The Ghosts of Gralstead

Philip Hinchcliffe Presents #1.1

Released: 5 September 2014

Listened: 3/31/22

This story, the first of the Phillip Hinchcliffe collection, leans in hard on the tropes that era is famous for. It’s a ghost story with a scientific explanation, set in Victorian England, with strong secondary characters. Leela even mentions wanting to see Jago and Litefoot again, but they’re 40 years too early. Plot-wise, it bounces around somewhat, from ghost story to Africa to gods in epic combat, and yet it’s paced quite well, so it doesn’t feel over-long. The origin of the bad guys is never fully explained, nor their motivations, but that’s also appropriate to the era. Leela does pretty well in Africa, better than she did in the Amazon in the last story. She also gets to do a more-than-usual amount of fighting, and isn’t at all hesitant to kill if she thinks it’s warranted. A large component of the story is a macguffin that can heal or even resurrect the dead, which allows for more dramatic cliffhangers in which our main characters actually do die, but cheapens it by making resurrection easy. You’d think there’d be some psychological repercussions to that, but apparently not. Also of note are the bit characters: an unscrupulous poor-house matron, and a pair of body-snatchers that fit the Robert Holmes mode quite nicely. A decent story, especially for a six-parter.