by Kim Newman
I’ve used Colonel Sebastian Moran, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The Empty House’, as the narrator of a series of stories (‘A Shambles in Belgravia’, ‘A Volume in Vermillion’, ‘The Red Planet League’ and others) set in something like the version of the underworld seen here (but without vampires). These should eventually fix up into a book called The Hound of the D’Urbervilles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: MATTERS OF NO IMPORTANCE
In his lecture to the company, Oscar Wilde is, of course, quoting himself. The long sentences on criticism come from his essay ‘The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing’.
CHAPTER TWELVE: DAWN OF THE DEAD
Beatrice Potter. A clarification – this is not the authoress Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit, etc), but the Fabian socialist better remembered under her married name, Beatrice Webb.
Sir Hugh Greene’s anthology The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970), which had several sequels and was adapted as a British TV series, highlighted a number of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who get a name-check here. The creators of the other sleuths are William Hope Hodgson (Carnacki, the ghost finder), Ernest Bramah (the blind detective Max Carrados), our friend Arthur Morrison (Martin Hewitt) and Jacques Futrelle (Professor Van Dusen). Cotford, like Kate Reed, is a character Bram Stoker intended to fit into Dracula, but never found a place for. Hawkshaw, once well-enough-known for the name to be a synonym for detective the way Shylock is a synonym for loan shark, comes from an earlier generation, appearing in Tom Taylor’s 1863 play The Ticket-of-Leave Man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: STRANGE FITS OF PASSION
... like a Drury Lane ghost... The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, built in 1812, was known in the later nineteenth century for melodrama, spectacle and special effects. Seward is referring to the wailing, shroud-dragging ghosts who appeared in the plays rather than any of the several spectres reputed to haunt the building.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE HOUSE IN CLEVELAND STREET
Orlando is a character made up from whole cloth. He’s not the sex-changing hero of the Virginia Woolf novel, the marmalade cat, that Sam Kydd TV reprobate or any other Orlando of fiction. I probably should have used a name not already attached to so many people, but didn’t. To make up for it, this Orlando features – in a different alternate world – in my story ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A TURNING POINT
Louis Bauer – alias Lewis Bower, Jack Manningham, Paul Mallen and Gregory Anton – comes from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light, alias Gaslight and Angel Street. He’s the fellow who methodically drives his wife mad while obsessively searching for the rubies hidden in the house next door. At the end of the piece, he’s completely insane, which explains what he was doing in Purfleet Asylum. I particularly like Anton Walbrook’s performance in Thorold Dickinson’s film version.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: SILVER
The Reid design. John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger, was able to finance his wandering, masked crusade – by the way, how come the lone ranger has a sidekick? – because he had discovered a fabulous silver-mine. The original point of using silver bullets was that taking life shouldn’t be cheap, but since he had an unlimited source of the things it’s somewhat obscure.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MR VAMPIRE
The Chinese movie tradition of the hopping vampire (jiang shi or geung si) is one of the odder strains of vampirism. I saw Ricky Lau’s Mr Vampire (1985) at a cinema in London’s Chinatown before the film and its many spinoffs, sequels and variants had made much impact outside its home territory. A lingering aftereffect of this cycle is that, from Buffy and Blade on, even Western vampires tend to know kung fu.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE POSEUR
I did plan to extend the Anno Dracula series with a vampire Western novella in which Edgar Allan Poe tracks a blood-drinking Billy the Kid. Poe features in The Bloody Red Baron to set this up because, historically, Pat Garrett was accompanied by a man named Poe when he set out to kill Billy the Kid. In Anno Dracula, I establish that Geneviève was in the Wild West at the time and knew Doc Holliday, and they would have featured too – along with Drake Robey, my favourite vampire gunslinger (from the movie Curse of the Undead) and a lot of other Wild West characters from history and fiction. The story would have been called ‘Sixteen Silver Dollars’ in reference to one of the Kid’s victims, Bob Ollinger – who, at least in a couple of film versions, threatens Billy with a shotgun loaded with ground-down coins and winds up blasted with it (‘keep the change, Bob,’ says Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun). Annoyingly, I can’t write this now because someone else has done a vampire Billy the Kid scenario. Even more annoyingly, it was Uwe Boll – in the feeble computer game-derived direct-to-DVD film Bloodrayne Deliverance.
