The Holmes-Vampire Trilogy

( All Three From The Baker Street Chronicle, Volume 4, Number 5, September-October 1984)

One Good Reason Why Holmes Did Not Meet Dracula in 1890

(As explained by Arminius Conan Detweiller)

To Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler was the woman. Of all that Watson tells us of Holmes, this fact is one of the best known. And from it we can make a very simple deduction: Sherlock Holmes obviously never met Wilhelmina Harker nee Murray.

Although she was almost ten years younger than Irene Adler, Mina Harker could still be considered a contemporary of Holmes. Her adventures are recorded in that collection of papers that bears the title Dracula, released by the Harkers’ agent Bram Stoker. In the midst of an adventure to rouse the weakest spirit, that set of memoirs tells of Mrs. Harker’s many virtues. And as loyal to the Watsonian canon and its folk as one strives to be, it is not hard to admit that here is a woman that puts Irene Adler to shame. We all know of Irene Adler’s attributes, the beauty, the acting skill, the confounding cleverness; but what of Mina Harker?

Upon first meeting her, her soon-to-be friend Dr. John Seward refers to Mrs. Harker as "sweet-faced" and "dainty-looking." This, of course, can hardly compete with Irene Adler’s "face a man might die for." But then, Mina Harker had a face that a man did die for. That man, an American named Quincey Morris, pointed at her young face in his final moments and cried out, "It was worth this to die!" In the true spirit of Sherlock Holmes himself, however, let us look past such superficial characteristics.

Irene Adler was quite talented. She could sing; she could disguise herself as a boy. Mina Harker’s talents were a bit more practical. A Bradshaw was never necessary when she was around; her memory for the times of train arrivals and departures was phenomenal. She could take shorthand, and type at such a remarkable speed that typing dictation from a phonograph record was no great effort to her (and this was long before electric typewriters, mind you). She could also handle a Winchester rifle. Apparently she couldn’t dress up like a boy, though, which seems to have been what really impressed Holmes about Irene.

Now to the real area of competition -- a battle of the minds. Irene Adler was a quick-thinking adventuress. She could recognize a suspicious circumstance and act upon it almost instantly. Mina Harker, on the other hand, on the other hand, was an assistant schoolmistress given more to step-by-step analysis, on one memorable occasion going even so far as to deduce the route of Dracula’s coffin by a train of reasoning worthy of Holmes himself. Although Irene showed an impressive cleverness in dealing with Sherlock Holmes, her style of thought is still that strange mixture of intuition and stored hearsay that is stereotypically regarded as female thinking. Mina Harker, as her colleagues remarked more than once, had an incisive, rational mind that could out-think the minds of most men on what has been thought of as their home ground. She might have even been too bright for Holmes’s liking, for as he remarked in "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier": "A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous."

But whatever the case, meeting a woman such as Mina Harker would have left an impression upon Holmes. Did he ever meet her? If he did, it is plain that the meeting did not take place before Watson penned "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the summer of 1891. Such being the case, it would be unlikely for Sherlock Holmes to have been involved in that series of events chronicled under the title Dracula, as some have conjectured. Another time, perhaps . . .

One Good Reason Why Holmes Did Not Meet Dracula After 1890

(As explained by Arminius Conan Detweiller)

Count Dracula died in 1890.

On November 6, 1890, to be exact, he was stabbed through the heart, his head was cut off, and he crumbled to dust. Vampire or not, you don’t get much more dead than that. Unless a fleck of Dracula’s remains blew Holmes’s way and landed on his shoes during his hiatal wanderings in 1891, it is extremely unlikely that the Master had any encounter with the Count after 1890.

Sherlock Holmes and the Secretly Dead:
A Near Fatal Case of Close-Mindedness

By Brad A. Keefauver

There is a vampire in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.

I can say it no plainer than that. Such a fact would perhaps be better presented to the reader by degrees, but let us weed out the narrow-minded at the article’s outset. The matter at hand is of too much importance to waste our time on skeptics and . . . fools.

Sherlock Holmes was a skeptic.

"What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their graves by stakes driven through their hearts?" he scoffed in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" before going on to prove that the Sussex vampire was no vampire at all. His ultra-rational naivete, however, would very nearly be the death of him in another, later adventure, as we shall soon see.

For within the Sherlockian Canon, our safe haven of Victorian order and comfort, there lurks a certain Balkan nobleman. Said nobleman, it will be noticed, is never seen by the bright light of day. He only appears in the canon at night. This "man" possesses a strange, hypnotic power over women; they are at his mercy. It is said there is no more dangerous man in Europe. And his name is not Dracula, and he is not a count, but a baron.

Baron Adelbert Gruner.

Enter "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client," and you enter a Sherlockian nightmare. It all starts innocently enough, with Sherlock Holmes being hired to intercede in a family dispute of sorts, to prevent an innocent girl from marrying a vicious scoundrel. The scoundrel, however, is much more than that. Put most simply, Baron Adelbert Gruner is a vampire, a member of the active dead. And given his way, the girl, Violet DeMerville, will never again see the light of day.

