is gone and Y's already with Z!

Further also moves away from the entwined kiss and tell and enter a jockey shorts competition and don't tell stories of the first books, with multiple characters involved  in a thriller sprouting outrageously from a nasty episode in American history. It's a bold statement from Maupin. The series can no longer be mistaken for a sit-com waiting to happen (intriguing to read that this was once on the cards). It's a Great American Novel taking the form and flamboyance of serial and soap as it pleases.

It's a chronicle of American history, not merely of the Reagan administration but the long slow death of sixties idealism in the hearts of those who believed in it most. Jonestown represents that, bitterly, but Mouse and Brian come to articulate it more convincingly. In my blog about the first books I talked about its liberating new model families. I'd forgotten how sad these books get too.

It's intriguing to find, in what might be the Queer Canterbury Tales, a straight man's renunciation of promiscuity and his search for self given such centrality. Meanwhile, another sudden leap between Further and Babycakes brings Mouse sharply into the great 20th Century historical shift of the gay community. Once again, the jump is surprisingly abrupt, but Maupin's depiction of Mouse is so accomplished, the reader hardly cares.

Babycakes continues the move in Further Tales toward a more streamlined narrative, and Mouse's adventures in London are actually a little lacklustre, but oddly enough I think it's Maupin's best writing of the sequence so far. Mouse, Brian, Mary Ann and (at last!) Mona are so changed from their original appearances, but flawless studies, real as friends and as surprising, with Mary Ann's story particularly unravelling like a clock winding up to strike.

It was a bedtime read for the first three books, but the fourth had to come out with me. I read it on the bus, the Tube, the loo, desperate to know what happened next - because in-between the adventure (slightly hackneyed, this time), the conversations between characters were so compelling.

And I'm still reading on - here come Significant Others...

Meanwhile, all these paintings are the work of Joan Brown, one of the San Francisco figuratives, I believe - I'd never seen her work before but I wanted a SF artist, and I love these. The one at the stop has a fantastic story behind it, too...

Soft hearted ... For the love of paperbacks (a top ten)

What’s your preference, the hardback or paper- edition? You may remember me saying that, with some exceptions, I’d have the latter. I’d go further and say my fervour for books is all tied up in my love of paperbacks, the effect they’ve had on publishing, the experience of dipping into, flipping through them, riffling, sifting, thumbing and exchanging. And so, in the spirit of my last post, I thought I’d choose a top ten of them.

There are, of course, too many to choose from. Paperbacks are part of an inky pulpy boom. Where hardbacks build hierarchies, for me, paperbacks tumble them: they reprint, re-cover, they bring in the new, they foster subcultures. Paperbacks are physically redolent of readers’ affection: they crease, crack and crumble under use. They are annotated without a qualm. Paperbacks are given away, thoughtlessly, to charity shops and secondhand places, scooped up in house clearances; they and their readers and their readings, their lives, proliferate.

Proliferate even sounds like someone flicking through a yellowed paperback looking for their favourite quotation, underlined in biro.

The Face in the Frost is a wonderful example. For starters, I love everything about the front cover – and it’s a great novel too, an early work by fab children’s novelist, John Bellairs. I didn’t expect to find it anywhere, so was thrilled to get a copy via internet bookswapping website Bookmooch. Something good about this novel being unwanted in the US and winging its way over to me.

But this isn’t that copy – this is the copy I found (surprise) in a ramshackle bookshop in Hastings. How did it get there? You’ll see it has a notch taken out of it – a sign it once belonged to a Book Exchange – and the idea of that coming and going, the imprint left on it like a sailor’s tattoo, made me love it even more.

And like the pulp fantasy novel, the children’s book, for me, is paperback. Puffin, Dragon and Lion – to name a handful – led the way in democratising good literature for children, enabling it to be read more widely, with less ceremony. I had to restrict myself here: these could all be books that slipped through school library shelves or were passed from hand to hand, that kept an old classic alive or put it on the same shelf as Joan Aiken.

The book I chose was The Borrowers Afield, a favourite in any case, but I first read it in a giant omnibus which feels like a family Bible. My friend Rosie sent me this. It made me recognise the novel itself. Now I associate it, and its wonderful illustrations, directly with her - and her wonderful Borrower-eye photographs of flowers, ferns and trees.

