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Telos Doctor Who Novellas #9
Doctor Who: The Cabinet of Light
Where is the Doctor? Everyone is hunting him. Honore Lechasseur, a time sensitive 'fixer, ' is hired by mystery woman Emily Blandish to find him. Lechasseur discovers that the Doctor is, in fact, a semi-mythical figure who has appeared off and on throughout Earth's history. But what is his connection with London in 1949? And why is a mysterious group seeking 'the cabinet of light' -- a device somehow connected with the Doctor.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 19, 2017
This is an intriguing book - it is most certainly a Doctor Who story however the majority of the story happens with the Doctor "off screen" and with the story focusing on someone else.
Now this book comes from the small independent press Telos and comes from an intriguing time of Doctor Who. The series was off the air and BBC was involved with some creative licenses of the books. I am no expert on this (so please be gentle when correcting) but I believe that Telos had the rights for hardback books while the rights for paperbacks were elsewhere (by which I mean over the years several publishers had printed books in the series).
As a result some authors have had far greater exposure (and fame) for their Doctor Who books than others - Daniel O'Mahony being one of them.
What you have a dark noir style story set just after the second world war where the story centres around a war veteran Honoré Lechasseur who is not your usual choice of hero.
From a series where "monster of the week" is almost a constant trap an author has to avoid at all cost what you have here is an imaginative and creative book, a great read and one I was lucky to find.
But there is more - this book is also the spring board of the Time Hunter series where Honoré Lechasseur embark on his own adventures but more of that to come.
Now this book comes from the small independent press Telos and comes from an intriguing time of Doctor Who. The series was off the air and BBC was involved with some creative licenses of the books. I am no expert on this (so please be gentle when correcting) but I believe that Telos had the rights for hardback books while the rights for paperbacks were elsewhere (by which I mean over the years several publishers had printed books in the series).
As a result some authors have had far greater exposure (and fame) for their Doctor Who books than others - Daniel O'Mahony being one of them.
What you have a dark noir style story set just after the second world war where the story centres around a war veteran Honoré Lechasseur who is not your usual choice of hero.
From a series where "monster of the week" is almost a constant trap an author has to avoid at all cost what you have here is an imaginative and creative book, a great read and one I was lucky to find.
But there is more - this book is also the spring board of the Time Hunter series where Honoré Lechasseur embark on his own adventures but more of that to come.
April 18, 2022
Coming to wilderness-era Doctor Who books often make for curious reading. Sometimes they feel like artifacts from another age, trying to define the series in a time before its 21st-century regeneration on-screen. Other times they feel like prototypes for things that came later, pre-echoing things that have come to pass in Modern Who. Reading The Cabinet of Light, one of the entries in the Telos range of novellas given a second life with some minor edits as part of their Time Hunter series, offers all of the above and so much more.
One of the secrets of Doctor Who's longevity is its ability to adapt to seemingly any genre. In the case of this novella, Daniel O'Mahony brought Who into noir. Or, perhaps more of neo-noir in the vain of the seventies and eighties when the genre got a second life in an era without production codes and more lenient standards. It's hard not to feel that influence on the depiction of 1949 London and the characters that populate it, from a Nazi-affiliated stage magician to a landlady abusing her amnesiac tenant for not helping her get money from journalists. It's not a pleasant world by any means, one that former American GI turned "fixer" Honoré Lechasseur navigates the reader through, the potentially moral, yet imperfect, man on a journey into this seedy world.
Into all of that, O'Mahony drops the genre elements. In particular, there's the eventual villain and their henchman, the organic/mechanical hybrid Abraxas, described as eight feet tall and as someone who "stank of oil and musty dinosaur hide." The final third or so of the novella, as O'Mahony builds his narrative toward its climax, has the feel of a Lovecraftian nightmare, a sense of lingering horrors and wonders on the edges of human understanding. This is recognizably a Doctor Who story, even in the Time Hunter reprint where the Time Lord becomes "Dr. Smith," and the description of a Blue Box is impossible to miss.
And that's where the feeling of Modern Who kicks in. With Lechasseur as the main character, In many ways, Cabinet of Light feels like a precursor to the Doctor-lite episodes, particularly Steven Moffat's acclaimed 2007 episode Blink. This novella isn't a story about the Doctor or their companions, indeed, the Doctor barely features in it and is so vaguely described you could put one of many incarnations into this story (personally, I heard him speaking with the voice of Paul McGann). The Cabinet of Light is the story of what it's like to be someone on the edges of one of the Doctor's adventures, a sentiment summed up neatly at one point:
"He thinks he flits through the world leaving no waste and no tracks behind him, but he does. You're stepping in them."
