The Real Dracula Is A Detective Story

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Crime Reads:

Though it might have you think otherwise, the epistolary Victorian monster novel Dracula is a detective story.

Written by Bram Stoker in 1897, it tells the story of six middle-class professionals who track down an out-of-touch Eastern-European vampire on his feeding frenzy throughout London. Though its story is mostly well-known throughout the last century of pop culture via a host of watered-down adaptations, the (long) novel itself is a transcontinental, multi-generational, polyphonic, supernatural ensemble chase narrative built out of a collection of small documents. Dracula is convoluted, energetic, and sometimes even a bit confusing—sometimes the result of overly-ambitious plotting (there are nine central characters) and sometimes due to a seeming-lack of editing (there are few explanations for specific connections or events, and any well-edited critical edition of the novel will point out how many times Stoker accidentally mis-dates his characters’ letters and diary entries).

But the periodical disjointedness of Dracula only helps to categorize it as a text particularly overwhelmed by possibility (which the detective story, fundamentally initiated by a question without an answer, is, as well). The epistolary Dracula itself embodies, and is thematically about, material excess: too many characters, too many documents, too many clues, too many victims, too many possible answers. It is an overstuffed file-cabinet; a massive, multi-colored evidence board of a novel. And it exists in this expansive, immense way, in drastic pursuit of a single explanation—or, really, two: what monster is responsible for the bloodshed in England, and, once he is identified, how can he be stopped?

. . . .

Dracula begins in the rural backwaters of the Carpathian Mountains, where the credulous young solicitor Jonathan Harker is visiting a wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, to facilitate his purchase of an English estate called Carfax Abbey. The Count has terrible breath, hairy palms and weirdly intense Anglophilia, but he and Jonathan hit it off and spend long nights chatting, until Jonathan discovers that his host is a vampire. He’s then nearly seduced by a bunch of the Count’s wanton vampire wives and held captive while the Count begins preparations to sail to England, for what Jonathan now fears will be the killing spree of the century. He logs all of his creepy experiences and theories in the journal he keeps with him. He tries to kill the Count and escape the castle. And then he disappears.

These are the novel’s first four chapters; the story then shifts fifteen hundred miles away and a few months back in time, to England, allowing the mystery of what has happened to Jonathan Harker to linger unanswered. Back in England, Jonathan has only just left for his journey to Hungary, and his thoughtful fiancée, Mina Murray, a schoolteacher, spends her summer vacation teaching herself shorthand, learning how to use a typewriter, and writing letters to her friend Lucy Westenra, a beautiful young woman who wants to talk about how three men are totally in love with her and she’s not sure whom she should marry. As the summer moves on and Mina travels to visit her friend in the charming seaside town of Whitby, word from Jonathan ceases, a creepy ship arrives in an English harbor with its whole crew dead or missing, and Lucy begins to sleepwalk, growing sicker and sicker with each passing day. Meanwhile, a zoophagous patient at the local sanatorium (run by Lucy’s suitor Dr. Seward) has begun to predict the arrival of his “Master.”

. . . .

Dracula arrived at the tail of the decade, in 1897, stalking the flock of monster-centric texts that emerged circa the turn of the century, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Rudyard Kipling’s “A Matter of Fact” (1892), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and War of the Worlds (1897), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897)—the last of which is rarely read now but actually outsold Dracula when they were concurrently released.

Modern critics have read the mass-emergence of the monster novel as responding to a late-Victorian culture that was completely, (to some) horrifyingly transforming—in terms of technical and scientific progress, but also regarding social organization (the expansion of the working class and the increased opportunities for female advancement) and colonial expansion (as well as the permeating fear of reverse-colonialism, in which the empire would immigrate to England and racially co-exist there). Dracula, itself, is packed with all these tensions and euphorias—as scholar Bram Dijkstra notes, it celebrates a forward-thinking professional woman while simultaneously expressing terror at female desire and sexuality.

. . . .

Dracula’s critical versatility is one of the likely reasons it has stayed alive, all these years; it is, much like the vampire himself, a shapeshifter. Alas, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has written, “The monster is… an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture.” The monster becomes a means to ask questions, to interrogate a particular system.

. . . .

By the time of Dracula’s publication, the newly-developed “detective story” genre had been firmly established—starting in the 1850s, with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories about the virtuosic amateur detective Dupin. Its conventions were cemented in 1868, with the publication of the first full-length English-language detective novel The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. Both the mystery novel and the monster novel have shared roots in an earlier literary tradition, as well: the Gothic—which wonders about supernatural entities as much as, and often connected to, violent crimes. Generally speaking, the monster story presents a set of baffling clues that lead towards a hidden explanation, with the distinction being that the explanation exists in a realm of potential rather than practicality. The monster story is about figuring out what might be possible, rather than, as in the detective story, about solving what has simply happened.

Link to the rest at Crime Reads