Actually, three of these are gifts. Not that hardback books make poor presents – the reverse is true – but there is something tender and tactile about a paperback. My friend Ben sent me this copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by my favourite writer of short stories, Grace Paley. This was my introduction to her, in fact, and again I associate it with Ben, as much as I do that prior readership, which, because it’s Virago, I feel immense fondness for.

And Twelve Stories was a Christmas present from the author, in the first year of our friendship. Like most of the books in this list, it’s unostentatious – it’s slender and silvery and from a small (ish) press. But in a year that Paul seemed to be writing big characters – Brenda, Iris, Dr Who – this was a reminder of smaller, quieter stories of his, that I’d loved for years, such as the closely observed denizens of a cafe in Florence, and the story that became Exchange (both heard, ephemerally, on the radio). It was a small paperback freighted with old and new memories.

Paperbacks can be huge too, while still being more manageable and less grand than a huge hardback. Black Water is one of the books of my life, if that’s not too pretentious a term. I vividly remember buying it in Brighton on a black cloud day, sprinting through the raindrops to the coach station, and just being led, page by page, into the world of Alberto Manguel’s obsessions. It was a book that felt endless, but for once, not dauntingly. Inexhaustibly. Gloriously. I love almost every story, and I love picking it up to revisit them.

And Titus Groan! Gormenghast is at its best in paperback. They’ve brought out all those books in a giant hardback edition now, and I can’t think why, because how on Earth do you even lift it? Penguin do outsize editions sometimes, but the majority of lengthy novels just feel dense with words, heavy, peculiar. And these paperback Peakes are all part of his life story, his rediscovery, his second wind. It’s all the colours of Gormenghast: the silver, the black, the yellow-green of Peake’s own writing paper reproduced on the cover, and the butter-gold of the pages themselves.

Here’s another Penguin. I had to have two. This one is wonderful for being so much of its time. Juicy orange covers, and that cute little illustration, signalling the oddness and naturalness of Quatermass' sf horror tv being suitable for reproduction in this terribly proper paperback range. Paperback is the first shift beyond genre and hierarchy. The lists on Penguin and Faber inside covers are always fascinating, running the gamut of a reader’s potential library.

I had to include this book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It’s a book that feels slightly odd in the hands, because it’s heavy and square and slightly glossy. I love Sendak’s work, love its peculiarity, its humanity, its arty ugliness: I have another edition of Grimm illustrated by Peake and introduced by Russell Hoban, and it may seem like the oddest area of your library to duplicate, but this edition is such a perfect match, so beautiful. It’s a rare instance of real book lust for me.

The Well and Badly Loved, which might describe my paperback fixation, is like Paul’s book: new, slender, tactile, written by a friend. Well, if we’re getting detailed, the introduction is by me, so I suppose it’s extra selfishly special to me – but essentially, this is Ben Webb on the page: it’s poetic, melancholy, funny, and deeply, inconsolably personal. It reminds me of my poetry fixation – that I’m so out of the habit of now – those Faber’s and Carcanets and Bloodaxes, light as a chocolate bar, but richly, darkly, sweet or bitterly beautiful. I love it.

And finally, this little book by Anne Fadiman, a book about books, another one resembling a Dairy Milk bar, with its gorgeous pink wrapper. I remember buying it in Borders (I remember Borders! Do you?), one evening when I was a student and embarking on this strange relationship with books, and the opening essay – about marrying bookshelves – reminded me I was into books for the ‘wrong’ as well as ‘right’ reasons, for irrational reasons, books as people, things and memory boxes. I felt quite comradely with Fadiman when I read it, and I still do.

This list could go on forever, in along, beautiful, portable, touchable list. So what’s your preference – and what are your favourites?

A Pile of Puffins ... Auntie Robbo, by Ann Scott-Moncrieff

I found this on a sunny day last year in Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road, probably the bookshop most haunted by myself these days (poor things). I was faintly annoyed, to be frank, because I'd told myself I wouldn't buy any new books - I was working part time just then, and thought I should be watching my pennies, but I'd just stumbled across a whole bunch of things, including two Puffins: The Perilous Descent by Bruce Carter (an intriguing bit of old-fashioned sci-fi with irresistible pink parachutes on the front) and this.

And I knew I would love this.

