Dracula: Interview: Jonathan Barnes
Jonathan Barnes’ name will be familiar to readers of Sci-Fi Bulletin for his contributions to multiple Big Finish ranges – from Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Who, H.G. Wells to Frankenstein […]
Jonathan Barnes’ name will be familiar to readers of Sci-Fi Bulletin for his contributions to multiple Big Finish ranges – from Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Who, H.G. Wells to Frankenstein and Dracula. To accompany his most recent Doctor Who story, the first episode of Shadow of the Daleks 2, he chatted with Paul Simpson over Zoom…
How did you get caught up with Big Finish in the first place?
Big Finish? Just by going and knocking on their door really.
I’d published a couple of novels by that point but I just went and introduced myself to Nick Briggs – or reintroduced myself because I’d met him as a teenage fan, at a slightly strange convention in Norfolk in the late 90s when he was doing all the Bill Baggs stuff for BBV.
Before Big Finish really started.
It was definitely before Big Finish. I must have been about seventeen or eighteen, certainly in the 6th form, and introduced myself and said, ‘I like your stuff and I’d love to be a writer, can you give me any tips?’ I remember him being very patient and generous with a teenage fan. So I went back to Big Finish and said, ‘You won’t remember me but you met me some years ago, you were very encouraging. I’m now a published author, any change of anything coming up?’ He bore me in mind from there and commissioned me for the first Sherlock Holmes and it grew from there.
That was the first one yes, 2012 that came out.
Did you come up with the idea or was that from Nick?
I think Nick has a list of writers he might like to use one day, if the right thing comes up. I think he wanted to do something with the Titanic and said to me, ‘Have you got any ideas for anything Titanic related for the centenary?’ I said, ‘Well, how about a Sherlock Holmes? Starring you?’ And he was keen on that pitch and we took it from there.
You’ve since subsequently written a number of series of Holmes which have extended the canon. Where did your interest in Holmes start?
I’ve always been a Holmes fan since I was very small. I think the gateway drug for Holmes was Basil the Great Mouse Detective, the Disney film which I think I saw when it came out in the cinema, so I must have been about six or seven. That got me interested and from there I started reading the stories.
It’s a love affair that doesn’t let you down, isn’t it? And that’s certainly been the case with Holmes. Big Finish have been wonderful with the Holmes stuff because they’ve really let me do my own thing with it; they’ve been very generous. I’ve been lucky enough to have some sort of guidance from Nick and also from [director] Ken Bentley but mostly I’ve been left to my own devices.
I’ve done a lot of the Holmes stuff I’ve wanted to do. Going through his life, back when he was very young, when he’s old towards the end of his life; all sorts of different stories – straight mysteries but also stuff with that slight fantastical element that Doyle was bringing in towards the end. I’ve had a ball writing Holmes and there’s more to come – another trilogy started with The Master of Blackstone Grange which came out a few years ago and then two more three hour stories.
Do you have problems thinking up ideas for Holmes stories?
There’s a big crossover between Holmes and Doctor Who because the storytelling possibilities are almost infinite. I confess I felt a little bit selfish in a way because I’m aware that I’ve hogged a lot of the Holmes range for quite some time. I’ve written a big chunk of it and I’m sure there are other writers who would have different stuff to contribute – but I’m lucky enough that they keep asking me and I can’t quite bring myself to turn it down because I always have another idea for them.
But increasingly, as time goes on, I’m writing more and more for Nick and Richard [Earl] and for their partnership and their version of Holmes and Watson. So there’s always more.
I’ve found when I’ve been reading other Holmes stories, I’m hearing them in my head as the voices of the characters; do you have the same thing when you’re writing it?
Absolutely. Almost all of the stories are narrated by Watson and we use Richard a lot to do those narration duties in the stories. He’s a terrific Watson.
I always think it’s a hard part to cast. You need a star actor for Holmes but for Watson you need someone who can plausibly be a doctor, a writer and an ex-military man and very often you get one or two of the three but not all of them together. But I think Richard absolutely ticks all of those boxes.
I think we’re now almost out of the period where it’s got to be a Nigel Bruce type bumbling character. In the 80s and 90s, you got Holmes and that was the Watson people automatically expected.
Yes, a lot of people after Bruce did something similar. I think it started to change with the Jeremy Brett series when you had David Burke and Edward Hardwicke who very precisely went the exact opposite.
It’s taken me writing Holmes at such length to realise why you had that comedy Watson for so long. It’s because once you take away from him the duties of narration he often has very little to do in those stories. He’s there as a witness, he’s there as the person to explain the story to us and explain Holmes to us, but often he doesn’t have a lot of agency in his own right. So what do you do to make him more interesting on screen? You make him a comedy character – so I completely understand now why they did it.
There are a lot of your Holmes stories in the late Victorian/early Edwardian period and you’ve gone back to that era for Dracula. Was there any correlation between the two?
