Anno Dracula

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, encouraging a great many vampires – borrowed by me from a lot of books and films – to live openly in London. I had that idea for about ten years before I wrote the novel, and the breakthrough that enabled me to progress with the story was realising I could use the historical events of the Whitechapel Murders as a spine to the narrative. But I didn’t make Dracula the Ripper. Rather, I made the victims vampires and the murderer a vampire-killer, Dr Seward – tying his motivations in with character traits and plot events from Bram Stoker. Seward – who Stoker gives fits of depression, an unhappy love life and a drug habit even before Dracula shows up – fit with at least many fictional versions of the Ripper, the cracked medical men on personal crusades in everything from The Lodger to From Hell. He is even called Jack. Dracula and Jack the Ripper – and Dr Jekyll, Inspector Lestrade, Lulu, Dr Moreau and the rest – were just elements I wanted to include; I no more intended to suggest that my versions of these fictional characters were the real ones than I intended the historical personages (Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria) I wrote into the story (often as vampires) to represent an accurate version of who they might have been. Which isn’t to say I didn’t do a lot of research, because I did.

My personal experience in writing the book – not to mention a humour piece with Eugene Byrne and Neil Gaiman for a magazine called The Truth that wound up pinning the Ripper murders on Sooty (if you’re not British, ask someone who is) – crystallised my feelings about the unlikeliness that Dracula was the Ripper. If we’re casting the net wider for suspects and seizing on fictional characters as possible Rippers, we should probably be following the Agatha Christie dictum of looking for least-likely culprits. Someone (like the real, famous non-Ripper Dr Cream) who is already well-known as a serial killer of women and is unlikely to have an alibi for the nights in question, not to mention an array of respectable enemies who are liable to stand up and shout j’accuse, has ‘red herring’ sewn into the lining of their black cape. Under these circumstances, it would only need the victims’ purses in the Count’s back pocket to convince a Poirot or a Miss Marple that Dracula is, in this case, entirely innocent, a red herring to be chewed over for most of the book and then eliminated as the vicar or an eight-year-old child is shown up to be the actual killer.

So, if not Dracula, who? Here are some possibles: Jack (that name again) Worthing or Algy, from The Importance of Being Earnest – could not ‘Bunburying’ be a euphemism for something more sinister than mere idleness during their unexplained absences from society? Henry Wilcox, the ‘financial colossus’ from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (you know, the Anthony Hopkins part) – towards the end of the book, there’s a complicated bit of backstory as the old hypocrite is recognised as the man who ruined her by the grasping ex-whore. One of Wells’s Martians, an advance scout hiding tentacles under an extra-large ulster and experimentally dissecting human beings to find out if they’ll make suitable foodstuffs before giving a go-ahead for the full invasion. Dorian Gray – again, too obvious. Marlow, or some other Conradian world-traveller unhinged by experience of the heart of darkness? The Woman Who Did? Charles Pooter, so consumed with self-importance about his nobody status that he sets out to become somebody in the worst possible way. Mowgli, reverting to beastliness when brought to the heart of Empire? Alfred Doolittle, trying to catch the slut who bore his ungrateful daughter Eliza?

As it happens, none of these non-real people seem less likely suspects to me than the array of eminent Victorians who have been put in the frame at one time or another.