I don't think I could ever resist a novel about a boy and his grandmother. Two of my all-time favourite books (The Children of Green Knowe and Roald Dahl's The Witches) have that relationship at its heart. These are books are rebellious old women, and fey young men: women who do all the talking, and boys who shut up and listen for once.

That image of the boy at the foot of his stately grandmother is potent for me. Mum's Mum, whom we called Baba (seemingly unconscious of the name's use elsewhere in Europe), Joyce was rather statuesque when I knew her, with a residual glamour. She must have made some self-deprecating joke at some point, because I told everyone at school that she was a witch, and I remember being furious when she denied it later. She was covering up, I felt. Underneath it all, I knew she was an enchantress.

Auntie Robbo opens with that image, eleven year-old Hector sitting beside Aunt Robbo (short for Robina, which to me suggests Robina Crusoe's adventures in the Girl's Own Paper), as she drinks her coffee and he eats his bread and jam. She is not his Auntie, or his Grandmother, but his Great-Grand Aunt. In their remote old house, Nethermuir, she tells him of the travels of her youth, and sometimes they go to old battlefields to improve Hector's grasp on history. He has no wish to jostle about with boys his own age, and when a couple of self-interested do-gooders try and rescue him from this dysfunctional upbringing, Hector and Auntie Robbo take off by bus at dead of night, and begin a string of wild adventures.

You may be able to tell, already, that this is a wonderful book. It's absolutely criminal that it's not better known, not even in print, really, except for a manky print on demand version with a thoroughly inadequate clip art cover. Although, speaking of inadequate covers, this is hardly Puffin's finest hour, is it? Cheaply done, you can barely make out what's going on in that picture. It can't be the era - you'd never guess this book was as old as 1941 - so can it be because it's Scottish? Did booksellers feel that English kids wouldn't 'get' it?

There's barely anything on Scott-Moncrief online, either. This was her last novel - she died in the 1940s - and I can't find out much about her first two. She seems to have been a writer for BBC Radio, and she has a great ear for comedy, and perfectly captures Auntie Robbo's mix of anarchy and stateliness:

The dining-room door was snapped open and Auntie Robbo's voice came with great finality: "I tell you the whole thing is ridiculous, quite ridiculous," and presently she swept into the drawing-room.

Auntie Robbo was at her most magnificent, flushed and excited, anger adding fire to her brown cheeks and faded eyes. She was wearing one of her grandest evening dresses: a purple taffeta one nipped in at the waist, spread out into a fan-shaped train. It was festooned with bunches of net and white rosettes and from the corsage hung two twinkling tassels of diamonds. Auntie Robbo wore this confection right regally; she loved her clothes as she loved her food.

But there are also lyrical descriptions of the coast and the woods, and even that night bus racing through the darkness. It's a vivid, delicious novel, funny and adventuous. Hector and his Auntie end up racketing about with three other orphans, getting in and out of trouble, but they all end up living life according to their own characters. I suppose the end of the 30s was the last blooming of the bohemian dream: Augustus John was still alive and the Bloomsberries were in their farmhouse. I particularly like the youngest boy discovering his passion for painting, and the novel's conclusion that greed and selfishness are the worst things in the world, especially when it pertains to people.

Has anyone else read this...?

Plain, Lonely and Laughing ... The Terribly Plain Princess, by Pamela Oldfield,

A couple of weeks ago I talked about some of the books I loved as a child. And it was only ‘some’: I got myself in a real pother, because I didn’t have just one or two crazes; over the years, I had intense obsessions with a number of books. For short periods of time, perhaps, and associated with particularly happy memories, maybe, but no less enduring for that. Weird to try and assimilate them into one narrative, one childhood of reading. Perhaps we all have these serial passions when young, and I've just clung to them – but this book of lightly ironic fairy tales was one of them.

Well, not exactly. It was a cassette (called The Lonely Mermaid), picked up in a charity shop in Brighton, I believe. When I was a boy I listened to it, put it to one side, then listened to it again, and fell in love. I listened to it repeatedly, and began writing stories in its style, which strongly recalls E Nesbit’s Fairy Tales and the Incrediblania stories of Norman Hunter (both of which I was also reading at the time). Penelope Keith read them in a wonderfully arch manner, which I can hear now, albeit in memory alone – the recording itself has proved hard to track down.

I have a very strong memory of continually rewinding the cassette, listening over and over to Side One, and one day grudgingly listening to side two, and becoming obsessed with that one too, and scorning my youthful naivety.

