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The Companions of Doctor Who #2
Harry Sullivan's War
It is ten years since Harry Sullivan left UNIT and gave up his travels in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Sarah Jane.
Since then he has been engaged in top secret work, developing antidotes to nerve toxins. But when he is transferred to Yarra in the Hebrides to work on weapons research, he has severe misgivings. For one thing, it goes against much of what he believes in. For another, someone is out to kill Harry Sullivan.
Who wants Harry safely out of the way? What significance does a painting by Van Gogh have in the affair? And can Harry's old friend, the Brigadier, really be involved in a scheme which threatens the security of the Western World?
Since then he has been engaged in top secret work, developing antidotes to nerve toxins. But when he is transferred to Yarra in the Hebrides to work on weapons research, he has severe misgivings. For one thing, it goes against much of what he believes in. For another, someone is out to kill Harry Sullivan.
Who wants Harry safely out of the way? What significance does a painting by Van Gogh have in the affair? And can Harry's old friend, the Brigadier, really be involved in a scheme which threatens the security of the Western World?
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 11, 1986
5 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
About the author
Ian Marter
26 books21 followersIan Don Marter was born at Alcock Hospital in Keresley, near Coventry, on the 28th of October 1944. His father, Donald Herbert, was an RAF sergeant and electrician by trade, and his mother was Helen, nee Donaldson.
He was, among other things, a teacher and a milkman.
He became an actor after graduating from Oxford University, and appeared in Repertory and West End productions and on television. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic. He was best known for playing Harry Sullivan in the BBC Television series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1975, alongside Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. He had already appeared in the show as Lieutenant John Andrews in the Jon Pertwee serial Carnival of Monsters. He had numerous TV roles including appearances in Crown Court and Bergerac (Return of the Ice Maiden, 1985, opposite Louise Jameson).
Marter got into writing the novelisations following a dinner conversation. He went on to adapt 9 scripts over ten years. He started with The Ark in Space, the TV version of which he'd actually appeared in as companion Harry Sullivan. In the end he adapted more serials than he appeared in (7 appearances, 9 novelisations), and wrote one of the Companions series, telling of the post-Doctor adventures of Harry in Harry Sullivan's War. Shortly before his death he was discussing, with series editor Nigel Robinson, the possibility of adapting his unused movie script Doctor Who Meets Scratchman (co-written with Tom Baker) into a novel.
He was, among other things, a teacher and a milkman.
He became an actor after graduating from Oxford University, and appeared in Repertory and West End productions and on television. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic. He was best known for playing Harry Sullivan in the BBC Television series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1975, alongside Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. He had already appeared in the show as Lieutenant John Andrews in the Jon Pertwee serial Carnival of Monsters. He had numerous TV roles including appearances in Crown Court and Bergerac (Return of the Ice Maiden, 1985, opposite Louise Jameson).
Marter got into writing the novelisations following a dinner conversation. He went on to adapt 9 scripts over ten years. He started with The Ark in Space, the TV version of which he'd actually appeared in as companion Harry Sullivan. In the end he adapted more serials than he appeared in (7 appearances, 9 novelisations), and wrote one of the Companions series, telling of the post-Doctor adventures of Harry in Harry Sullivan's War. Shortly before his death he was discussing, with series editor Nigel Robinson, the possibility of adapting his unused movie script Doctor Who Meets Scratchman (co-written with Tom Baker) into a novel.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 8, 2008
Shame that the 'Companions' book series fizzled after three books, as it was a fun idea and the three books were decent reads.
In this one, Harry Sullivan finds himself in the middle of James Bond-ish spy adventure. What makes this fun, is Harry is never going to be James Bond. He is in way over his head and tends to just stumble through this story. He's good natured and tries, but he's closer to Bertie Wooster than 007.
Only gripe is I thought the ending felt rushed and a bit slapped together, like the author had no idea how to end it, but was approaching the end of his page allotment.
In this one, Harry Sullivan finds himself in the middle of James Bond-ish spy adventure. What makes this fun, is Harry is never going to be James Bond. He is in way over his head and tends to just stumble through this story. He's good natured and tries, but he's closer to Bertie Wooster than 007.
Only gripe is I thought the ending felt rushed and a bit slapped together, like the author had no idea how to end it, but was approaching the end of his page allotment.
September 4, 2019
As I watched the Fourth Doctor’s episodes in Classic Doctor Who, I immediately adored Harry Sullivan. He’s such a great companion. The Doctor may have at first called Harry in imbecile, but Harry quickly proved his worth and became a valued part of the Doctor’s team.
Since there’s not nearly enough Harry Sullivan in Doctor Who, I took to the internet to see if I could find any additional adventures that included Harry. Sure enough, I found Harry Sullivan’s War, by none other than Ian Marter, who played Harry!
Naturally, I had to buy the book, because I always love it when the actor loves a character they played so much that they write fiction about said character.
The novel starts out 10 years after Harry left UNIT and stopped traveling with the Doctor and Sarah Jane. He’s since become Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Harry Sullivan, and works for NATO, with developing antidotes for nerve toxins. He then gets transferred to work on weapons research, which doesn’t sit right with Harry. He’s not a fan of researching weapons for the government, but he’s also not a fan of being on the run from the person trying to kill him!
This book plays out like a spy thriller from the POV of someone who isn’t a spy, and is just trying to survive. Harry Sullivan isn’t a secret agent, but he has to become one on the fly to keep himself alive. At least one can trust the Brigadier...or can they?
This book is fantastic, and I also enjoyed the Van Gogh painting following him around everywhere. It was reminiscent of the Fourth Doctor episode City of Death in that respect. All in all a great read for fans of one of the best Doctor Who companions to ever exist.
Since there’s not nearly enough Harry Sullivan in Doctor Who, I took to the internet to see if I could find any additional adventures that included Harry. Sure enough, I found Harry Sullivan’s War, by none other than Ian Marter, who played Harry!
Naturally, I had to buy the book, because I always love it when the actor loves a character they played so much that they write fiction about said character.
The novel starts out 10 years after Harry left UNIT and stopped traveling with the Doctor and Sarah Jane. He’s since become Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Harry Sullivan, and works for NATO, with developing antidotes for nerve toxins. He then gets transferred to work on weapons research, which doesn’t sit right with Harry. He’s not a fan of researching weapons for the government, but he’s also not a fan of being on the run from the person trying to kill him!
This book plays out like a spy thriller from the POV of someone who isn’t a spy, and is just trying to survive. Harry Sullivan isn’t a secret agent, but he has to become one on the fly to keep himself alive. At least one can trust the Brigadier...or can they?
This book is fantastic, and I also enjoyed the Van Gogh painting following him around everywhere. It was reminiscent of the Fourth Doctor episode City of Death in that respect. All in all a great read for fans of one of the best Doctor Who companions to ever exist.
Read
May 8, 2015Had to take a pause from Elizabeth Bowen yesterday; knew the election would leave me with neither the intellectual nor emotional energy for modernism and London at war. Thought I'd go for a Doctor Who spin-off instead; not one of the clever metafictional ones, either, but the pulpy sort with car chases and fisticuffs. When it turned out to concern a chumpish but fundamentally decent Guardian-reader foiling a fiendish conspiracy, I was even happier. And if the bibliomancy turns out to have been a dead loss, well, the distraction was still welcome.
September 12, 2023
Better than I thought it would be, but still a bit too meandering and divorced from the source material to be fulfilling. While I wasn't surprised that we never saw any sign of the Doctor in this (as they aren't present in any of the three Companion Adventure novels), I was hoping for at least a few more mental references to the show's title character in Harry's thoughts. Granted, considering this whole adventure happens because Harry imbecilically tries to proves he's not an imbecile multiple times and always exacerbates an already troubling problem...and that's because the Doctor called him an imbecile in Revenge of the Cybermen, so the Doctor has a lot of influence in the story, despite not being present.
On the show content side of things, we do get appearances from Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Sarah Jane Smith. By this point of the story, we are ten years post Terror of the Zygons and so Sarah Jane is back on Earth and doing her work as an investigative reporter and the Brigadier has left UNIT and is working for the school where future Doctor Who companion Vislor Turlough would show up as a refugee from Trion and kickstart the whole adventure of Mawdryn Undead. (Or maybe that's already happened...it never is made quite clear.) Something I love about these connections is that Sarah Jane's and Harry's friendship is written wonderfully and, because this is authored by the actor who played Harry, the fondness that Ian Marter himself had for the characters involved just leaps off the page.
HOWEVER, I cannot forgive Harry for thinking for almost the entire book that the Brigadier -- OUR BRIGADIER -- was involved with terrorists and was a traitor to British interests. Did he make harsh calls against aliens in the show and could he be gun happy? Of course. So much so that he and the Doctor didn't always get along. But the Brigadier would never IN A MILLION YEARS go against the British government. And the fact that the idea even crossed Harry's mind, much less than he assumed it for the entire book, is absolute sacrilege and proof that Harry really lost a lot of brain cells due to oxygen deprivation during that opening gym scene.
And that's where another negative for this book comes in: I did not understand what happened in that end scene at the Eiffel Tower at all. I mean, I get that the man who was attacking Harry fell down and is the body that the police are talking about at the end. I got that far...but how did Harry himself get down? Did he just cling to the metal of the Eiffel Tower underneath the platform until morning? Did he secretly have a parachute under his suit? Were the other men (and women) involved in the terrorist organization arrested at the Eiffel Tower or are we just supposed to assume they're out there somewhere? It's never explained and no details are given and I'm just...a bit flummoxed.
This book was more James Bond than it was Doctor Who, but that honestly didn't bother me too much. I wish that we were given more scenes of Harry actually thinking things out and being proactive instead of just reacting, but I can also understand why he was forced to be all reactive. I just wish that the story had been allowed to be longer because I think the story would have worked better if we had been given more information and backstory on things. But with a 150 page limit on this, we don't get any of that. People just do things and Harry reacts and then Harry doesn't spend much time wondering how or why things occurred. And, mostly importantly, he never seems to wonder why they're happening to him specifically. And that's what I was more curious about. He gets pulled in to this whole thing because someone he has never met keeps trying to kill him, and then when he is assigned to a new job in Scotland (assigned, not something he applied for, mind you), they try to frame him. But why they were trying to kill him is never explained. I can understand the frame up after he got the job and after we find out what the endgame of the villains is, but if they had never tried to kill Harry in the first place, he would never have been suspicious of anything...
The causality of this whole adventure just makes absolutely no sense. But, what the hey...I had fun.
On the show content side of things, we do get appearances from Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Sarah Jane Smith. By this point of the story, we are ten years post Terror of the Zygons and so Sarah Jane is back on Earth and doing her work as an investigative reporter and the Brigadier has left UNIT and is working for the school where future Doctor Who companion Vislor Turlough would show up as a refugee from Trion and kickstart the whole adventure of Mawdryn Undead. (Or maybe that's already happened...it never is made quite clear.) Something I love about these connections is that Sarah Jane's and Harry's friendship is written wonderfully and, because this is authored by the actor who played Harry, the fondness that Ian Marter himself had for the characters involved just leaps off the page.
HOWEVER, I cannot forgive Harry for thinking for almost the entire book that the Brigadier -- OUR BRIGADIER -- was involved with terrorists and was a traitor to British interests. Did he make harsh calls against aliens in the show and could he be gun happy? Of course. So much so that he and the Doctor didn't always get along. But the Brigadier would never IN A MILLION YEARS go against the British government. And the fact that the idea even crossed Harry's mind, much less than he assumed it for the entire book, is absolute sacrilege and proof that Harry really lost a lot of brain cells due to oxygen deprivation during that opening gym scene.
And that's where another negative for this book comes in: I did not understand what happened in that end scene at the Eiffel Tower at all. I mean, I get that the man who was attacking Harry fell down and is the body that the police are talking about at the end. I got that far...but how did Harry himself get down? Did he just cling to the metal of the Eiffel Tower underneath the platform until morning? Did he secretly have a parachute under his suit? Were the other men (and women) involved in the terrorist organization arrested at the Eiffel Tower or are we just supposed to assume they're out there somewhere? It's never explained and no details are given and I'm just...a bit flummoxed.
This book was more James Bond than it was Doctor Who, but that honestly didn't bother me too much. I wish that we were given more scenes of Harry actually thinking things out and being proactive instead of just reacting, but I can also understand why he was forced to be all reactive. I just wish that the story had been allowed to be longer because I think the story would have worked better if we had been given more information and backstory on things. But with a 150 page limit on this, we don't get any of that. People just do things and Harry reacts and then Harry doesn't spend much time wondering how or why things occurred. And, mostly importantly, he never seems to wonder why they're happening to him specifically. And that's what I was more curious about. He gets pulled in to this whole thing because someone he has never met keeps trying to kill him, and then when he is assigned to a new job in Scotland (assigned, not something he applied for, mind you), they try to frame him. But why they were trying to kill him is never explained. I can understand the frame up after he got the job and after we find out what the endgame of the villains is, but if they had never tried to kill Harry in the first place, he would never have been suspicious of anything...
The causality of this whole adventure just makes absolutely no sense. But, what the hey...I had fun.
May 3, 2025
Book 330 - Ian Marter - Harry Sullivan’s War
In the mid 1980s the Target novelisations were reaching a peek of their popularity. The wonderful Terrance Dicks was almost superseded by all the actual TV story writers writing their own books. This allowed them to add to the actual story by adding parts they had had to take out due to timing or budgetary restraints.
And then there was this brilliant if brief idea of writing stories written around the companions of the Doctor. Ian Marter had already novelised a number of TV stories and this was a perfect pitch. What happened to Harry Sullivan after he left the Doctor in ‘Terror of the Zygons’… we do know he was seconded to NATO for a while but in this story we have him trying to find a cure for an attack by a biological weapon. It is a proper James Bond type thriller… with racing across the country from Scotland to London …escaping spies from other countries and even wonderful traps within traps…
Add to this a dash of special guest stars including the Brigadier and Sarah-Jane Smith and we have a near perfect novel written by Harry Sullivan himself. I loved this… one of my fave Doctor Who linked novels written by the actor who played my favourite Doctor Who companion.
