The Ruby's Curse

The Song Ones

The Ruby’s Curse
by Alex Kingston
with Jacqueline Rayner
BBC Books
ISBN: 9781785947131

Warning: Very, very light spoilers, sweetie!

I don’t really read Doctor Who novels these days. I loved the old Target novelisations when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s but, yeah, I tend not to read the spin offs and I think I only ever read one of the ‘original’ stories in my lifetime (so far), by one of my old favourite writers Michael Moorcock (and you can read my review of that one here). However, on my very recent discovery of this particular tome which was written, by the looks of things, in 2020 and then published early in 2021, I found The Ruby’s Curse by Alex Kingston with Jacqueline Rayner a much harder proposition to resist so, you know, I didn’t even try. I ordered this pretty much straight away after I knew of its existence. After all, what better person than Alex Kingston, the actress who played the great semi-regular character River Song herself (opposite David Tennant, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi in their incarnations of The Doctor), could you get to write further adventures for her. Well, okay, maybe her creator Steven Moffat but, heck, I’d take Alex over him any day of the week for sure.

And not just a further adventure of The Doctor’s wife but, also, the further adventures of her fictional (within a fiction) alter ego too, as the book cover has the tag line, A River Song/Melody Malone Mystery. So, yeah, the story here starts with River Song breaking back into the high security Stormcage facility, where she is being held for a certain crime (that followers of the show may or may not remember) at great peril because she wants to settle down for some peace and quiet in her prison cell for a while, to write the next book in her ongoing series of Melody Malone adventures.

And, for much of the story, the structure of the book... with different chapters labelled up in the various places and also the fictional settings she is writing about... is constantly cross cut as both the story within the story and also River’s new adventure, trying to locate a powerful artefact hidden in Cleopatra’s tomb, shuttles between two main narrative locations: Stormcage AD 5147 and, in the hard boiled Melody Malone mystery, New York AD 1939. Things get a little complicated though and, through the course of the story, River (and sometimes Melody) also end up in Egypt 30 BC, Cisalpine, Gaul 49 BC and Rome of 44 BC. Actually, the BC days are written as BCE in the book but I don’t hold with that kind of labelling myself and, since the other dates are given as AD rather than CE, then it’s BC for me please.

And then things get further complicated but, without giving anything away, the two similarly themed parallel stories start to overlap and so, if you think things are getting confusing when River accidentally acquires a wonderful talking cat of an assistant, wait until the two stories start to merge. There are points in the story where River and Melody interact and help each other out quite a lot, as River gets plunged into the book world and, later, Melody finds herself made flesh in River’s world. Luckily you can tell which is which because River’s main story is set in a different font from the sans serif world of the book she is writing. Alas, the front of the actual book, which usually only lists the one font the book is set in, also only lists one of the fonts in the book... something of an oversight by the publishing house, I suspect.

And it’s actually a really great read. River comes across exactly as she does in the TV show (but since we are privy to her thoughts now, perhaps even a little saucier) and the thing is written with a large dollop of humour and, well, it’s all very cleverly put together. I was quite floored by just how well written this thing was, to be honest. There are also a lot of references, of course, to the show over the years... there’s a lovely and quite subtle, blink and you’ll miss it put down of the Sixth Doctor’s sartorial tastes, for instance and another one I especially liked was a reference to a time travelling villain last seen in the Fourth Doctor story The Talons Of Weng Chian (reviewed coming this year, if my blog backlog keeps to schedule... this book kinda jumped the queue). There are also a lot of nice pop culture references in general which Kingston and co-writer Rayner make good use of, from Edgar Allan Poe through to Oscar Wilde and even a fairly obscure reference, I thought, to Kit Williams real life puzzle book from 1978, Masquerade (Was that Golden Hare ever found by a reader? I’ll have to google it.). I even found it quite educational, as it happens... I now know where the phrase “armed to the teeth” originated.

Added to this, there’s some typical River Song moments which I much appreciated, such as her asterisking a ‘spoiler warning’ for the readers and even a Dramatis Personae section titled... Here Be Spoilers. Added to this, there was one particular turn of events (where I was way ahead of an extra character just turning up out of the blue... maybe it was telegraphed just a little too much) in which a solid clue was, perhaps, inspired just a little from Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels.

And, yeah, that’s as much as I want to say about The Ruby’s Curse since I certainly don’t want to properly spoil it for you (sweeties!) but, I will say, it’s an absolutely wonderful, elegant and entertaining read and I would certainly recommend it to any fans of the River Song era of Doctor Who (which I keep hoping against hope that we still haven’t seen an end to... you never know, stranger things have happened and, with regards to that thought, it looks like stranger things soon will be happening within the show, judging from the last episode trailer I saw). But, yes, a fantastic book and it also walks a good tightrope between something that is for readers of all ages but also with an adult sensibility which may go straight over the heads of those too young to get all the jokes. Nice stuff, for sure and, you know, in the words of The Doctor in response to reading Melody Malone fiction in the show once... wowza!