The Crooked Man

"Death walks the streets here."

Writer: John Dorney

Format: Audio

Released: March 2014

Series: Fourth Doctor Adventures 3.03

Featuring: Fourth Doctor, Leela

Synopsis

Winter at the seaside. The wind blows. The waves crash. People are dying and a strange spindly figure stalks the cold, deserted streets. A typical holiday for the Doctor and Leela in other words.

When they stumble across a grotesque series of murders at the coast, the TARDIS travellers realise the local constabulary is out of its depth. Something supernatural has come to town, something evil. And it all seems to be tied in to a particular young family.

Monsters lurk behind strange doors. Tragic secrets wait to be uncovered. And somewhere, deep within, the Crooked Man sits. He is waiting for you.

Verdict

The Crooked Man was an outstanding audio adventure! I thought this was really quite brilliant from start to finish. I was certainly not expecting any involvement from the Land of Fiction in this story so that was a real treat and the way it was done was incredibly clever. I was a big fan of the pacing and the way the story started with Laura Corbett selling some rare books of her recently deceased father for a mere £30 really set the tone. I liked that it was a modern setting and timeline and Leela's comments about the paper of news and the blue guards was excellent. The literary theme was great and the idea of books returning to the Corbett household was intriguing, along with the arrival of a mystery door in a house where Laura grew up in and had never seen it before. I thought her relationship with Simon was nice and their child wouldn't stop crying which, considering I was listening to this in some free time from my own baby, seemed ironic. The fact that he was taken by the Crooked Man seemed incredibly dark and that might just be because I'm a dad now, but it sold the evil that was present in the titular character. The origins of the Crooked Man was an incredible story of a childhood story that Laura's dad told her so she wouldn't go near his book collection. I thought that was eerily brilliant and the fact he had a manuscript that was left behind following his death about the Crooked Man was fantastic, and that would actually be the spark of bringing it to existence. The idea of a tear in the dimension to the Land of Fiction is brilliant and the concept of that dimension getting full was superb! So without being able to sustain every character in a world where more and more imagination was creating fiction, the unpublished and the not so popular characters were being thrown out. That was incredible. I liked the little sub-story between Laura and PC Andrews and it was clear right from the off that there was a history between the pair as he offered to walk her home from the crime scene. Leela's brash reveal of her perceiving his feelings for Laura was terrific comedy as well. Lesley King was an amusing character and I was a big fan of the explanation for her being in two places at once. She was in on it with other fictional characters and their referring to the executioner was a good way in highlighting the problem in the Land of Fiction. The Doctor recalling the events of The Mind Robber and his memories of the dimension being all Rapunzel and Gulliver was marvellous and I thought Tom Baker was on stellar form in this adventure. The reveal that Simon was actually a fictitious husband and Andrews was actually the father of Ellis was outstanding and something I didn't see coming, so he was not restrained by the Crooked Man. I loved the concept of destroying the works that created the fictional characters being a way to destroy the character that had come to life, and trying to get hands on the manuscript provided an exciting conclusion. The Doctor working out the truth about Simon was good and I liked Leela's confusion about him knowing he wasn't real. It was very powerful and emotional stuff. Overall, a quite brilliant story!

Rating: 10/10