Kim Newman is an author, journalist, broadcaster, critic and bon viveur. His famous novel Anno Dracula, recently re-issued by Titan Books, is set in 1888, during Jack the Ripper’s killing spree—but a different 1888 to the one we know, in which Dracula became the ruler of England. In the novel, fictional characters—not only from Dracula, but also from other works of Victorian era fiction—appear alongside historical persons.

Bookgeeks’ Simon Parker asked him about his writing and his feelings about zombies, among other things…

Are you a bookgeek?

I suppose so. I have a lot of books. I don’t bite the heads off live chickens, though.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

Stop trying to be so bloody clever – this was my A level sociology teacher. I did moderate that, but I think the abiding sin of my generation of writers is being too clever by half.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Raymond Chandler, HG Wells, Howard Waldrop, David Thomson, Fredric Brown, Stanley Ellin, Ramsey Campbell, Glendon Swarthout, Cornell Woolrich, Wilkie Collins, RL Stevenson.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

The latter, mostly. Sometimes, I think I write in service of the characters or the story rather than me or the reader. I just hope there’s some connection to someone eventually.

Where do you write, and why?

Why do I write where I write, or why do I write? If the former, at a desk in my flat – I like being surrounded by my reference books and fetish objects, rather than sitting in a cafe or on a plane or in a hotel room. If the latter, I really don’t think I have a choice.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

I don’t read other people’s work and wish I’d written it, no matter how wonderful it is. I also don’t look at books which have earned fortunes and wish my name were on them. I suspect the book I most wish I’d written is some phantom idea of my own that has for one reason or another never coalesced enough to be turned into prose.

Are you back to reclaim your vampiric crown?

If I ever had it, I’m happy to put in for its return. The books have been hard to find for a while, for tedious rights reasons, so I’m glad they’re out again.

How did you feel with the explosion of vampires across pop culture during the years since AD was published. Were you “oi, that’s mine!” or “bugger I missed the boat”, or “great I love this stuff”? Or frustrated that so much of it is pants?

If I’m honest, all of these have flitted across my mind – though vampires weren’t exactly in short supply in 1992 when the book first came out. Since Anno Dracula is so blatantly a reworking of many other folks’ material, I can’t really complain when later vampire fiction borrows from me since I plundered others in the first place – for instance, Charlaine Harris uses the phrase ‘true death’ in the way I do, but I use the phrase ‘red thirst’ in the way George R.R. Martin does. I admit I’ve only sampled recent vampire fiction, partly because there’s just so much of it about – since I’ll be extending the series with a new book (Johnny Alucard) and some novellas, I’ll probably go on a vampire binge to get my head around where the sub-genre is these days.

The world of Anno Dracula is thought through to minutest detail, that’s part of the fun of period fiction I guess – is this why you showed this world as a setting rather than concentrating the intrigue/politics/war of taking over?

Yes, indeed. I wanted to poke about the world, looking at how it would affect all levels of society, rather than do a corridors of power story. That’s why it’s also a serial killer/detective novel. From Raymond Chandler (and James Ellroy) I got the notion of crimes that require an investigator to pry into slums and palaces. It’s not an uncommon strategy: Harry Harrison does a similar thing in Make Room! Make Room!, another book that’s about its world rather than its plot. There is a strong thread of intrigue and politics, though.

There are direct parallels with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis? Is this SSGB and Fatherland and It Happened Here territory – if so, are there difficulties where the fun of exploring them in an Entertainment run into the grim realities.

I was thinking more of earlier invasion narratives – The Battle of Dorking or War of the Worlds or When William Came – than the Nazis-won-the-war books (though Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn is stirred in there somewhere). And, yes, the underlying theme of the novel is a society becoming more totalitarian by increments and how people can make a stand against that – sadly, that’s not just a historical story about the Nazis or Stalinism. A lot of the book grew out of the 1980s – when it was first published, one of my friends said it was about Margaret Thatcher (who was quite often caricatured as a vampire). I didn’t want to write a humourless tract or a novel of unrelieved horror, but I didn’t want to create an entirely escapist fantasy world either.

At the other end of the spectum, but related, what do you think of Mark Gatiss’s Lucifer Box books if you have read them? Were there any “egad sir, that’s mine” type moments for you with him or any other authors?

I’m afraid I’ve not read them, though Mark is a neighbour and I generally like his work. There was one tiny weird idea in a TV episode of True Blood (the vampire girl whose hymen grows back) which I’d used before. As I said, I use so much material from other writers, I can’t complain when people come to me for the same. I did write a story (‘The Biafran Bank Manager’) about monsters who can only move when you’re not looking at them before that Steven Moffatt Doctor Who episode, though: I imagine we were both thinking of that playground statues game.

I’m a lover of dandies and aesthetes in crime fiction, my favourite being Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin novels. Why do they make such great detectives?

I’ve explored this in The Man From the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain), and will do something with that character in a forthcoming Anno Dracula novella (‘Aquarius’) to be included in the reissue of Dracula Cha Cha Cha. It’s partly that detectives (especially private eyes) work best as outsiders – they have to be apart from the case – and it helps if they have a peculiar way of looking at things so they can see the clues others have missed. For me, it’s also a fun element: rather than the books (MP Shiel’s Prince Zaleski is the weirdest dandy detective) I’m inspired a lot by 1960s/70s TV characters like Adam Adamant, the Avengers and Jason King.

Vampires are all very well but zombies are the grown-ups monster of choice right?

The spine of Nightmare Movies (Bloomsbury), my just-reissued-in-a-massively-expanded-form study of the modern horror film, is George Romero’s series of zombie apocalypse movies, which starts with Night of the Living Dead (1968). His ghouls are actually vampire derivatives (via Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend) rather than true zombies (Haitian slaves), so the whole flesh-eating zombie apocalypse thing is actually a sub-genre of vampire fiction. And the recent proliferation of zombie apocalypses has glutted the market far more than the vampire boom, because it’s a more limiting form – you can hold a conversation with a vampire, but zombies just grunt; vampires can have complex schemes, plots, relationships and characters, but zombies can’t.

As someone who has spent many hours and (pounds) searching Abebooks for these, thanks for reissuing them – they are now more like deluxe albums or DVDs with extras and demos. Is that something you see as important in general, i.e. showing the workings out in the margin, not just the answer?

It’s not something I’d want to do with a new book – it seems presumptuous, like those three-disc, extras-packed sets for films no one would really want to watch twice or know anything about – but I felt Anno Dracula had accrued enough extra stuff that it was worth including. From a commercial point of view, I hoped this would sway folks who already had tatty old copies into springing for a spanking new edition. After twenty years, I had maybe worked out consciously some of the things I’d done on instinct and I thought there might be some interest in that, though I’m wary of over-explaining and have deliberately left some mysteries.

What’s next for you?

My next book will be The Hound of the d’Urbervilles: The Crime-Book of Professor Moriarty (Titan), due out this Autumn. It’s the memoirs of Colonel Sebastian Moran, whom Doyle readers will know was Moriarty’s right-hand man and thus placed to be his Dr Watson. After that, I have to work on extra stuff for The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha Cha Cha – which will include substantial new novellas to fill in historical gaps (the 1920s and 1968) – and finally finish the fourth book, Johnny Alucard, which will bring the story up to 1989.

Additional questions by Simon Parker

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