UNIT: The Vaughn Identity

There’s a lot left open at the end of The Invasion. Tobias Vaughn’s story – and the whole International Electromatics set-up – is very layered and detailed. We see repeatedly in Doctor Who that once the main threat is dealt with the Doctor is quick to leave.

As a character, he was in a class of his own – due very much to Kevin Stoney’s bravura performance, but also because of Derrick Sherwin’s script and Douglas Camfield’s direction. We know Vaughn was killed at the end of The Invasion, and left hanging over the railings. I wanted to find a way to get more from the character without pretending that he hadn’t really died on screen, which would have felt like a cop-out. I also wanted to work purely within the situations and concepts that Derrick Sherwin had created, to give my story the sense that it was finishing off, or tidying up any strands left hanging loose after the TV story had concluded.

We’ve got a wider cast of UNIT regulars to take our books forward. Readers have already been introduced to many of them in the two UNIT Files short story collections (Operation Wildcat, 2022, and Operation Fall-Out, 2023) but The Vaughn Identity allows us to see how they were impacted by the events of The Invasion, making it more of a shared experience. As the first novel of the range, it’s important to introduce and involve new regular characters in the action and the storyline and not simply as an info-dump roll call.

There are a few minor nods to the Lethbridge-Stewart range, but nothing that would faze new readers. We want this to be a jumping-on point, a fresh start whilst also quietly acknowledging the achievement of the previous range.