It has been announced that the writer Henry Lincoln has died, at the age of 91. With his writing partner Mervyn Haisman (d.2010) he wrote three Doctor Who stories - The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Dominators.
As such, he was partly responsible for the Yeti, the Great Intelligence and the character of Lethbridge Stewart. Lincoln and Haisman retained the rights to the Brigadier.
A third Great Intelligence / Yeti story - "The Laird of McCrimmon" - would have written out Jamie from the series, after he returned to take over his ancestral seat. It might possibly have been the one to write Patrick Troughton out of the series as well. However, the writers fell out with Script Editor Derrick Sherwin and Producer Peter Bryant over The Dominators - to the extent that they had their names removed from it. It is credited to Norman Ashby - a name derived from their respective fathers-in-law.
The arguments centred on the rewriting of the story, reducing it from 6 to 5 episodes, and the potential marketing of the Quarks.
Lincoln was born Henry Soskin and followed an acting career before taking up writing. Interested in archaeology he was appearing in a production which centred around Egyptology, and complained about how inaccurate it was. He was asked if he could improve these sections, and so did his first writing for drama.
In 1969 he was visiting France and came across a place called Rennes-le-Chateau, which was the scene of a mystery - the local priest supposedly having come across a buried treasure. This was the starting point for the bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, co-written with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. A court case to prove that this had been pilfered wholesale for The Da Vinci Code failed.
Lincoln's death is sadly significant as far as Doctor Who goes, as he was the last surviving 1960's writer.
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