Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [155]
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PRIME MINISTER
Lord Ruthven is the title character in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, which is based on a fragment by Lord Byron. Ruthven is generally taken to be a caricature of Byron. Before Dracula, Ruthven was the default fatal man vampire, and he appeared in a run of sequels, theatrical adaptations and operas in the nineteenth century.
For Lord Ruthven’s roll-call of vampire elders, thanks to the authors J.M. Rymer, Charles L. Grant, Robert McCammon, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Les Daniels, Suzy McKee Charnas, Stephen King, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Mary Braddon, F.G. Loring, Julian Hawthorne and Bram Stoker and the actors Robert Quarry, Ferdy Mayne, David Peel, Robert Tayman, Bela Lugosi, Jonathan Frid, German Robles, Gloria Holden, Barbara Steele and Delphine Seyrig.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE MYSTERY OF THE HANSOM CAB
The chapter title comes from an important early detective novel by Fergus Hume.
Red Thirst. I owe George R.R. Martin thanks for this term, which comes from his vampire novel Fevre Dream. I also used it as the title of one of the Jack Yeovil Genevieve stories.
CHAPTER TEN: SPIDERS IN THEIR WEBS
Of the named and unnamed Victorian-Edwardian master crooks who appear in this chapter, only Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola – an ambiguous mastermind who made his debut in A Bid for Fortune, and continued to search for the elixir of life in later novels – has fallen entirely off the radar.
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