CHAPTER TWENTY: NEW GRUB STREET
Frank Harris was once famous for his scandalous, boastful memoirs, My Life and Loves. Jack Lemmon plays him in Delmer Daves’ Cowboy (1958), but the range-riding part of his career is less remembered than his various London literary associations, which included knocking about with Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Leonard Rossiter played him in Fearless Frank, or, Tidbits From the Life of an Adventurer, a 1978 BBC TV play.
Though I still think the bit with the ‘angry little American in a rumpled white suit and a straw hat from the last decade’ is funny, I came to regret displacing this character in time because I should have saved him for Johnny Alucard, where he’d have been a better fit. Reporter Carl Kolchak appears in Jeff Rice’s novel The Kolchak Papers, source for the Richard Matheson-scripted TV movie The Night Stalker. Darren McGavin created the role and played it again in The Night Strangler and a brief TV series; Stuart Townsend took over for a muddled twenty-first century revival.
Among the pressmen at the Café de Paris are the prolific if little-remembered novelist William LeQueux, author of The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), and Robert D’Onston Stephenson, who put forward the theory that the Ripper was performing an occult rite (a theme picked up by Robert Bloch in his classic short story ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’) and has been cited himself as a suspect.
Ned, the copy-boy, comes from Howard Waldrop’s ‘The Adventure of the Grinder’s Whistle’, which advances the ‘runaway steam-driven automaton theory’. In later life, Ned – Edward Dunn Malone – is the narrator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: IN MEMORIAM
Kingstead Cemetery is usually taken as a cover name for Highgate Cemetery – the Victorian section, not the modern stretch where Karl Marx is buried – though some Dracula scholars have questioned this. My story ‘Egyptian Avenue’ (in The Man From the Diogenes Club) is also set in Kingstead.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO: GOOD-BYE, LITTLE YELLOW BIRD
Montague John Druitt. When I first read about Jack the Ripper in the early 1970s, Druitt was put forward as the most likely suspect – chiefly because he committed suicide shortly after the final murder. Subsequently, a proliferation of conspiracy theorists have sought more famous Rippers, while solid research tends to clear Druitt on the grounds that someone who stays up all night in Whitechapel committing murders shouldn’t be able to give as good an account of himself on cricket pitches half-way across the country the next day as he did (several times). A barrister and schoolmaster, the real Druitt wasn’t associated with Toynbee Hall; I put him there as a nod to Ron Pember and Denis de Marne’s musical play Jack the Ripper (which I once acted in).
The nurse comes from E.F. Benson’s often-reprinted story ‘Mrs Amworth’, which tried to get away from the dominant vampire stereotypes with an ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman villain.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX: MUSINGS AND MUTILATIONS
Marie Manning and her husband Frederick were hanged in 1849 for the murder of her lover, Patrick O’Connor. The Mannings invited O’Connor, a moneylender, to their home for dinner and killed him so they could steal a sum of money. The affair was known in the sensation press as the ‘Bermondsey Horror
’. An appalled Charles Dickens attended the double execution, and commented ‘I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun’. Swiss by birth, Mrs Manning was among the most despised of Victorian murderers, and had a lasting notoriety comparable to Ruth Ellis or Myra Hindley.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN: DR JEKYLL AND DR MOREAU
I’ve gone back to the House of Dr Jekyll in the novellas ‘Further Developments in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ and ‘A Drug on the Market’ (which is, in its way, ‘Anno Jekyll and Hyde’). Every time I look again at Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I am astonished by the precision with which the short book is put together. A fair chunk of the description in this chapter is lifted outright from Stevenson.
