Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [181]
* This brings together two villains, and puts Mycroft’s conspiracy in peril.
* This rearranges the business of Chapters Fifty-Five (“Fucking Hell!”) and Fifty-Six (‘Lord Jack’) a little, albeit with too much talk (I’d have pruned a lot if the script had gone into further drafts). I slightly prefer the way things pan out here, with Mary trying to defend the man who’s dissecting her and Charles shooting Jack during a fight to save Geneviève rather than summarily executing a helpless man.
* This pays off Hentzau’s increased villainy in the script, and also shows that since his bout with Arthur, Charles has gained the skill and determination to best a vampire in a serious swordfight. The suggestion is that being bitten by Geneviève has also given him sharper reflexes.
§ And here’s yet another variant ending. Charles nearly dies, but it looks like Geneviève will save him with her blood. Stuart and Andre were keen on playing up the angle of whether Charles would turn into a vampire, and this was the payoff for that strand – keeping it ambiguous in case we came to film the later books (in which Charles isn’t a vampire). When I came to write the third novel, set in 1959, I included this element in the backstory – the ending of the novel doesn’t say that this little scene doesn’t happen – to help explain Charles’ longevity.
DRAC THE RIPPER
Originally published in The Ripperologist #60 (2005)
What if... Count Dracula were Jack the Ripper?
It seems too obvious, somehow. Considering Dracula and the Ripper have both inspired libraries of spin-off fictions, you’d think that someone would have worked that premise. But, no... Mr Hyde, a monster who comes from within Victorian society rather than a foreign barbarian, seems a much more congenial suspect for the Whitechapel Murders. Hyde is the Ripper in at least two movies (Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Edge of Sanity), Richard Mansfield (the actor who allegedly took off his stage Jekyll and Hyde in 1888 for fear that a possible connection between the fictional and the real fiend might seem distasteful) figures as one of the hoked-up suspects in the 1888 Michael Caine Jack the Ripper TV miniseries, and the popular image of the murderer as a repressed Victorian bourgeois with a usually-concealed monster inside him derives from Stevenson’s Strange Case. In an array of spin-offs, various characters from the Sherlock Holmes canon have also been depicted as secret Rippers – Holmes, Watson, Watson’s wastrel brother, Professor Moriarty, Inspector Athelney Jones.
So why not Dracula?
In Bram Stoker’s novel, the vampire comes to London – presumably sometime between 1885 and 1893 (arguments vary) – and predates on genteel Englishwomen. We are given his addresses (some suspiciously in the East End) and there’s little to indicate that he doesn’t spend time slaking his thirst on easily-available street women between visit to the more refined veins of Lucy and then Mina. The mutilation of the victims could serve a double purpose – to disguise the cliché marks on the necks, and to prevent the drained from rising again as vampires. Okay, fine, go away and write it... I can dimly remember one retelling of the Dracula story that did make a connection like this, and wrote in Sherlock Holmes as well, in a Marvel black and white comic of the 1970s, but even that was in the form of notes and suggestions rather than a full narrative. There’s a story by Harry Turtledove (‘Gentleman of the Shade’) in which Jack the Ripper is a vampire, but not the vampire – and a thorough search of the library will turn up many vampire stories which reference the Ripper and vice versa.
My own entry into the (now rather crowded) field of Victorian literary-historical fantasy, Anno Dracula, is a) about Dracula and b) about Jack the Ripper. The premise is an echo of all those Nazis-won-the-war stories in that the book depicts a timeline in which Dracula defeated Dr Van Helsing and the others, then married Queen Victoria,