Over the years since Anno Dracula first appeared, some readers have made their own lists of the ‘borrowed’ (frankly, misappropriated) fictional or historical characters who appear in it. Especially those who go unnamed or disguised. A few have posted these online. To keep the game alive, I’ve opted not to spell out the origins of every walk-on character or checked name (at this date, I doubt I even could). This is literally a vampire novel, in that it battens onto other works of fiction (primarily, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and draws life from them, so I am happy to acknowledge victims. Where appropriate, further reading or viewing is listed. Since I’m wary of explaining away too much, some mysteries remain...
EPIGRAPH
Bram Stoker hyphenated ‘were-wolves’, so – for consistency – it remains in that archaic form throughout the novel. The hyphen disappears from the series thereafter. Stoker was probably thinking of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). ‘Un-dead’ is a Stoker convention, too.
CHAPTER ONE: IN THE FOG
The chapter title comes from Richard Harding Davis’s novel In the Fog (1901). The first fragment (now lost) of what would become Anno Dracula – which didn’t even feature vampires – was called ‘Beauregard in the Fog’. It did have footnotes, as I recall.
The second paragraph has, in all previous editions, included the jumbled phrase ‘setting down the human thought mind’.
‘Brevis esse laboro, as Horace would have it.’ The sprinkling of Latin and Biblical saws in Anno Dracula was suggested by Eugene Byrne, who pointed out that Victorians in conversation and letters habitually quoted classics the way we quote pop song lyrics or lines from The Terminator. Horace, incidentally, meant the opposite of what Seward is saying. The full quote is Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio (‘When I labour to be brief, I become obscure’).
CHAPTER TWO: GENEVIEVE
Several different versions of the vampire Genevieve Dieudonne exist in my bibliography, distinguishable by their middle names. Her lives are so complicated I’m having to look up her wikipedia entry to write this note (and that’s not 100% accurate).
First to appear was Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonne, in Drachenfels, a novel set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy world which I wrote under the name Jack Yeovil. All the Yeovil/Warhammer novels and stories are collected in The Vampire Genevieve (Black Library).
Genevieve Sandrine de l’Isle Dieudonne is the character in the Anno Dracula series.
Genevieve Sandrine Ysolde Dieudonne appears in a series which has been collected in The Man From the Diogenes Club, Secret Files of the Diogenes Club and Mysteries of the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain); this also follows several other characters from the Anno Dracula world (including Charles Beauregard and Kate Reed) in a continuum which more closely resembles the one we live in.
Arthur Morrison. Morrison was the author of the Martin Hewitt stories, The Dorrington Deed- Box and A Child of the Jago. The Whitechapel of Anno Dracula includes several streets from Morrison’s books, including the slum he called the Old Jago.
As one critic pointed out, the reason Holmes is removed to a concentration camp in Anno Dracula is to get around a problem I have with many Holmes/Jack the Ripper stories – the great detective would have identified, trapped and convicted the murderer before tea-time. Devil’s Dyke is a real place, on the Sussex Downs.
CHAPTER THREE: THE AFTER-DARK
The Diogenes Club. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the Diogenes Club in ‘The Greek Interpreter’, along with its most prominent member, Mycroft Holmes, brother of the more famous Sherlock. Later, in ‘The Bruce- Partington Plans’, we learn that not only does brother Mycroft work for the British government but, under certain circumstances, he is the British government. The notion that the Diogenes Club is an ancestor of Ian Fleming’s Universal Export, a covert front for British Intelligence, comes from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE DIOGENES CLUB
Ivan Dragomiloff, the ethical assassin, is the lead character of Jack London’s novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. (unfinished, completed by Robert L. Fish). Basil Dearden’s 1969 film of the book, with Oliver Reed as Dragomiloff, is one of a knot of overpopulated period-set ‘romps’ which influenced this book. See also: The Wrong Box, The Best House in London, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and (especially) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PRIME MINISTER
Lord Ruthven is the title character in John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, which is based on a fragment by Lord Byron. Ruthven is generally taken to be a caricature of Byron. Before Dracula, Ruthven was the default fatal man vampire, and he appeared in a run of sequels, theatrical adaptations and operas in the nineteenth century.
For Lord Ruthven’s roll-call of vampire elders, thanks to the authors J.M. Rymer, Charles L. Grant, Robert McCammon, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Les Daniels, Suzy McKee Charnas, Stephen King, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Mary Braddon, F.G. Loring, Julian Hawthorne and Bram Stoker and the actors Robert Quarry, Ferdy Mayne, David Peel, Robert Tayman, Bela Lugosi, Jonathan Frid, German Robles, Gloria Holden, Barbara Steele and Delphine Seyrig.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE MYSTERY OF THE HANSOM CAB
The chapter title comes from an important early detective novel by Fergus Hume.
Red Thirst. I owe George R.R. Martin thanks for this term, which comes from his vampire novel Fevre Dream. I also used it as the title of one of the Jack Yeovil Genevieve stories.
CHAPTER TEN: SPIDERS IN THEIR WEBS
Of the named and unnamed Victorian-Edwardian master crooks who appear in this chapter, only Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola – an ambiguous mastermind who made his debut in A Bid for Fortune, and continued to search for the elixir of life in later novels – has fallen entirely off the radar.
I’ve used Colonel Sebastian Moran, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in ‘The Empty House’, as the narrator of a series of stories (‘A Shambles in Belgravia’, ‘A Volume in Vermillion’, ‘The Red Planet League’ and others) set in something like the version of the underworld seen here (but without vampires). These should eventually fix up into a book called The Hound of the D’Urbervilles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: MATTERS OF NO IMPORTANCE
In his lecture to the company, Oscar Wilde is, of course, quoting himself. The long sentences on criticism come from his essay ‘The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing’.
CHAPTER TWELVE: DAWN OF THE DEAD
Beatrice Potter. A clarification – this is not the authoress Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit, etc), but the Fabian socialist better remembered under her married name, Beatrice Webb.
Sir Hugh Greene’s anthology The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970), which had several sequels and was adapted as a British TV series, highlighted a number of the Victorian and Edwardian detectives who get a name-check here. The creators of the other sleuths are William Hope Hodgson (Carnacki, the ghost finder), Ernest Bramah (the blind detective Max Carrados), our friend Arthur Morrison (Martin Hewitt) and Jacques Futrelle (Professor Van Dusen). Cotford, like Kate Reed, is a character Bram Stoker intended to fit into Dracula, but never found a place for. Hawkshaw, once well-enough-known for the name to be a synonym for detective the way Shylock is a synonym for loan shark, comes from an earlier generation, appearing in Tom Taylor’s 1863 play The Ticket-of-Leave Man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: STRANGE FITS OF PASSION
