CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE HOUSE IN CLEVELAND STREET
Orlando is a character made up from whole cloth. He’s not the sex-changing hero of the Virginia Woolf novel, the marmalade cat, that Sam Kydd TV reprobate or any other Orlando of fiction. I probably should have used a name not already attached to so many people, but didn’t. To make up for it, this Orlando features – in a different alternate world – in my story ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: A TURNING POINT
Louis Bauer – alias Lewis Bower, Jack Manningham, Paul Mallen and Gregory Anton – comes from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light, alias Gaslight and Angel Street. He’s the fellow who methodically drives his wife mad while obsessively searching for the rubies hidden in the house next door. At the end of the piece, he’s completely insane, which explains what he was doing in Purfleet Asylum. I particularly like Anton Walbrook’s performance in Thorold Dickinson’s film version.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: SILVER
The Reid design. John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger, was able to finance his wandering, masked crusade – by the way, how come the lone ranger has a sidekick? – because he had discovered a fabulous silver-mine. The original point of using silver bullets was that taking life shouldn’t be cheap, but since he had an unlimited source of the things it’s somewhat obscure.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MR VAMPIRE
The Chinese movie tradition of the hopping vampire (jiang shi or geung si) is one of the odder strains of vampirism. I saw Ricky Lau’s Mr Vampire (1985) at a cinema in London’s Chinatown before the film and its many spinoffs, sequels and variants had made much impact outside its home territory. A lingering aftereffect of this cycle is that, from Buffy and Blade on, even Western vampires tend to know kung fu.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE POSEUR
I did plan to extend the Anno Dracula series with a vampire Western novella in which Edgar Allan Poe tracks a blood-drinking Billy the Kid. Poe features in The Bloody Red Baron to set this up because, historically, Pat Garrett was accompanied by a man named Poe when he set out to kill Billy the Kid. In Anno Dracula, I establish that Geneviève was in the Wild West at the time and knew Doc Holliday, and they would have featured too – along with Drake Robey, my favourite vampire gunslinger (from the movie Curse of the Undead) and a lot of other Wild West characters from history and fiction. The story would have been called ‘Sixteen Silver Dollars’ in reference to one of the Kid’s victims, Bob Ollinger – who, at least in a couple of film versions, threatens Billy with a shotgun loaded with ground-down coins and winds up blasted with it (‘keep the change, Bob,’ says Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun). Annoyingly, I can’t write this now because someone else has done a vampire Billy the Kid scenario. Even more annoyingly, it was Uwe Boll – in the feeble computer game-derived direct-to-DVD film Bloodrayne Deliverance.
CHAPTER TWENTY: NEW GRUB STREET
Frank Harris was once famous for his scandalous, boastful memoirs, My Life and Loves. Jack Lemmon plays him in Delmer Daves’ Cowboy (1958), but the range-riding part of his career is less remembered than his various London literary associations, which included knocking about with Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Leonard Rossiter played him in Fearless Frank, or, Tidbits From the Life of an Adventurer, a 1978 BBC TV play.
Though I still think the bit with the ‘angry little American in a rumpled white suit and a straw hat from the last decade’ is funny, I came to regret displacing this character in time because I should have saved him for Johnny Alucard, where he’d have been a better fit. Reporter Carl Kolchak appears in Jeff Rice’s novel The Kolchak Papers, source for the Richard Matheson-scripted TV movie The Night Stalker. Darren McGavin created the role and played it again in The Night Strangler and a brief TV series; Stuart Townsend took over for a muddled twenty-first century revival.
Among the pressmen at the Café de Paris are the prolific if little-remembered novelist William LeQueux, author of The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), and Robert D’Onston Stephenson, who put forward the theory that the Ripper was performing an occult rite (a theme picked up by Robert Bloch in his classic short story ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’) and has been cited himself as a suspect.
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.