I am very drawn to it. I said to my wife the other day that I think my favourite decade in British history is the 1890s and she told me not to be silly – who possibly has a favourite decade. But I keep being drawn back to it, that end of Empire, end of the 19th century, fin de siècle era. I’ve been drawn back to it again and again and again: there’s just something about it and I seem to feel very at home there.
When did you first experience Dracula… and don’t tell me it was through Count Duckula…
It would be nice, wouldn’t it.
A certain mirroring.
And then you’ll ask me about James Bond and I’ll say Danger Mouse.
If you had said James Bond Jr I would have been very impressed.
Oh, I do remember that!
Dracula I remember reading very clearly, probably at just the right age, which was late childhood on the cusp of adolescence. That’s echoed in the child of the title of my book who is at the end of childhood and the start of adolescence and manhood.
It’s a book that speaks to you particularly at that age and I loved it. One feels envious often of people encountering these texts for the first time that now you know really well. The thought of encountering it for the first time is really exciting but yes, really thrilling and strange.
It’s a strange book, Dracula, that really drew me in and so that’s lived with me as well. All the many movie versions I’ve loved but again, it was the Big Finish connection with that as well, adapting Dracula, which I did five or six years ago. Taking it apart and putting it back together again and seeing how it functioned reconnected me with that story.
That has become a trilogy for Big Finish; was that planned from the start?
The way it often works with Big Finish is, you get an email out of the blue. So far it’s always exciting news when you get an email from Nick or David [Richardson] or Scott [Handcock] or James [Goss].
The invitation to do it just came out of the blue. I was writing Dracula’s Child at the same time, so I was writing multiple sequels and prequels for Dracula. I’d love to do more for Big Finish but I don’t know how well it needs to do for that to become possible. Mark Gatiss I know loved playing the Count and wanted to come back and do it again.
Dracula’s Child and the two audios, Dracula’s Guests and Dracula’s War, obviously they’re all connected to the parent book but do they actually cross over or are they effectively separate continuities in the same way the continuation Bond books all refer to Fleming as the bible but don’t have to refer to each other?
My intention is that they all fit together – if you squint a bit. The novel I think, just by the nature of what it is, is a slightly different beast but if you want them to connect together – if anyone’s keen or mad enough to listen to the trilogy and then read the novel – they do but it will require a little bit of squinting to make it work.
Certainly when I did the original adaptation I put a couple of things in, because Big Finish obviously love a series don’t they? Love a trilogy or a franchise. I thought, “If there’s any chance we’ll come back to it, I’ll just put a couple of little bits in” which as luck would have it, I was allowed to considerably expand upon and embroider when I came back and did the prequel and the sequel.
How did the novel come about? Was that connected to having written the adaptation or was that two separate tracks, Big Finish and novel writing?
It’s two separate tracks with a connection really. When I came to adapt it, obviously you have to read stuff really closely; you’re not reading for pleasure, you’re reading to see the architecture of the book.
It’s one of the great oddities, isn’t it? Stoker never wrote a sequel to Dracula, particularly towards the end of his life. I know Dracula wasn’t a huge smash hit in its immediate publication but I still think it’s strange that he wrote other things and didn’t come back to it. If you read the original books there are almost hints and seeds of a possible sequel in there and there have been many other continuations and sequels but I thought, let’s try and do a really authentic book. What if Stoker, instead of going away and writing The Lair of the White Worm and all those other books, had written a big bulky novel in, if you’ll excuse the pun, the same vein?
So did the seed of Dracula’s Child come from that architectural read or did you have to go back in separately to look for the inspiration?
No, it was as soon as I re-read the novel and was writing the adaptation that it occurred to me and I started working on it. Just as a side project really amongst the other things I do. It was about four years work, the novel. So it’s quite a project.
It’s not exactly the world’s shortest novel.
No, it’s pleasingly chunky, it’s definitely the longest thing I’ve written. It’s good, I like a big chunky novel. You can use it as a doorstop or a paperweight as well.
You also did a number of other adaptations for Big Finish. Has there ever been any talk of doing anything else with Frankenstein?
I’d love to. I’m really proud of everything I’ve done for Big Finish but I think particularly the literary adaptations, the Holmes stuff and the H.G Wells, and Frankenstein.
I think Frankenstein is probably a slightly more idiosyncratic adaptation than some of the others but it came out really well. Part of me would love to do Frankenstein vs Dracula for Big Finish, if anyone’s interested…
That’ll be like Alien vs Predator: whoever wins we lose.
If I remember rightly, didn’t you put little links in between your H.G. Wells adaptations?
I did, yes. A whole bunch of us did H.G. Wells stories and I just put a couple of things into mine. There’s also a link with one of the Holmes stories, which is the Christmas special we did. We had a very direct link to one of the H.G. Wells adaptations.
Griffin’s in that, isn’t he?
That’s right, yes. Played by Blake Ritson. So, kind of quietly without really telling anyone and without anyone noticing, I’ve been putting a few links in the background that could be tied together one day, somehow.
Do you find that sort of thing just “falls off the pen” and if it gets through the edit process it does, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t? Or do you find yourself writing yourself to a place where you can put that in? Are they happenstance or do you actually manipulate so that you can get those little lollipops in?
I think a bit of both. The kinds of stories that we’re telling, they just lend themselves to continuation, they ask for sequels and prequels and continuations in one form or another. So I can’t resist dropping them in but sometimes they just crop up. There was a little link at the very end of the first Holmes box set we did, The Ordeals of Sherlock Holmes. It was a little teaser scene right at the end, which I remember we talked half jokingly about doing something with in the future but that would be something completely different. So yes, it comes organically out of the process really.
And of course, for Big Finish, prequels and sequels are bread and butter on the Doctor Who range. You’ve written quite a few for those. I loved the Romanov story.
Oh thank you.
So much felt right about Yekaterinburg and what was going there and the personalities involved. And again, we’re in the same sort of period.
I suppose it is, isn’t it? But it feels completely different, I think, to what was happening in England at the time.
I’m glad you enjoyed that; I think one of the things Big Finish does really well is authenticity. Let’s try and do this absolutely as authentically as we can. That was a story that came in for some criticism online but I was very much thinking, OK, how would the Doctor Who production team 1963/1964 have told that story? And that was my best guess of trying to be as authentic as possible.
Of course, at that point wasn’t the fake Anastasia still alive in the 60s?
I think she probably was, wasn’t she? Yes.
I think she died in the 70s. [It was actually 1984 she died.]
Obviously writing for the first Doctor is very different from writing for the fifth or later; do you have a particular Doctor you like writing for because of the nature of the stories?
That’s a good question. You’re so lucky when you write for Big Finish because of the actors you get to write for.
I think David Bradley is a terrific first Doctor and again very close in many ways to the part whilst also being his own performance, so that was fine but that’s not my era of Doctor Who. It’s an attempt to do a reconstruction.
Sylvester McCoy is my Doctor in terms of when I was watching the show as a child, that era and the New Adventures era.
Tom Baker as well was obviously an absolute treat to write for; I did one story for him. I’ve just done a short Doctor Who actually which is coming out as part of Shadow of the Daleks.
Doctor Who’s really hard to get right. It’s such a particular formula and I really take my hat off and admire some of the writers Big Finish has who write a lot of Doctor Who. People like Matt Fitton, John Dorney, James Goss who really write a huge amount of Doctor Who stories which nonetheless always feel fresh and energetic but it’s really hard to do.
I think probably the Peter Davison that’s coming out – a hostage to fortune here – is probably my best Doctor Who because it’s just a very short standalone piece. I haven’t heard it yet but fingers crossed for that one.
What do you think makes it your best?
Well, what’s hard to get right is the proper, what I’d call – which always sounds slightly derogatory but isn’t intended to – the meat and potatoes Doctor Who story, I think that’s the hardest form of Doctor Who. Mid season, doesn’t advance the arc, if there is such a thing (which obviously there wasn’t for most of its life). It’s just a story that gets you from A to Z with no big departures or arrivals or anything like that, that’s the hardest form. I had a go at that for the third Doctor with Operation Hellfire, an attempt at doing a very straightforward adventure story.
In some ways it’s probably easier to do the slightly strange more off the wall gimmicky ones, which the Peter Davison one definitely is because it has a particular conceit – it’s a phone in radio show and the Doctor is the host. It’s probably easier to pull off which is maybe why I think it’s my best pass.
Are there literary characters that you haven’t had a chance to write either audio or in prose that you’d really love to have a go at?
Oh definitely yes, there are always characters like that. I would have loved to have done more of the H.G. Wells stuff, particularly now that’s all out of copyright, to revisit some of those stories. I would love to have a crack at some of the Edgar Allan Poe stories, there are some very underused elements in that. He has a detective of course who’s very underused in fiction.
Professor Challenger, Arthur Conan Doyle’s second greatest creation. I think he is a great character but perhaps hasn’t been put in great books. I think even the most ardent Challenger fan would say that those are not Doyle’s best works.
No, they’re pulp fiction.
Yes.
When the World Screamed, there are a few moments in that that are quite lyrical and then it becomes basically twenty years too early Flash Gordon-esque escapades.
Yes and a very odd final novel, which is a weird spiritualist gospel almost, The Land of Mist.
What do you read for pleasure?
All sorts really. Particularly if you want to be a writer and have some sort of career writing professionally you need to read as widely as possible. Having said that, I became a father last year and I’ve done very little reading for pleasure since but yes absolutely read as widely as you can. I think the most striking thing I’ve read lately is the new Susanna Clarke novel, Piranesi. It’s much shorter than Jonathan Strange.
The Bible is much shorter than Jonathan Strange!
That’s probably the best thing I’ve read lately which is absolutely in my wheelhouse. A really intelligent high end, I think you’d call it a fantasy. I’m often interested in stuff that blends genre and she certainly does that in this new novel.
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