Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [156]
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