Anno Dracula

Ripping Yarns

Anno Dracula
by Kim Newman
Titan Books
ISBN: 9781803361864
Signed 30th Anniversary Edition
including new Anno Dracula short, 
The Chances Of Anything 
Coming From Mars

Warning: A kind of spoiler... but not really.

So it’s been about 30 years since I last read Kim Newman’s masterwork Anno Dracula. I only read it the once but it became one of my favourite books, being one of the first I’d read where various literary and real life characters collide in a fictional confection of some substance. A year or two after, remember that this was in the days before the internet really took hold and people couldn’t find out about things like new release books unless they saw them in a bookshop, I stumbled on a second-hand hardback copy of his sequel, The Bloody Red Baron. A year or two later, again, while holidaying in Llandudno, I discovered in a remaindered bookshop his third and, for a good long while ‘final’, Anno Dracula tome - a new hardback copy of Dracula Cha Cha Cha. They were all brilliant and all told tales, set in a different decade, of an alternative history of the world after Dracula had in fact ‘won’ at the end of Bram Stoker’s novel, seduced and married Queen Victoria and created a London... and world... where vampires and ‘warms’* lived in a dubious harmony. 

When Newman started writing new Anno Dracula books, not all that long ago, I decided to buy the new annotated editions with the extras and go through all of them again. But I was stalled until the announcement of his new 30th anniversary edition, signed by the author in hardback with red sprayed page edges and attached cloth bookmark. I certainly couldn’t resist and bought all the Anno Dracula tomes I could find.

This one hooks the reader in straight away. It’s not really a spoiler to say that it deals with Jack The Ripper’s reign of terror in London and that, from the very first chapter, the reader is made aware of the identity of The Ripper... so stop reading now if you really don’t want to know but, honestly, it’s not a whodunnit, so it’s revealed straight away. Revealed, as it happens, in a ‘cover version’ of a famous, fictional murder by Jack The Ripper, that of Lulu Schön in Wedekind’s Pandoras Box (more famously remembered these days as the role which made Louise Brooks a household name... I saw Joanne Whalley play the part on stage in the 1990s and she also did a good job with it). In this alternate riff on the final scene of that play, Lulu is a vampire prostitute and Jack The Ripper, known at this point as Silver Knife, because he is cutting up vampire girls and you can’t do any damage without silver, kills her and goes back to his sanatorium. For it is revealed straight away that this is what has become of Bram Stoker’s character Jack Seward.

The rest of the book is about Charles Beauregard of the famed Diogenes Club (from Sherlock Holmes, the club still being run by brother Mycroft), given the task of finding the killer as Jack takes out his real life victims one by one... as his way of getting back at Dracula for what he did. Aiding him are the Si Fan, lead by Fu Manchu and his daughter from Limehouse and, the long lived ‘captured at 16 year old’ vampire heroine of this and a few of the other Anno Dracula novels, Geneviève Dieudonné. Not to be confused with Kim Newman’s other vampire character of the same description written under a pen name, also called Geneviève Dieudonné, from his Warhammer books (yeah, it gets kinda confusing). 

And it’s great stuff which, despite the number of references to other literary characters and events, is very much its own story... and an extremely well written one at that. As writer Neil Gaiman says in his introduction to this new, deluxe edition (honestly, who’d have thought it would come to a deluxe edition... nobody had heard of it when I first read it and it seemed to almost flounder in obscurity), the window dressing never gets in the way of the story. 

But such brilliant window dressing. Lots of the usual suspects turned up either named as such... like Dr. Jekyll, Mr, Hyde, Dr. Moreau, Colonel Sebastian Moran (accomplice of one Professor Moriarty, if you remember your Conan Doyle), Varney The Vampire and even, Count Orlok, the iconic ‘bootleg Dracula’ from the 1922 movie Nosferatu, who is put in charge of the Tower Of London after certain events take place in this book. Those who aren’t actually named are certainly alluded to, perhaps due to copyright restrictions... so there will be no doubt just who you are reading about when it comes to characters like Dr. Fu Manchu, for example or, in one wonderful moment where the costume and speech of a character makes the reference quite clear, a temporally displaced version of Carl Kolchak. 

There’s also some interesting characters from real life, too numerous to mention but a special shout out to Florence Stoker (husband of Bram... who has himself been sent to the notorious English concentration camp Devil’s Dyke, along with such anti-vampire factions as Sherlock Holmes) and also to John Merrick, The Elephant Man and his own part in the novel’s finale. 

The descriptions of the lifestyle and feeding rituals of the various vampire characters are well done, especially when Charles’ fiance is ‘turned’ and the politics of the piece, witnessed by such people on the street as vampire Inspector Lestrade, are actually quite chilling and do, it seems to me, reflect politics in ‘not so Great anymore Britain’ even more now than they did when the novel was first published, three decades ago. 

However, it’s also filled with a lot of humour and jokes, as you can probably tell from my vague descriptions, not least of which when an armadillo turns up in Dracula’s Buckingham Palace near the end of the novel, mirroring the armadillo seen briefly near the start of Universal’s 1931 version of Dracula (that completely popped me out of the novel and got me chuckling, I can tell you). Also, the great thing about re-reading this 30 years on is... I get more of the references now. Such as Genevieve being pursued by an elder, hopping vampire from the movie Mr. Vampire (a film I still have yet to see but, my understanding is I will become acquainted with it soon, probably before this review goes up even).** 

And, it has to be said, it’s got an absolutely brilliant ending (which has completely thrown me into confusion as I just started reading Mr. Newman’s relatively new comic book sequel to the tale in terms of setting... more on that when that review goes up and I may have more clarity by the end of it) and it’s followed by the author’s annotations on certain ‘spot the reference’ antics throughout the novel (although, as he admits himself, certainly not all of them). 

As if this wasn’t enough, this edition also includes a new story set in 1899... The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars. This is told first person by the vampire version of Colonel Sebastian Moran and deals with he and various other characters, such as Professor Challenger, as they go to deal with... as you might expect from the title... the arrival of a martian fleet in Woking. In this alternate version of H. G. Wells The War Of The Worlds, the martians certainly don’t die from the common cold as they do in the original novel, but I won’t spoil the twists and turns of this one here. But, once again there are various misplaced pop culture references such as, during a description of speculations about the martians, ones which look like “pygmies wearing roman helmets”... so yeah, Marvin The Martian from the old Warner Brothers cartoons finally gets a look in too. And there’s also an excellent gag which is a literary equivalent of the comically timed ‘excised scenes’ from Grindhouse put into effect. Really wonderful stuff.

As is the whole darned book, which I’ve rattled on about enough for now, I think. Anno Dracula is still one of my favourite novels and an absolutely brilliant read. Definitely give this new edition a go if you’ve not read it before and keep an eye out on the blog in the, relatively, near future as I read and re-read myself through the entire series. 

*Warm blooded, non-vampires.

**That dates when I wrote this somewhat... my review of Mr. Vampire can be found here. 

The Man From The Diogenes Club

 

Action Guru

The Man From
The Diogenes Club
by Kim Newman
Titan Publishing
ISBN 9781781165744

A quick word to the wise about another absolute belter of a classic from Kim Newman, The Man From The Diogenes Club. Those new to Newman should at least recognise The Diogenes Club from its appearances in Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories, forever associated with his even smarter brother Mycroft Holmes. In the literary world of Mr. Newman, however, the gentleman’s club has been co-opted as the establishment where the more-secret-than-top-secret British intelligence service is run, especially... as in this case... where cases of unusual or supernatural phenomena are concerned.

The Diogenes Club features quite heavily in Newman’s Anno Dracula books too (reviews of those treasures coming very soon to this blog) but this manifestation, while sharing many of the same people, seems to operate in a slightly alternate universe to the Anno Dracula books. Which would explain why characters from those books are mentioned (and even turn up to help) throughout this collection of short stories about Richard Jeperson, the titular man from the Diogenes club. Sometimes this can get a little confusing, for sure...

For instance, in one of the stories in this tome, which has a kind of ‘brand new team of superheroes sent in to rescue the old team’ vibe, none other than the vampire Geneviève Dieudonné turns up to lend her talents. I’m guessing this isn’t the Anno Dracula version of Geneviève or there would be a lot more overt vampires in the text throughout this collection... it may be the Warhammer series version of Geneviève (also written by Newman) or someone else completely, I have no idea. But it was nice she gets an elaborate shout out in this tome.

Now, for these stories we have the central character of Richard Jeperson who Newman freely admits to being inspired by such 1960s TV fayre as The Avengers and Jason King and, yeah, certainly this has the feel of those in places. For me though... and there’s absolutely nothing to back this up... I reckon Jeperson is possibly inspired by Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character... with a hefty dose of Sapphire and Steel thrown into the mix. Joining Jeperson for most (but not all) of the stories are the enigmatic Vanessa and, as we see recruited in the first story (although it’s not chronologically the first in this collection), a transferred copper called Fred Regent.

Although one or two tales seem chronologically misplaced (perhaps it’s writing order rather than story order, so to speak), they cover Jeperson’s exploits going from the 1950s (in a flashback from a story which starts off in the 1980s) right through to the 21st Century. And the stories are all fantastic, not a bad one among them as the writer tells tales involving such things as killer robots, living snowmen, a Soho Golem and even a killer TV soap opera, of all things. And being as it’s Mr. Newman, there are all kinds of cultural references littered throughout the stories. One of my favourite tales in the book is the second story, Moon Moon Moon - “It’s all trilogies these days. I blame Johnny Tolkien.” - which involves a bunch of killings which lead to a plot to stop the first moon landing by Armstrong and Co and even features small guest appearances by such notables as Cyrano De Bergerac, Baron Munchaussen, the Selenites, the Cybermen, Captain Haddock and even the Cat Women On The Moon.

The Soho Golem story is another corker, set in the seedy underbelly of London’s Soho and involving all manner of strippers and mob connections. And another firm favourite with me is the last tale, Swellhead, which involves a much older Jeperson in the age of the internet as he investigates, along with a team including the titular Swellhead of the story, Mr. Sewell Head, an underground lair beneath the ice where his coat, the exact same one he is also wearing at the same time as being brought said coat, is found riddled with bullet holes and some of his blood. Is it a time travel thing or is there something even more sinister going on? Either way, Mr. Newman gets away with working one of the best lines from the movie version of Barbarella into the mouth of his main character. He also finds a version of the novel 2001 - A Space Odyssey except, this one is co-authored by both Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury so, yeah, there’s definitely something up.

Other thing I love about these stories is how Newman can just throw in a quick, cultural reference to place the story in a certain time zone by shorthand, rather than trumpet the exact decade each time. So, for instance, in a railway waiting room in the story The Man Who Got Off The Ghost Train, there’s a copy of Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit waiting to be read. I was also very pleased with Newman’s correct usage of the expression ‘imp of the perverse’, after the Poe story. Seems to me I’ve seen that regularly mis-used over the years but Newman obviously totally ‘gets it’ and uses the term admirably. And, in the story which takes place on the sets of a TV soap opera, I was delighted by the term ‘To Darrin’ someone, meaning to replace an actor a long way into a run with someone so like him the audience doesn’t notice... named after the real life occurrence when Dick York, who played Darrin in Bewitched, was replaced after 170 episodes by Dick Sergeant for the remaining 84... with scarcely anyone in the audience noticing. This particular story also introduces a similar variant concept, ‘To Who’ someone... but I’ll let you figure out what that one is.

At the end of the day, I had an absolutely fantastic time with Kim Newman’s The Man From The Diogenes Club and, as usual with this writer, it’s a hard recommend all the way. Certainly add this to your reading list if you’ve not already done so.