Let’s start with the most obvious thing here. Dicks adds a lovely top and tail to the story that builds on the major trait of the Hinchcliffe era. As Phil Sandifer notes, ‘The Hinchcliffe era did scary by showing the potency within the dying embers of old myths’, and the prologue sets Sutekh up in this mould beautifully, right from its trademark Dicksian first line: ‘In a galaxy unimaginably distant from ours, on a planet called Phaester Osiris, there arose a race so powerful that they became like gods’. At long last, the Jackanory-style voice that we’ve been (haphazardly) charting in ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably…?’ is getting harnessed to tap into storytelling’s oral traditions and hint at the mythic.

As befits an ancient myth, the Osirians, as the book rechristens them, mysteriously ‘vanished from our cosmos’ but left behind them a murky trace which was fundamental to human development, thanks to ‘Egyptian culture [being] founded on the Osirian pattern’. There’s also the hint of a Da Vinci Code-style secret history, what with a ‘secret cult’ dedicated to guarding the buried truth.

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The epilogue reinforces the conspiracy theory vibe, with Sarah investigating how the events of the story were recorded by history. Things start to look dodgy when the news clipping relates that ‘Marcus Scarman […] had just returned from a successful archaeological expedition to Egypt’ – how would anyone know it was successful considering he died on entering the tomb and everyone else involved was slaughtered running away from it? As his body arrives in the UK by swirly effect tunnel, it seems unlikely that the animated cadaver ever left the pyramid either, which would at least have allowed for some sightings of Scarman after his departure in search of a rumoured pyramid, the existence of which ‘Many had scoffed at’. Especially odd is the statement that ‘investigations in Cairo revealed that Professor Scarman had left some time ago’ when presumably investigations in Cairo would have in fact revealed no one had seen him since he headed off on a wild duck chase with a bunch of locals who’d all either been found dead in the desert or mysteriously disappeared. I guess there’s a record of loads of stuff getting shipped to the Priory from Egypt, from which it could be construed he’d had a successful visit, and we never find out the exact details of the letter Namin showed Collins, which might have stated he’d been successful and was returning soon, but it does suggest the article’s been written by someone who knows more than he’s letting on and this is a deliberate cover-up. And just like so many a cover-up, an innocent sop is held to be responsible, blame for the fire placed on ‘one of the many advanced scientific devices […] installed in the Lodge’ by the lovely Laurence Scarman.

This isn’t especially different to what used to happen in all the UNIT stories, when they’d put out stories to explain away the events around various alien incursions, but that was when they’d saved the day. The focus here isn’t on the triumph over Sutekh and how close the Earth came to disaster but on ‘The terrible events’ that became ‘a deplorable but soon forgotten tragedy’ – it feels like the ‘sacrifice’ of the likes of Laurence has been effaced, discarded, even as Sarah reflects how they ‘had not been in vain’ to her ‘unchanged […] twentieth century’.

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The other thing the prologue does is subtly tweak Sutekh. Suddenly, he’s not just ‘Sutekh the Destroyer’ for whom ‘evil is my good’ but the bitter younger brother, devoted only to toppling Horus, whose ‘jealousy and hatred’ eventually ‘turned to madness’. His desire to kill everything is essentially paranoia because, once he’s taken Horus’s place, it’s the only way he believes he can remain secure ‘as unchallenged ruler’ – he can’t trust anything not to work on overthrowing him as he will have overthrown Horus. As a result, all of Sutekh’s rants become a reminder madness, his eager anticipation of freedom, for example, picturing the day when ‘All the humans... birds, fish, reptiles, plants […] shall perish’, echoing his first realisation that ‘all sentient life was his mortal enemy. Not just the more intelligent life-forms, but animals, reptiles, insects, plants’. Dicks doesn’t even have to change the script much to achieve this, Sutekh’s rant on TV relishing the time when ‘the humans, animals, birds, fish, reptiles […] shall perish’ – it’s only really the insistent hatred of plants that he adds.

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Sutekh’s not the only one to get a boost to his characterisation. Ernie Clements, who seems to exist just so someone’s still getting chased by mummies while the Doctor, Sarah and Laurence are snared up in exposition and Tardis travel, gets a bit of background for one. He’s not just a poacher who sneaks around the Scarmans’ land, he sees ‘himself as the Scarmans’ unpaid gamekeeper’, providing a service as well as making a bob or two. That this is something of a vocation for him makes it all the sadder that his death sees his livelihood turned on him: ‘He felt like the fox at the end of a very long chase. For the first time in his life he felt some sympathy for the animals he hunted and trapped’.

Ernie’s behaviour is all a bit less erratic in the novelisation thanks to the insight into why he does stuff. He might mutter about these ‘Murdering swine’ before stalking after Marcus with his shotgun on TV but, in the novelisation, he goes through clear stages that build to his opening fire on a person. At first he’s simply ‘determined to track down the murderer of’ Doctor Warlock but it’s only when he witnesses ‘Another body!’ that he decides he’s ‘now […] dealing with a dangerous murderer’, suggesting that what had started as a desire to seek revenge for ‘his friend’ has become fear of a psychopath on a killing spree. Even then, it takes ‘a sudden surge of furious rage’ for Ernie to actually shoot and he’s immediately ‘appalled by what he had done’.

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Marcus Scarman and Ibrahim Namin are tweaked even more by Dicks’s adaptation. To start with the latter, I don’t think I’d ever really understood his background from the TV episodes (I don’t know if that’s a flaw on my part or theirs). Here, he’s explicitly ‘the High Priest of the Cult of the Black Pyramid’, and Sutekh clearly distorts the purpose of that cult, saying ‘the writings were mistaken’ and ‘the opening of the Pyramid was a part of [the Great Ones’] plan’, to persuade Namin to follow him. I mean, he’s clearly still not a nice man, what with slaughtering and burying ‘Ahmed and the terrified labourers’ and his quickly harbouring dreams of becoming ‘ruler of the world’, but there is some pathos in the way he’s so easily twisted to serve the very purpose he and his ancestors across ‘thousands upon thousands of years’ were dedicated to preventing before being summarily strangled and burnt to death. That said, you do have to wonder a bit about how easily he’s tricked when Sarah, whose knowledge of Egyptian mythology is based purely on some research she did long ago for a single article, instantly identifies Sutekh as the enemy of Horus, who we can assume was the goodie, what with being ‘the god of light’. You’d have thought Namin might be a little more suspicious. Still, you’ve got to feel sorry for the way he’s ended up in the UK, homesick and surrounded by ‘hostility and suspicion’.

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Marcus Scarman comes off worse. Bluntly, he’s a cock – he watches ‘impatiently’ while his ‘labourers’ do all the work and then pushes them aside when he doesn’t need them, he’s too ‘absorbed’ in his own pursuit of glory to notice or take heed of his companion’s fears, it appears he doesn’t even carry his own lantern, having to call on Ahmed when he wants to look at something, and he dismisses his terrified sidekick’s terror as just the reaction of a ‘Superstitious savage’. Crashing in on Sutekh’s just what he deserves.

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This is, of course, a significant improvement over the TV episodes. Phil Sandifer identifies a failure to clear out the attitudes of his source material as Robert Holmes’s great flaw, and ‘Pyramids of Mars’ is one of the stories in which this line of criticism starts to come to a head in TARDIS Eruditorum. The specifics of the complaint against ‘Pyramids’ is really about its portrayal of Namin (already slightly improved here) but it’s also part of the build up to the discussion of ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’, in which the point is sort of that the show has become so arrogant under Hinchcliffe and Holmes that it sees the business of avoiding the racist stereotypes inherent in doing Fu Manchu v Sherlock Holmes as beneath it. Among the several defences of the story Sandifer tackles is the idea that the Victorian Brits are being satirised as sharply as the Chinese, a defence he dismisses on the grounds that ‘a loving poke’ at historic foibles and ‘anti-Chinese sentiment’ based on ‘yellow peril stereotypes’ are really playing in different leagues.

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Now, I’d have expected Dicks to be rather more vulnerable to this flaw than Holmes – he’s a man I would suspect of having not just a soft spot but an active approval for the starchy Edwardian types that populate ‘Pyramids on Mars’. Instead, we get Namin’s observation upon the ‘unthinking arrogance’ of the ‘typical English country gentleman’ and everything we’ve seen of them, especially of Marcus, so far backs him up. And Marcus is introduced, resplendent in his ‘white tropical suit, with stiff collar and public school tie’, as typical of ‘Englishmen abroad’ and the inappropriate and irrelevant ‘standards’ they held themselves to. As far as Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars is concerned, Edwardian Brits are lazy, rude and ridiculous – that goes a bit beyond ‘a loving poke’ [all this could just be in my head, though Sarah describes Marcus’s death as the ‘most tragic of all’].

Oddly, the greatest beneficiary of this is Laurence, even as Dicks leaves his material largely unchanged. His desperation to help his brother is even more kind, caring and decent when that brother is such a hateful git. Perhaps in deference to lovely Laurence, Dicks dials back the hints that Marcus might still exist behind Sutekh’s control of his corpse, most obviously at the end when I’m sure we get a hint of the character’s own voice cheering ‘free at last’ where in the book it’s most definitely the ‘voice of Sutekh that came from his lips’ but also in a slight addition to the dialogue where Marcus looks at the photo of him and his brother as kids. On TV, having seemed to be breaking the control, stuttering ‘I was Marcus’, the spell breaks when he declares ‘No! I am Sutekh’, but in the book Dicks has Marcus repeat the line with a stress on ‘was’ to emphasise the man is dead. There’s still evidence that Sutekh has access to Marcus’s ‘long-buried’ memories, as when he starts moving towards the priest hole where the Doctor, Sarah and Laurence are hiding, but there’s no suggestion, despite Laurence’s attempts, that he’s still in there and could ever have been saved.

All in all then, this feels like Dicks is back giving it his all, breaking up the serial nature of the TV episodes, adding in through-lines to bind the books together, neatening up bits of characterisation and even turning Robert Holmes’s blind adoption of outdated attitudes into a commentary on the sins of the Edwardian era. Which is just as well really because we’re not going to get more than a one-book break from him now until Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit and Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World in roughly 38 books’ time (a state of affairs that actually started five books back with The Revenge of the Cybermen). Let’s hope he can keep it up.