How O'Mahony handles the Doctor likewise pre-figures Moffat. There's a mythic feeling to how the Doctor (or, rather, Dr. Smith) is referred to and seen throughout, a phantom or trickster running throughout history. There's an intriguing re-telling of the events of An Unearthly Child, for example, early on that presents it as a legend with all the details off by varying degrees, which wonderfully demonstrates this approach. How far some would go to meet him or confront him, too, is here almost a full decade before the likes of The Pandorica Opens or A Good Man Goes to War. Cabinet of Light presents variations on those ideas, and in a self-contained story that crams so much into the page count of a Target novelization, making it a read that was ahead of its time in many ways.
This is perhaps why, reading it in spring 2022, it resonates so much. No mean feat for a nearly 20-year-old book. Plus, thanks to its becoming the basis for the Telos Time Hunter series, it's part of a select group of Wilderness Era novels that are in print once more. Oh, the more overt references might have been tinkered with, but are still so blatant you can recognize them outright.
So do yourself a favor, and give this a read.
One of the secrets of Doctor Who's longevity is its ability to adapt to seemingly any genre. In the case of this novella, Daniel O'Mahony brought Who into noir. Or, perhaps more of neo-noir in the vain of the seventies and eighties when the genre got a second life in an era without production codes and more lenient standards. It's hard not to feel that influence on the depiction of 1949 London and the characters that populate it, from a Nazi-affiliated stage magician to a landlady abusing her amnesiac tenant for not helping her get money from journalists. It's not a pleasant world by any means, one that former American GI turned "fixer" Honoré Lechasseur navigates the reader through, the potentially moral, yet imperfect, man on a journey into this seedy world.
Into all of that, O'Mahony drops the genre elements. In particular, there's the eventual villain and their henchman, the organic/mechanical hybrid Abraxas, described as eight feet tall and as someone who "stank of oil and musty dinosaur hide." The final third or so of the novella, as O'Mahony builds his narrative toward its climax, has the feel of a Lovecraftian nightmare, a sense of lingering horrors and wonders on the edges of human understanding. This is recognizably a Doctor Who story, even in the Time Hunter reprint where the Time Lord becomes "Dr. Smith," and the description of a Blue Box is impossible to miss.
And that's where the feeling of Modern Who kicks in. With Lechasseur as the main character, In many ways, Cabinet of Light feels like a precursor to the Doctor-lite episodes, particularly Steven Moffat's acclaimed 2007 episode Blink. This novella isn't a story about the Doctor or their companions, indeed, the Doctor barely features in it and is so vaguely described you could put one of many incarnations into this story (personally, I heard him speaking with the voice of Paul McGann). The Cabinet of Light is the story of what it's like to be someone on the edges of one of the Doctor's adventures, a sentiment summed up neatly at one point:
"He thinks he flits through the world leaving no waste and no tracks behind him, but he does. You're stepping in them."
How O'Mahony handles the Doctor likewise pre-figures Moffat. There's a mythic feeling to how the Doctor (or, rather, Dr. Smith) is referred to and seen throughout, a phantom or trickster running throughout history. There's an intriguing re-telling of the events of An Unearthly Child, for example, early on that presents it as a legend with all the details off by varying degrees, which wonderfully demonstrates this approach. How far some would go to meet him or confront him, too, is here almost a full decade before the likes of The Pandorica Opens or A Good Man Goes to War. Cabinet of Light presents variations on those ideas, and in a self-contained story that crams so much into the page count of a Target novelization, making it a read that was ahead of its time in many ways.
This is perhaps why, reading it in spring 2022, it resonates so much. No mean feat for a nearly 20-year-old book. Plus, thanks to its becoming the basis for the Telos Time Hunter series, it's part of a select group of Wilderness Era novels that are in print once more. Oh, the more overt references might have been tinkered with, but are still so blatant you can recognize them outright.
So do yourself a favor, and give this a read.
June 21, 2023
Honoré Lechasseur is a 'fixer', who works on the grey edges of the law. When Emily Blandish hires him to find her husband, Dr. Smith, he soon finds himself caught up in a strange web of half truths and is unsure whether the people around him are who they say they are.
O'Mahony's 'Cabinet of Light' sets up the 'Time Hunter' series with this nice little mystery investigating a man who has both never existed and never existed. The Doctor recognises Lechasseur as a Time Sensitive and lets him on his way with very little explanation, which sets up another mystery for readers to invest in. Who, or what, is Honoré Lechasseur?
O'Mahony's 'Cabinet of Light' sets up the 'Time Hunter' series with this nice little mystery investigating a man who has both never existed and never existed. The Doctor recognises Lechasseur as a Time Sensitive and lets him on his way with very little explanation, which sets up another mystery for readers to invest in. Who, or what, is Honoré Lechasseur?