Some search engineering with key terms (‘lonely mermaid’ ‘soldier doll’ ‘the good life’) finally told me the cassette had been a book first, The Terribly Plain Princess, by Pamela Oldfield. That name rang a bell, because when I was transcribing my schoolboy Reading Diary (you can see the results here – it’s illuminating, in a guttering-candle-in-subterranean-labyrinth sort of way) the only book of Ghost Stories I mentioned was edited by – Pam! The evidence suggests that The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories was brilliant (and you never get Bumper Books of anything these days, have you noticed?) which makes me smile, quizzically.

I found this in Roehampton’s Children’s Literature library (it’s not in print any more), and something inside me knew it would be good, even though it’s been a while, and – I was right! It may not look too original once you think how old the genre is, but it is inventive and charming - I wonder if it was inspired by Kenneth Williams reading Norman Hunter on Jackanory? The opening line is, 'Once upon a time there was this terribly plain princess. I won't beat about the bush - she was terribly plain.' I also like the bit where the terribly plain Princess falls in love with a plain  gardener who longs to grow a giant blue marigold: 'He confided this secret to nobody but the Princess Sophia - and the cook and most of his relations (and he came from a very large family).' 

You might expect some of these stories to be influenced by post-60s gender emancipation (well, look at that title) but some stories are particularly clever, without being cold.In particular, 'Viola and the Ogre' is a lovely deconstruction of the fairy tale form, told very chattily and charmingly. It begins: 'I expect you've noticed how in fairy tales brave young men are always rescuing damsels from terrible danger. It's just one of those things and it seems to work out very well unless, of course, there's a shortage of terrible danger and that is what happens in this story.' Tomas can't marry Viola because her father objects to his sticking-out ears. He dresses up as an ogre, kidnaps Viola (who goes along with it because his ears are so familiar) but en route, meets an actual ogre. 

When Tomas' disguise is knocked away, the ogre (a vegetarian) becomes helpless with laughter. Viola goes and marries someone else, and Tomas and the Ogre become slightly homo-erotic pals. 'It's incredible, really, how well it worked out in the end.' The laughing, and Viola's ambivalence, are impressively modern details. They indicate to us – without any didacticism – that the fairy tale’s modus operandi is an artifice, a put up job. I have always loved Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, but particularly for their depiction of an alien culture: beware the decapitated horse, the stray snowflake. Because this is a story about conventional marriage, specifically it is a comment on old-fashioned male-female relations, not the form itself.

Something true to the original form in Oldfield's stories is a palpable strain of melancholy. There’s a lot of tears, a lot of boredom, some inconclusive endings. One story is all about a mermaid who refuses to swim, and sits on a rock every day. At last, a human rows past and catches her eye, and she swims after him to shore. But when she gets there – alas – he is met with a kiss from his girlfriend. It’s an unexpected twist, and as sad as anything Danny Kaye ever sung about whilst pretending to be a nineteenth century homosexual eccentric.

The Terribly Plain Princess is the only book of its kind by Oldfield. More Googling reveals that she was extraordinarily prolific. Curiously, her profile (ghost stories, historical romance, adventures for the young) seems to echo a favourite of mine, Joan Aiken’s. For both, it suggests, to me, a ‘born writer’, someone who found inventing stories – particularly for a specific audience, for whom distinct voices are given free reign – uncomplicated, pleasurable. Someone who wrote very well, quickly, and chose to write genre, but respectable genre (ghosts, romances and child-audiences all have a conventional association with women writers too – I wonder if Aiken and Oldfield’s careers were defined by the directives of their publishers as much as anything else). Interestingly, Oldfield went to school in Rye (where Aiken spent her childhood, a decade before) and her sister is Antonia Barber, author of The Amazing Mr Blunden.

Has anyone read this, or other stuff by Pam? I think I must seek out her Bumper Book now…

In a glass, darkly ... The Obsidian Mirror, by Catherine Fisher

I wrote about Catherine Fisher here last year, when I read her novel Darkhenge. I had heard good things about it, not least that it managed to write about the archaeological imagination – as well as the archaeological experience – with a real adventure in the mulch and myth of the British landscape. You know – of course you do – that this is a particular area of interest for me at the moment, and I’m grateful for every related title you can think of (just this last week I found a new one for the list – and she’s called Winifred...).


It’s rare to find someone who can do that sort of Herne the Hunter business today. It easily lapses into cliché, reduces paganism to a cartoon, or goes ultra-conservative. That wood-leaf tang has to be felt, deeply, if it’s going to convince – but it’s hard to write about Earth Magic without sounding right-on or right-wing. Fisher’s huge advantage is a grounding in archaeological practice, which meant Darkhenge was permeated with curiosity for older cultures and the ways they looked at the self. It was more a novel about nature as universal symbol. Sometimes it was a little self-serious as a result...

A friend who works at Hodder, Fisher’s publishers, very kindly sent me some more of her work to look at, including this one: The Obsidian Mirror. It only came out last year, look at me with my finger on the pulse! I read it last week and had a great time. It’s more a gung ho adventure than Darkhenge: in the depth of an ancient wood, on the verge of the winter solstice, a mysterious loner and his manservant perform strange experiments with the eponymous mirror, once belonging to Doctor (Mortimer) Dee. But others are after the mirror – and others are after them – and some are after the loner himself – and a wild magic is at large...

I wouldn’t quite say that it is ‘like’ Susan Cooper. It is reminiscent in feel, and the atmosphere of the novel is wonderfully rich (it’s a mass of snow, dust, vanishing ink, and seven identical cats), but this is a thriller, a page-turner. It recalls The Maltese Falcon almost as much as The Grey King, and its ex-rugby player schoolteacher hero feels like consciously action movie material (or maybe it’s just knowing that Fisher’s Incarceron is soon to be a major motion picture). It also felt disconnected from folk culture, reminding me of Robin Jarvis, a writer I have a love-hate relationship with – particularly hating his most recent one, Dancing Jax, but loving his Bethnal Green-set trilogy The Wyrd Museum. A venture into the past here recalled the Blitz episodes of The Woven Path to me.

In narrative complexity, Fisher is miles ahead of Jarvis, and initially The Obsidian Mirror recalled Diana Wynne-Jones too, that wonderful sense of not knowing who you can trust and why. There are some wonderful magicians and magical beings in this novel. Fisher is perhaps closer to Jarvis than Wynne-Jones in characterising her leads – where D W-J could make you root for the most vain and stubborn soul, Fisher never quite made me believe in most of her leads - but while I may not have cared much for the boarding school drop-out hero, the more magic tinged characters seemed much more alive, with their otherworldliness portrayed in marvellous subdued tones.
I was sorry to reach the end and see this was the first in a trilogy – not because I dislike trilogies especially, but because it made me want to try more of Fisher’s oeuvre, to find her strike the balance I really want from her: the emotional drama of Darkhenge, the exciting invention of Obsidian Mirror. But here we are at the start of a bigger story, and I look forward to seeing where it goes next time...

And this picture, of course, is by Louise Bourgeois...

In the Collection ... Doctor Who's New Series Adventures

Earlier this year I talked about this strange scheme, in which I would celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who by reading eleven of the 'tie-in' novels published across those the years: from the pocket-sized novelizations, bringing old stories to life before young readers' saucer eyes, to those chunky, peculiar, sometimes romantic, sometimes 'adult' novels of the 1990s, which showed that these were stories unconfined by cathode rays, changing fashion and the tastes of big shot TV execs. Yes, it looks like a TV show, Doctor Who; it looks like a cross between Casualty and Star Trek and The Two Ronnies, but of course it only ever existed in the gaps, strung between the half hour broadcasts, in memories and nightmares, and in the challenge for new writers: make heroic behaviour new, surprising, non-violent, iconoclastic.

That challenge was always harder in the books, and more exciting when they got it right, because there was no budget limit in the imagination, and no glass screen between us and the adventure. And they were read, I suspect, when fans needed them. Yes, I've heard about schoolboys swapping Target novels, and I know many a forum and pub corner has been massed with readers debating what New Adventures, but in my experience at least, you'd read a Doctor Who novel when it wasn't Saturday night, when you weren't among fellow viewers, when you needed a hit of adventure and thrill and witty retort: in bedrooms, in school toilets, on car journeys, on bad days.

