You
get some interesting responses when you tell someone you’ve published a book. I
was talking with a friend a while back, and he asked if my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, had any
vampires in it.
“Vampires?”
I said.
“Yeah,
vampires,” he replied. “It seems like every book out there now has vampires.
Yours would probably sell better if it had some, too.”
He
may be right, but it’s too late for a rewrite at this point. Nevertheless, he
got me thinking about a couple of venerable vampire stories that are
considerably older than I am.
A Victorian Lesbian Vampire Tale
JosephSheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) is generally ranked with Wilkie Collins as one of
the great writers of Victorian-era shockers. A number of his tales were ghost
stories or tales of the supernatural, and though they’re not widely read today,
they’re quite good. I defy anyone to read “The Familiar,” then step forth
confidently on a walk through a deserted city.
His
best vampire story is “Carmilla,” which tells of a young woman by that name who
takes up temporary residence with a man and his daughter in their home in a
lonely forest in Germany. Pretty soon the wives and daughters of nearby
peasants are dying mysteriously, and the young lady of the house, who has
become Carmilla’s affectionate friend, has become inexplicably ill.
For
a story written 150 years ago, in an excessively proper society, “Carmilla is
pretty steamy stuff. Here is the young lady of the house writing about waking
suddenly in the middle of the night and seeing:
“A
young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her
with a kind of pleased wonder and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her
hands and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I
felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was awakened by
a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment
…”
Makes
you wonder how that got past the censors of the day, but then I once read that
when Parliament was considering the criminalization of lesbian behavior, Queen
Victoria scotched the idea on the grounds that since such a thing could not
possibly happen, there was no good reason to outlaw it. Maybe that’s the
explanation.
Nothing Supernatural About It
ClaytonRawson (1906-71) was an American mystery writer, contemporary and friend of
John Dickson Carr, the locked-room specialist. Rawson was an accomplished
magician, and many of his stories feature outrageous situations with prosaic
solutions.
In
1940 he wrote four stories/novellas under the pen name Stuart Towne, featuring
a magician named Don Diavolo. One of them, “Ghost of the Undead,” tells of a
vampire who appears in New York City and commits a murder. You can find it on
Kindle in the book Death Out of Thin Air.
Rawson
isn’t in LeFanu’s class as a writer, and this story has the feel of something
banged out on an old Underwood, under the influence of coffee and cigarettes,
by a man in need of a quick check from a magazine. But it’s interesting, nonetheless,
as a historical curiosity.
Almost
all supernatural tales written in the first half of the 20th
Century, when people still believed in science and progress, ended up having
rational explanations. Rawson’s vampire isn’t really a vampire, and tricks such
as disappearing from a locked room on the 20th floor of a skyscraper
are merely sleight of hand, explained at the end. How odd that in today’s high-tech
society, such rationality seems passé.