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October 5, 2013Of all the great Doctor Who writers, Daniel O'Mahony gets talked about the least, perhaps because his output's so slender - two great novels during the first half of the wilderness years, then nothing. And both of those novels were strange and creepy affairs, not really the sort of thing that could feed into the teatime show, which may be delightfully eerie at times, but certainly has no place for historicals in which the past celebrity is de Sade. This, alas, is not quite on that level; it may not help that it's a backdoor pilot for Time Hunter, the spinoff in which even I have never been much interested, and we see a lot more of its star, time sensitive detective Honoré Lechasseur, than we do of the Doctor. Still, O'Mahony at least uses this as the basis for a story in which the leads mostly want to be the Doctor, or are mistaken by each other for him, while the (unspecified) Doctor operates in the margins, outclassing them all. Any longer and it would have been wearying; at 120 pages, it just about works.
December 3, 2013
That was freaky. I couldn't even tell which Doctor that was. Some of the clues had me thinking maybe it was Eight (somewhere between Doctor Who: Casualties of War and Doctor Who: The Turing Test while he was stranded and amnesiac). Then again it could've been an attempt at a completely new Doctor. In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter to the story anyway.
The main character was really good for a Doctor Who novel. I really cared about him. Really I suppose this wasn't much of a Doctor Who novel at all, but it was well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
The main character was really good for a Doctor Who novel. I really cared about him. Really I suppose this wasn't much of a Doctor Who novel at all, but it was well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
December 21, 2025
First published in 2003 as part of a doctor who novella range this is an edited version published to link into the time hunter series reprints. Why an edited version? Well the original book featured an unspecified doctor and the TARDIS. When telos lost the rights to published doctor who books they created the time hunter series featuring two characters fom this original doctor who novella, Emily Blandish and Honorè Lechasseur. Eighteen years later telos have reprinted the eleven time hunter novellas and as a bonus have presented this book as book zero, making twelve time hunter books, the first time cabinet of light has been published as part of the series. The edits are minor. The doctor becomes dr. Smith and the TARDIS is unnamed. Otherwise the plot is unchanged. I didn't read the time hunter series when published but have decided to read them now. I enjoyed the original of this book and thought I might as well have the full set in the same format. As it's been eighteen years since I read the original I thought I'd better read the story again before reading the main series.
I wasn't impressed by the authors previous doctor who books (two for virgin books) but I did like this one. The story is good and the writing sharper. The characters are good and it still stands up after all these years. A good start to the series, both in the 2003 original and in this 2020 version.
I wasn't impressed by the authors previous doctor who books (two for virgin books) but I did like this one. The story is good and the writing sharper. The characters are good and it still stands up after all these years. A good start to the series, both in the 2003 original and in this 2020 version.
August 6, 2023
I'm disappointed that the description for the audiobook in Overdrive/Libby doesn't include the relationship to doctor who. Due to the lack of that, I got it into my head that this story is something that was pitched to the BBC who rejected it so they tried to publish it as a standalone, particularly when the cabinet is suddenly referred to as a blue box then goes back to being a cabinet again; like someone did find and replace on the script.
It spends 3/4 of the runtime establishing things that a doctor who fan will recognize in 5 seconds.
If the series drops the connection to the doctor and stuck with the actual main character I'll probably continue to see where it goes.
It spends 3/4 of the runtime establishing things that a doctor who fan will recognize in 5 seconds.
If the series drops the connection to the doctor and stuck with the actual main character I'll probably continue to see where it goes.
April 5, 2013
An intriguing entry in the Telos Books series of Doctor Who novellas, in which an American soldier turned London spiv is hired to find the Doctor...something that draws him into a web of truth, lies, occultism, and revelations that reveal his own talents and change his entire life. I'm not sure which Doctor this is supposed to be -- perhaps a future regeneration -- which makes for an interesting and unexplained mystery at the heart of the story. Then again, the TARDIS doesn't seem to exactly behave the way one would expect.
This novella was later revised to become the opening chapter of the Time Hunter series of books from Phantom Films, which sees Lachasseur embracing who he is and moving backwards and forwards in time, solving mysteries, and coming to grips with the mystery of the elusive Doctor Smith.
This novella was later revised to become the opening chapter of the Time Hunter series of books from Phantom Films, which sees Lachasseur embracing who he is and moving backwards and forwards in time, solving mysteries, and coming to grips with the mystery of the elusive Doctor Smith.
September 5, 2016
I listened to the audio version of this which had all the Doctor Who references stripped out. Made the Doctor character much spookier and more weird and I spent a lot of the time trying to work out which actor was potentially supposed to be playing him. Okay story otherwise, not sure I was terribly taken by Honoré as a lead character
March 22, 2010
Outstanding.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews