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By Root 699 0

have made their own lists of the ‘borrowed’ (frankly, misappropriated) fictional or historical characters who appear in it. Especially those who go unnamed or disguised. A few have posted these online. To keep the game alive, I’ve opted not to spell out the origins of every walk-on character or checked name (at this date, I doubt I even could). This is literally a vampire novel, in that it battens onto other works of fiction (primarily, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and draws life from them, so I am happy to acknowledge victims. Where appropriate, further reading or viewing is listed. Since I’m wary of explaining away too much, some mysteries remain...

EPIGRAPH

Bram Stoker hyphenated ‘were-wolves’, so – for consistency – it remains in that archaic form throughout the novel. The hyphen disappears from the series thereafter. Stoker was probably thinking of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). ‘Un-dead’ is a Stoker convention, too.

CHAPTER ONE: IN THE FOG

The chapter title comes from Richard Harding Davis’s novel In the Fog (1901). The first fragment (now lost) of what would become Anno Dracula – which didn’t even feature vampires – was called ‘Beauregard in the Fog’. It did have footnotes, as I recall.

The second paragraph has, in all previous editions, included the jumbled phrase ‘setting down the human thought mind’.

‘Brevis esse laboro, as Horace would have it.’ The sprinkling of Latin and Biblical saws in Anno Dracula was suggested by Eugene Byrne, who pointed out that Victorians in conversation and letters habitually quoted classics the way we quote pop song lyrics or lines from The Terminator. Horace, incidentally, meant the opposite of what Seward is saying. The full quote is Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio (‘When I labour to be brief, I become obscure’).

CHAPTER TWO: GENEVIÈVE

Several different versions of the vampire Geneviève Dieudonné exist in my bibliography, distinguishable by their middle names. Her lives are so complicated I’m having to look up her wikipedia entry to write this note (and that’s not 100% accurate).

First to appear was Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné, in Drachenfels, a novel set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy world which I wrote under the name Jack Yeovil. All the Yeovil/Warhammer novels and stories are collected in The Vampire Genevieve (Black Library).

Geneviève Sandrine de l’Isle Dieudonné is the character in the Anno Dracula series.

Geneviève Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonné appears in a series which has been collected in The Man From the Diogenes Club, Secret Files of the Diogenes Club and Mysteries of the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain); this also follows several other characters from the Anno Dracula world (including Charles Beauregard and Kate Reed) in a continuum which more closely resembles the one we live in.

Arthur Morrison. Morrison was the author of the Martin Hewitt stories, The Dorrington Deed-Box and A Child of the Jago. The Whitechapel of Anno Dracula includes several streets from Morrison’s books, including the slum he called the Old Jago.

As one critic pointed out, the reason Holmes is removed to a concentration camp in Anno Dracula is to get around a problem I have with many Holmes/Jack the Ripper stories – the great detective would have identified, trapped and convicted the murderer before tea-time. Devil’s Dyke is a real place, on the Sussex Downs.

CHAPTER THREE: THE AFTER-DARK

The Diogenes Club. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the Diogenes Club in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, along with its most prominent member, Mycroft Holmes, brother of the more famous Sherlock. Later, in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’, we learn that not only does brother Mycroft work for the British government but, under certain circumstances, he is the British government. The notion that the Diogenes Club is an ancestor of Ian Fleming’s Universal Export, a covert front for British Intelligence, comes from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DIOGENES CLUB

Ivan Dragomiloff, the ethical assassin,