The Gunfighters is my least favorite Hartnell story on tv. It’s not bad, but I do consider it weaker than most of his other outings. So imagine my surprise when the randomizer landed on the novelization for it.

I would argue that this adaptation is better written than the episode it’s based off of. The plot is more or less the same, but the characterization is stronger, the tone is more consistent, and there’s no blasted song nor fake western accents to sit through.

The story is written almost like a parody of Mark Twain, if Mark Twain had a darker and more violent sense of humor. The book reads like how Revelation of the Daleks watches. It’s a black comedy through and through, where death is common, casual, and caviler.

Almost too caviler at times. I personally did not care for the additional scene of the Doctor accidentally shooting some bystanders, presumably killing them, and the story treating it as no big deal. The overall story is well written, but it suffers from being saddled to a preexisting, family friendly series where we have established characters that simply would not behave in the way that they do on the page.

While it was an interesting read, the actual filmed story, for all its faults, feels more like Doctor Who.