In the mid 1980s the Target novelisations were reaching a peek of their popularity. The wonderful Terrance Dicks was almost superseded by all the actual TV story writers writing their own books. This allowed them to add to the actual story by adding parts they had had to take out due to timing or budgetary restraints.
And then there was this brilliant if brief idea of writing stories written around the companions of the Doctor. Ian Marter had already novelised a number of TV stories and this was a perfect pitch. What happened to Harry Sullivan after he left the Doctor in ‘Terror of the Zygons’… we do know he was seconded to NATO for a while but in this story we have him trying to find a cure for an attack by a biological weapon. It is a proper James Bond type thriller… with racing across the country from Scotland to London …escaping spies from other countries and even wonderful traps within traps…
Add to this a dash of special guest stars including the Brigadier and Sarah-Jane Smith and we have a near perfect novel written by Harry Sullivan himself. I loved this… one of my fave Doctor Who linked novels written by the actor who played my favourite Doctor Who companion.
August 1, 2021
Between a 3 and a 4 for me, is an interesting story, and one where I sometimes have to try and disconnect myself from being too vested into the decisions Harry makes here - many quite questionable and sometimes stupid decisions here, where I fear the author is intending that they aren't, but really it is in character for what Harry was like on TV, so I don't think the author is trying to portray them as anything other than questionable / stupid :)
Being mainly from Harry's point of view, it can be hard at times to work out what is going on in the broader sense, but that helps add to the mystery and tension of the story, even if involves smears on one of my favourite characters (the Brigadier), and even at the end a lack of clarity about some parts of what was going on.
Was a bit slow at times in terms of pace, but generally kept me engaged, and was an enjoyable read.
Being mainly from Harry's point of view, it can be hard at times to work out what is going on in the broader sense, but that helps add to the mystery and tension of the story, even if involves smears on one of my favourite characters (the Brigadier), and even at the end a lack of clarity about some parts of what was going on.
Was a bit slow at times in terms of pace, but generally kept me engaged, and was an enjoyable read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 14, 2018
Above average installment in this short lived Doctor Who spin off series. Written by Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan in the series, this is an almost moronic take on the spy genre, with Sullivan playing the role is a klutzy, old-fashioned and really, rather useless James Bond. Has it's moments, the ending is quite tense and the book is well written. Nice to see cameos from the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith.
July 11, 2020
There is almost TOO much plot and action crammed into the Target Book standard word count...but there is no denying that this is, pre-New Adventures, the best original Whoniverse fiction written up to that point. No body knows Harry Sullivan better than the man who played him, and Ian Marter takes the Doctor's former companion on a James Bond ride that is surprisingly intense. It's a great pity that the intended sequel never materialized.
June 3, 2019
An extraordinarily fun ride concept of a buffoonish, yet confident-enough everyman in a James Bond type story. The mystery is compelling although it does end up falling apart. The entire last act of this novel seems like it was slapped together as fast as possible with an ending that is barely comprehensible because of its speed. Almost excellent.
August 12, 2020
My favourite Dr Who companion and I wish Ian Marter had written more Harry Sullivan books.
This is a great read lots of twists and I like to dig it out every other year or so.
This is a great read lots of twists and I like to dig it out every other year or so.
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October 21, 2007http://nhw.livejournal.com/763482.html[return][return]This was the second officially published Doctor Who novelisation not based on a TV story (the first being the long-forgotten Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, from earlier in 1986). Alas, it is not very good. I was startled on page 4 to learn that, in this book meant to have a contemporary mid-1980s setting, NATO headquarters was in Geneva. A fairly trivial detail to those readers who visit neither NATO nor Geneva as frequently as I do, but symptomatic of a lack of focus throughout. Harry Sullivan, meant to be an experienced doctor working on top-secret biological warfare, seems to have no idea about elementary security precautions. There are some nice bits with a recurrent Van Gogh motif, and a climactic fight on the Eiffel Tower, but basically it doesn't make much sense. There are cameos from the Brigadier (now retired to teaching a la "Mawdryn Undead") and Sarah Jane Smith as well.
June 4, 2023
One would think that Marter could write the character he played better than this. The novel is basically a Hitchcock-styled spy thing with Harry caught up as that man in the wrong place at the wrong time who gets chased by baddies. Harry spends most the novel fumbling around and being kind of stupid through most the plot. The villain is rather bland, and the plot has many holes.
June 16, 2010
Hugely entertaining '39 Steps'-style yarn from the late Ian Marter, who played the character of Harry Sullivan in Doctor Who in 1974-5. Well-written and fast paced.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews