I’m not sure when all the connections were made, but at some point in the early ’80s it occurred to me that there might be story potential in an alternative outcome to the novel in which Dracula defeats his enemies and fulfils his stated intention to conquer Britain. It still seems to me something of a disappointment that Stoker’s villain, after all his meticulous planning and with five hundred years of scheming monstrousness under his cloak, has no sooner arrived in Britain than he trips up and sows the seeds of his eventual undoing by an unlikely pursuit of the wife of a provincial solicitor. Van Helsing describes Dracula’s project in Britain as to become ‘the father or furthurer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead through Death, not Life’. Yet Stoker allegorises Dracula’s assault on Britain entirely as an attack on the Victorian family, an emblem of all the things he prized and saw as fragile. It struck me as an interesting avenue to explore the kind of England, the kind of world, which would result if Van Helsing and his family of fearless vampire killers were defeated and Dracula was allowed to ‘father and further’ his new order. I remember discussing this idea with Neil Gaiman and Faith Brooker (then an editor at Arrow) around 1984, when Neil and I were compiling a book called Ghastly Beyond Belief for Faith and trying to come up with novel ideas we could sell her (I also remember gruesome horror novel pitches called The Creeps and The Set). Among many projects we talked about but never did much with was the idea of a trilogy on my ‘Dracula Wins’ theme, which would have concentrated on the workings of a vampire government from the 1880s to the First World War (Neil was keen on writing the trenches scenes). Nothing was ever written down, but the vision then was of a story that concentrated on high places: it was to have been set in the corridors of power, with Dracula as a major character, and the plot would be what eventually became the backstory of the novels, the workings of vampire politics, following Dracula’s rise to power and the efforts of British revolutionary groups and foreign powers to oust him from the throne.
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 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.