Anno Dracula (50 page)

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN
: A T
URNING
P
OINT

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.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
: S
ILVER

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.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN
: M
R
V
AMPIRE

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
.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN
: T
HE
P
OSEUR

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
.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
: N
EW
G
RUB
S
TREET

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
.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
O
NE
: I
N
M
EMORIAM

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.

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T
WENTY
T
WO
: G
OOD
-B
YE
, L
ITTLE
Y
ELLOW
B
IRD

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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
S
IX
: M
USINGS AND
M
UTILATIONS

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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
S
EVEN
: D
R
J
EKYLL AND
D
R
M
OREAU

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
.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
E
IGHT
: P
AMELA

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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
N
INE
: M
R
V
AMPIRE
II

I should have followed the Chinese style of sequel-titling, and called this chapter ‘New Mr Vampire’.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
O
NE
: T
HE
R
APTURES
A
ND
R
OSES
O
F
V
ICE

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.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
T
HREE
: T
HE
D
ARK
K
ISS

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.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
F
OUR
: C
ONFIDENCES

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.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
S
EVEN
: D
OWNING
S
TREET
, B
EHIND
C
LOSED
D
OORS

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.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
N
INE
: F
ROM
H
ELL

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.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
T
WO
: T
HE
M
OST
D
ANGEROUS
G
AME