Prince Mamuwalde, played by William Marshall, appears in the films Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT: PAMELA
Clayton, the cabby. Readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles will recall his tangential involvement in the persecution of Sir Henry Baskerville. Readers of Tarzan Alive, by Philip José Farmer, will know much more about this surprisingly distinguished cab driver, and his relationship to John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. I freely admit that Anno Dracula is among the many books, comics and television programmes which would not exist if Farmer hadn’t written Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
Carmilla. I wanted the Karnstein girl in the book somewhere, though she is pretty definitively destroyed in LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ which takes place well before the time of Anno Dracula. One of the most interesting vampire characters before or after Dracula, her curiously passive-aggressive predation strikes me as creepier than the melodramatic rapine and seduction practised by nineteenth century male vampires. She also brings in her various film avatars in Vampyr, Blood and Roses, The Vampire Lovers, The Blood-Spattered Bride, Lust for a Vampire, etc. Though a major vampire character, Carmilla seldom shows up at the party with other monsters in stories like this: an exception is the cartoon feature The Batman vs Dracula, where Carmilla is Dracula’s soul-mate.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE: MR VAMPIRE II
I should have followed the Chinese style of sequel-titling, and called this chapter ‘New Mr Vampire’.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE: THE RAPTURES AND ROSES OF VICE
Henry Wilcox. The ‘colossus of finance’ is from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End; the Anthony Hopkins part from the Merchant-Ivory film. I like Wilcox as an epitome of Victorian hypocrisy, and have featured him also in the stories ‘Seven Stars: The Mummy’s Heart’ – where he has a run-in with Kate Reed – and ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ – where his invitation to an exclusive orgy is purloined by Colonel Sebastian Moran.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE: THE DARK KISS
General Iorga. Originally intended as a porn movie entitled The Loves of Count Iorga, Robert Kelljan’s Count Yorga – Vampire was one of a wave of dynamic, contemporary-set vampire movies which came out in the early 1970s, though Iorga/Yorga himself (Robert Quarry) is a straight Dracula knock-off, a cloaked aristocratic predator. The Count loosens up in The Return of Count Yorga, which is bigger-budgeted if less confrontational. For a while, Iorga/Yorga was the second most-famous movie vampire – though his series fizzled after the sequel. In the Anno Dracula world, I see him as the most blatant Dracula wannabe among the Carpathian clique. He turns up again, conflated with the hippie guru vampire Khorda Quarry played in The Deathmaster, in ‘Castle in the Desert’, a section of Johnny Alucard which takes him to his original locale and time, California in the 1970s.
Rupert of Hentzau. The dashing villain, of course, of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. Douglas Fairbanks Jr had a career-best turn as the winning scoundrel in the 1937 Ronald Colman film.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR: CONFIDENCES
The Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt had to marry Edith Waugh, sister of his late wife Fanny. Throughout the later half of the nineteenth century, marriage to the sister of a dead wife was considered incest under English law. In an era of death in childbirth and hard-to-marry-off girls, the circumstance of a widower wishing to wed his sister-in-law was not uncommon and a lengthy campaign to overturn the law was carried out (there’s a joke about it in Iolanthe), finally resulting in The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907. In the first draft of Anno Dracula, Penelope and Pamela were sisters; thanks to Eugene Byrne for pointing out the historical circumstance that this would make Charles’s engagement illegal.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN: DOWNING STREET, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Mr Croft. Caleb Croft, aka Charles Croydon, is one of the nastiest vampires in fiction. Created by David Chase (of The Sopranos), he is played by Michael Pataki in the 1972 film Grave of the Vampire. Chase’s script is purportedly based on his own novel, The Still Life – but no one I know has ever come across a copy, and a few have tried hard.
