Wish I knew where my action figure was. I remember having to glue her arms back together, but like most of that 25th anniversary box set (they hadn’t released Ace yet…) I fear I have lost it to the winds of time. Shame, maybe she’s worth something on eBay…
"A Melanie Bush Mystery?" Looks like they're hoping to start a series. I'm reminded of when Pocket Books' Star Trek novel line did a Perry Mason pastiche with Samuel T. Cogley from "Court Martial." Or a co-writer. Sometimes these things are ghostwritten, sometimes they're true collaborations.
The Tom Baker and Alex Kingston novels had almost no input from the credited authors. Ian Marter and Colin Baker, on the other hand, were capable of writing fiction by themselves. I'd like to read the short stories Matt Smith wrote as preparation for the role.
I know Ian Marter wrote a number of the Target novelizations as well as Harry Sullivan's War. I didn't know about the others.
Colin did a comic book for DWM back in the day (nineties) including some poetry that referred back to when his Doctor was the incumbent in the DWM strip, so he possibly also read them.
I presume Tom at least had his notes from when he was Co-writing — with Ian — scratchman though? (I remember it being talked about in the old Peter Haining non-fiction books, so it’s been knocking around a while.)
Colin Baker wrote a comic book for Doctor Who Magazine back in the day, and he wrote a short story for The Target Storybook a few years ago. (Matthew Waterhouse also wrote a story for that collection.) The story I've heard on Alex Kingston's River Song novel is that reading the audiobook was her first encounter with the text and that she had no idea where it was going. James Goss had access to what Baker and Marter had written for Scratchman forty-five years ago. And Baker obviously wrote the acknowledgements, where he describes Marter as "a good egg." Otherwise, it's a James Goss book, which BBC Books went to extreme lengths to hide in the run-up to release.
So if she didn't write it, and didn't even know the story, then why is she credited as it's author? I'm assuming Baker was credited for Scratchman because he worked on the original script.
I know what ghostwriters are, but I thought they usually worked closely with the person who was actually credited with whatever they were working.
Sometimes, not always. I'd say working closely with the ghostwriter is more the exception than the rule, since the whole reason people hire ghostwriters is that they don't have the time, talent, or willingness to write a book themselves. But it runs the gamut from full collaboration to loose oversight to simply being a famous name on the cover to sell books.