#100days - #96: my best #DoctorWho novel

I grew up watching Doctor Who in New Zealand, and dreamed of writing stories for the character one day - but it seemed impossible from the other side of the world. By the time I moved to the UK, the chances seemed even more remote. The show had effectively been cancelled by the BBC, with little prospect of it ever returning.

Then Virgin Publishing acquired the rights to commission new, original novels featuring the Doctor. But it took me another five years - and writing three Judge Dredd novels for the company - to achieve my dream. In April 1996 Virgin published Who Killed Kennedy, my first officially licensed Doctor Who novel.

Who Killed Kennedy was an atypical tie-in novel. It was written in the first person by 'James Stvens', a fictional narrator co-credited as the author alongside my name on the cover. It was packed with continuity references, but designed to be a compelling read on its own merits for non-Who fans.

WKK is a faux conspiracy novel, examining the UNIT years of Doctor Who from an outsider's perspective. The Doctor hardly appears in the story at all, though his presence looms large over the narrative. As such, it might be viewed as a template for subsequent Doctor-lite TV stories like Blink.

I've always been proud of Who Killed Kennedy, who is still highly regarded among Who fans more than 20 years later. It sold well enough in 1996 to earn out its advance and make royalties, but hasn't been reprinted since. But I was never entirely happy with the book's ending, something about the final chapters nagged at me, failing to satisfy.

Around 2009 the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club asked if it could make WKK available as a free ebook. I wrote an author's commentary to accompany this revival. Aware of my grumblings about the ending, the NZDWFC offered me the chance to write a new ending for WKK, but I declined. I still hadn't figured out what was missing.

Finally, in 2016 I wrote some additional chapters, adding a new coda to WKK. The NZDWFC indulged me by incorporating that to the ebook hosted on its site to create a 20th Anniversary edition - available free here.

For me, that incarnation is the final word on Who Killed Kennedy. It provides an emotionally satisfying ending and scratched the itch that'd been bugging me since 1996.

I live in hope that one day somebody will make an audiobook of WKK. Being written in the first person, it's an ideal candidate for such a version. There were even murmurings of interest from BBC Books a year or two back, but nothing has come of that yet...