Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [162]
The idea lay about in my head gathering dust and the odd character (Charles Beauregard, for instance, came from a fragment called ‘Beauregard in the Fog’ I wrote at university: he was intended as a dashing if troubled Victorian hero along the lines of Rudolph Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda or Gerald Harper in the old TV series Adam Adamant Lives!), until 1991 when Stephen Jones asked me to write something for an anthology project he was working on, The Mammoth Book of Vampires. I felt a mammoth book of vampires should have some showing from the king of the un-dead, so Steve’s request prompted me finally to set down the parameters for Anno Dracula. The result was ‘Red Reign’, which first appeared in Steve’s book (published by Robinson in the UK and Carroll & Graf in the US) and is the bare skeleton of Anno Dracula. For Steve’s later The Mammoth Book of Dracula, I wrote ‘Coppola’s Dracula’, which will appear as part of the fourth book in the series, Johnny Alucard. Meanwhile I’d already been drawn to vampires in my work under the name of Jack Yeovil for GW Books’ tie-ins to their Warhammer fantasy universe. As Jack, I developed not only a system of vampirism that, crossbred with Bram Stoker’s, survives in the Anno Dracula novels, but also the creature who became their most popular character. For the record, the Genevieve of the Jack Yeovil novels and stories is not the same character as the Geneviève of Anno Dracula, but she is her transcontinual cousin. That Genevieve (who lacks an accent because the primitive word-processing software of the day tended to throw up type-setting glitches which made them inadvisable) was introduced in Drachenfels and has her own complicated biography.
For me, book ideas are like coral reefs, built up as bits and pieces stick together over years. With Anno Dracula, I had the background and the two lead characters, plus the notion (inspired by Philip José Farmer) of a large cast list which would include not only real Victorians (Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Swinburne) but famous characters from the fiction of the period (Raffles, various Holmesian hangers-on, Dr Moreau, Dr Jekyll). In The Night Mayor, my first novel, I had explored the idea of a consensus genre world, whereby all the faces and figures from 1940s film noirs hung out in the same city; it was an obvious step to make the London of Anno Dracula a similar site, where the criss-crossing stories of all the great late Victorian horror, crime and social melodramas were being played out at the same time (yes, it all goes back to the likes of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man). This adds to a certain spot-the-reference feel some readers have found annoying but which others really enjoy: I admit to getting a tiny thrill when I can borrow a character from E.M. Forster or resurrect someone as forgotten as Dr Nikola. This also allows me to make the novel as much a playground as a minefield, and go beyond historical accuracy to evoke all those gaslit, fogbound London romances.
One of the things my plot needed was a plethora of vampires, since Dracula would have turned a great many Britishers into his get, starting with a couple of Stoker’s characters (Arthur Holmwood, Mina Harker) and extending to a lot of real people from Queen Victoria to a horde of walk-on prostitutes and policemen. I decided that if Dracula were to replace Prince Albert as Victoria’s consort, then all the other vampires of literature would come out of hiding and flock to his court in the hope of advancement. After Dracula, the best-known vampire in literature was Dr Polidori’s Lord Ruthven (this was before Twilight, True Blood, Buffy and other franchises which will have to take their lumps in later books), so he came forward to take the job of Dracula’s Prime Minister and stick around for the rest of the series (in The Bloody Red Baron, the second Anno Dracula novel, I see Ruthven as John Major to the Count’s Margaret Thatcher). For my other major