Graf Orlok. Max Schreck in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie das Grauens (1922). In the film, he’s Dracula himself under a pseudonym, trying to evade Florence Stoker’s copyright claims. Here, he’s a distant relation.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE: FROM HELL
The chapter title comes from one of the Jack the Ripper letters. It was used by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell for the graphic novel, which was filmed by the Hughes Brothers.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO: THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
The title comes from Richard Connell’s often-reprinted and filmed short story, as does that ‘Russian with the Tartar warbow’.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE: DRINK, PRETTY CREATURE, DRINK
The chapter title comes from ‘The Pet Lamb: A Pastoral’, by William Wordsworth.
Dr Ravna. The supercilious, chilly vampire patriarch played by Noel Willman in Hammer’s The Kiss of the Vampire.
CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN: THE HOME LIFE OF OUR OWN DEAR QUEEN
The chapter title comes from a (probably apocryphal) statement usually attributed to one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting upon seeing Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. ‘How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen.’
The armadillo. In one of the oddest moments in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), an armadillo is seen among the vermin inhabiting Castle Dracula in Transylvania. Yes, armadillos are native to the Americas and highly unlikely residents of Romania. Personally, I don’t think this an error on the part of the filmmakers, but a sign of wrongness – creepier somehow than the attempt at depicting a giant insect (a regular-sized bug on a miniature set) made in the same sequence. So, here’s that armadillo again.
Countess Barbara de Cilly (c. 1390-1452). Holy Roman Empress, Queen Consort of Hungary and Bohemia, known as ‘the Messalina of Germany’. She was instrumental in founding the Order of the Dragon, which is where Dracula got his title from. Her descendants include all the Royal Houses of Europe. Besides the scheming and treachery inherent in holding offices like Holy Roman Empress, she spent her last days – after an inevitable ousting from power – studying alchemy and the occult. Some sources suggest her as the real-life model for LeFanu’s Carmilla, but she’s figured surprisingly rarely in vampire fiction.
‘sword-point darting like a dragonfly’. Thanks to Helen Simpson, the original copy-editor of Anno Dracula, for knowing what I meant, even though the manuscript said ‘darting like a snapdragon’. Helen fixed many of my other brain-freeze moments.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Of course, this novel would not exist without Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. So he should get the lion’s share of the credit for establishing an entire category of vampire fiction. In taking hold of the material Stoker laid down, I must also acknowledge a debt to many scholars. Most often consulted were Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula and Christopher Frayling’s Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, which point out many of the byways I f
ound myself exploring, but I should not care to underestimate Basil Copper’s The Vampire in Legend, Fact and Art, Richard Dalby’s Dracula’s Brood, Daniel Farson’s The Man Who Wrote Dracula, Donald F. Glut’s The Dracula Book, Peter Haining’s The Dracula Centenary Book, Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, Michel Parry’s The Rivals of Dracula, Barry Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula, David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema, Alan Ryan’s The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, Alain Silver and James Ursini’s The Vampire Film, David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen and Gregory Waller’s The Living and the Un-dead.
In addition, for numerous historical, literary and frivolous details, I must credit W.S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes: A Biography and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s invaluable The Jack the Ripper A to Z, Richard Ellman’s Oscar Wilde, Philip José Farmer’s Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, Andrew Goodman’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s London, Steve Gooch’s translation of The Lulu Plays of Frank Wedekind, Melvin Harris’s The Ripper File, Michael Harrison’s The World of Sherlock Holmes, Beth Kalikoff ’s Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature, Laurence Lerner’s The Victorians, Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie’s The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells, Sally Mitchell’s Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (especially useful in the pre-internet days for information on lots of things), Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (with a biographical study by P.J. Keating) and David Pringle’s Imaginary People: A Who’s Who of Modern Fictional Characters. Among the friendly eyes who glanced over the manuscript in various forms, I should like to credit Eugene Byrne, for his detailed historical carping, Steve Jones, Antony Harwood, Lucy Parsons and Maureen Waller.