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By Root 777 0

vampire characters, I drew on less-known names, borrowing from Alexander Dumas (in The Pale-Faced Lady), Eric, Count Stenbock (in ‘The True Story of a Vampire’, which I found in James Dickie’s anthology The Undead), George A. Romero (in Martin) and the ever-dependable Anonymous (in ‘The Mysterious Stranger’) for the worthies Kostaki, Vardalek, Martin Cuda and von Klatka. I decided to let LeFanu’s Carmilla stay dead, but at least gave her a mention, and thought it obligatory to have some fun at the expense of the real-life Elizabeth Bathory (my version owes more to Delphine Seyrig in Le Rouge aux levres than history) and Anne Rice’s fashion-plate bloodsuckers. I enjoyed cramming in as many previous vampires as possible, to the extent of writing a speech which finds Ruthven nastily listing all his peers and being rude about them. In follow-up novels, I have enjoyed working a little more with Les Daniels’ Don Sebastian de Villanueva and Barbara Steele’s Princess Asa Vajda, though I’m wary of doing too much with other people’s characters when their original creators might not yet be finished with them.

The final element which dropped into place was the actual plot. I needed a spine for the story, which would enable me to explore the world I had created and wanted something which would take the readers on a tour of my London that would include the slums and the palaces. The story of Jack the Ripper would have been hard to keep out of Anno Dracula, but the idea that the unknown serial killer was a vampire (a theme Robert Bloch made his own in ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ and which has been rehashed several times since) not only struck me as old hat but also not quite right for a story in which vampires were out in the open rather than cowering in the fog. So, with the world turned upside-down, Jack the Ripper should be a vampire-killer; Stoker had obligingly called one of Van Helsing’s disciples Jack, made him a doctor and indicated that his experiences in the novel were pretty much pushing him over the edge. Therefore, Stoker’s Dr Seward became my Jack the Ripper, driven mad by the staking of Lucy Westenra, with whom he was in love, and stalking vampire whores in Whitechapel. To make his situation more complex, I made Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, the get of the vampire Lucy and also her near-lookalike. The Ripper story is nowadays almost as big a favourite with the conspiracy theorists as the Kennedy assassination, and so it became quite natural to depict the effects of a series of sex crimes on a volatile society. With a killer on the loose, my other characters had all sorts of reasons – self-serving or noble – to find out who he was, to hinder or help his crimes or to make propagandist use of him. I was trying, without being too solemn, to mix things I felt about the 1980s, when the British Government made ‘Victorian Values’ a slogan, with the real and imagined 1880s, when blood was flowing in the fog and there was widespread social unrest. The Ripper murders also gave the novel a structure: the real dates of the killings – I couldn’t resist adding the Ripper’s most famous fictional victim, Wedekind’s Lulu, to his historical list – became pegs for the plot, and other actual events like a Bernard Shaw speech, the bogus letters from the Ripper to the press or an inquest also fit into the fantasy.

The Ripper theme imposed a specific date on the action, the Autumn of 1888. It is often assumed that the events of the Stoker novel take place in 1893 (the dates he gives fit that year), however there is a chink in the argument. Published in 1897, Dracula ends with a present-day chapter locating the bulk of the story seven years in the past; it is implied that the book itself is part of the story, a non-fiction compilation memoir compiled by Mina Harker at the behest of Van Helsing and presumably agented for publication by Bram Stoker the way Holmesians assume Arthur Conan Doyle agented Dr Watson’s memoirs. Numerous small details –like the use of the phrase ‘new woman’, coined in 1892, or even the comparative sophistication