Well, nowadays Doctor Who is back on the telly on Saturday nights; fashions change, but they're still trying to string that line that stretches back to November 1963, to the antihero who looks like your Grandfather, the magic machine that looks like junk, the brave teacher venturing into the shadows. They don't always get it right. I expect it's an impossible task (but then, it always was). The books are more necessary than ever because there are fewer stories, and they go by so fast. The books are there when your appetite for Who is strong, and Diana Rigg in a bonnet is still five school-days away.

They're also necessary, I realised, reading these three the other week, because Doctor Who stories deserve to be bigger on the inside. Now that the producers have decided - possibly following the tastes of big shot TV execs - to scrap even two-part stories, there is no time to create and explore the worlds we visit in the Tardis, or even the characters our heroes meet. To be honest, even when there was room for this (back in the old days) it was sometimes squandered.

But The Silent Stars Go By, for instance, which I read a couple of Saturdays ago, was such a pleasure to settle down with. We're on an alien world impossibly far in the future, and human colonisers there are experiencing snow for the first time - more than there should be, and they don't know why. And there are creatures in the snowy trees. It won't win a prize for originality, especially with those colonists, who have lived so long as farmers that they've forgotten their scientific past, yadda yadda yadda. But it's so carefully evoked that we feel their woollen cloaks, the dry air of wooden-walled council chambers, their deep suspicion of the stranger with the quiff.

And Sting of the Zygons, which I read in the airport waiting for Jon's flight to land, is a shorter novel, ostensibly for a younger readership, but still managing to do something similar. A rural British location (the Lakes) in a quaint historical era (1909) has been invaded by ghoulish, cunning nasties (you may have seen them in previous adventures such as Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster). Stephen Cole adds some interesting twists and new ideas to the formula, but it's nevertheless a familiar mix. I enjoyed it ever so much, though, for the brambles, mist and mulchy ground - for the stately home, with its heavy velvet curtains and ivory door-handles.

Silent Stars creates a lovely cosy atmosphere, but Zygons benefits from a fog of paranoia and suspicion. Those blobby, hissy, squidgy fiends of the title, if you're unaware, can steal your body away to their squelchy, spongy, throbbing spaceship, and once you're embedded in the uncanny sugar walls of their memory banks, they can wear your identity (face, body, clothes, voice) as easily as the Tenth Doctor wears his plimsolls. Once you know those orange goblins are about, therefore, you find yourself eyeing every man, woman and child with a weather eye. On the telly, you only have a minor cast for the Zygons to hide among, but Cole's novel has room for all sorts: red herrings, double bluffs, and nasty surprises.

The Clockwise Man, an adventure for the Ninth Doctor (and the first Justin Richards novel I've read for fifteen years!), is another novel of intrigue, dripping in atmosphere (for the first two thirds at least - I always find these New Series Adventures lose my interest in the race to the finish). We're in London in the 1920s, and there are stained gloves, painted masks, clandestine meetings, eavesdroppers on the balcony, killers in the fog, spaceships (of course) in the Thames. Is anyone who they claim them to be?

When these books were first released, in 2005, I didn't read a single one of them, despite enjoying the show as revived by Russell T Davies (who was then, and remains, one of my favourite writers for television). I'd gone off the Eighth Doctor's Adventures too, lost in back-story; the new novels lacked all that stuff but looked too nicely behaved, following formula, creating new ones, putting the toys away nicely at the end. I remembered when novels pulled apart old toys to build new ones...

I mean, with all that you can do with a novel, should you settle for transcending budgets, reviving unfashionable monsters, adding a few more twists that Saturday night audiences (seemingly) have no attention span for? It's interesting that instead of 'Also available', The Clockwise Man suggests we 'Collect all..' the other titles in the range, like any other merchandise. With some exceptions - The Eyeless was terrific, and I like the look of Shroud of Sorrow - New Series Adventures rarely satisfy an appetite for Doctor Who, because they aren't allowed outside the line(s).

Having said that, The Clockwise Man was a surprisingly good read (I especially liked the slower passages - like the Doctor's chess game with Wyse in his Gentleman's Club, a location this novel is too limited to fully explore), and a nostalgic one too. I loved the energy Christopher Eccleston brought to his Doctor, far from his successors' more clownish excesses. He could have been given some better stories - more stories, at least - and I'm really quite sad that he won't be there in the BBC's anniversary story. Richards' novel feels just like a lost Eccleston story - I was surprised at how he caught his voice - and made me miss those 'early' days all over again.