Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [157]
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