From his first interview with Baron Gruner, we see that Holmes is a bit out-matched. The Baron confidently laughs at Holmes, calling the detective’s efforts "pathetic." He even goes so far as to reveal to Holmes some of his nefarious methods, so sure is he of success. In this confrontation’s end, we find that it is Holmes who leaves in silence, rather than his usually dumbfounded antagonist.

"Must you interfere?" Watson asks Holmes after that first encounter. "Does it really matter if he marries the girl?" Even the faithful Watson has serious doubts about this case. So afraid is he for Holmes’s safety that he actually asks the detective to drop the case, something the doctor has never done before.

But Holmes, of course, presses on despite these dire omens. With the aid of Shinwell Johnson, he finds Kitty Winter, an ex-mistress of the Baron’s. With Kitty Winter, the first hints of the unnatural enter the case. She is an intense, emotional woman, described as having "fierce energy" and "blazing eyes." Yet Kitty Winter has dead-white skin. Even at her most emotional, no color comes to her cheeks. Add to that the fact that she, like Baron Gruner, never appears in the story at any time before the early evening hours, and the symptoms become familiar. But is she truly one of the undead?

"I am his last mistress," Kitty Winter tells Violet DeMerville. "I am one of a hundred that he has tempted and used and ruined and thrown into the refuse heap, as he will you also. Your refuse heap is more likely to be a grave, and maybe that’s best."

The Baron is no fool. The vampire who kills for blood is the vampire who is recognized for what he is and is soon hinted down. Better to seduce one’s victim’s, draining them of what blood is necessary over a period of time, then leaving them alive. No woman would dare tell anyone of what he did to her — the shame of admitting to taking part in such a deviant act and finding it a bit enjoyable (although under the Baron’s hypnotic spell at the time) would be too great. Even without the total blood drain, the victim still begins to assume some of the characteristics of a vampire during the later stages of blood loss. There is paleness, of course, and a habit of sleeping by day and waking at night (both these symptoms are recorded in the classic journal on vampirism, Dracula). In the case of Kitty Winter, her relationship with the vampire Gruner so affected her self-image and sense of worth that she carries on the living by night habit, even after the Baron’s influence has been lifted from her.

When we first meet Winter, she is but a drained blood container on Gruner’s trash heap. In casting aside a woman of Kitty Winter’s fire and intelligence, however, Baron Gruner made a fatal mistake. She knows of the Baron’s ways all too well, and can easily see what is in store for Miss DeMerville, who is already looking a bit pale. "Your refuse heap is more likely to be a grave," she told DeMerville, "and maybe that’s best." Is Kitty Winter really saying that death is a better fate than hers? Or does she mean that un-death, that quasi-life eternal, is what she would have preferred?

The Baron plans to marry Violet DeMerville, and his desire is a natural one. DeMerville is rich, accomplished, beautiful, a veritable "wonder woman." What more could one look for in a wife? And if he plans to make her his mate, would he not also plan to complete the process he began on Kitty Winter and countless others, and make Violet undead as well? Once married, it would be little problem for the vampire to kill his wife and then keep her corpse secreted away for three days, until she would rise again as a full-fledged vampiress. The world would never know she had ever been dead.

Such a secret transformation was surely the style of the Baron’s own origin as a vampire. He is so entrenched in the world of living men that his becoming a vampire must have taken little time out from his interaction with that world. There were no long years spent wasting away in a isolated castle for this vampire. After he first discovered vampirism, undoubtedly during a wild romantic escapade with some unexpectedly fanged beauty, Baron Gruner immediately took steps to ensure that no one knew of his affliction. Killing his wife in the Splugen Pass "accident" was surely the first of such steps. As the years passed, he would take care to involve himself, or seem to involve himself, in such daylight activities as would cover his vampiric lifestyle. Polo was but one of these cover interests. The final bit of protection he concocted for himself was the simplest of all: make-up. Giving himself a swarthy complex- ion would end any suspicions before they could start.

Rather than use his vampiric powers to do his dirty work, Baron Gruner protected himself further by hiring human agents to attack his enemies such as Holmes or LeBrun. The Baron’s own vampiric strength during the night-time hours would have beef more than enough to effortlessly tear either man limb from limb, but doing so would surely attract undo attention. Of course, if the Baron got angry enough, so that his emotion overruled his sense of discretion, anything could happen, and it almost does.

Through Kitty Winter, Sherlock Holmes learns of Gruner’s one weak spot, his "lust diary" as Holmes calls it. The degraded Ms. Winter thinks "Souls I have ruined" would be a more apt title, and indeed it would be. Everything about every woman Gruner ever took a moment’s dalliance with is in this book, and with it, Sherlock Holmes is certain he can shock Violet DeMerville out of the Baron’s thrall.

Using tie ever-willing Watson as a distraction, the detective breaks in to Baron Gruner’s large, castle-like house to steal the book. Holmes, however, has severely underestimated his foe. The Baron’s intellect is not fooled by Watson’s masquerade, and his keen vampiric sense do not miss the sounds of someone burgling the next room. He catches Holmes sneaking out the window with his book, and immediately becomes so furious that he emits a virtual "howl of rage" as he starts after Holmes to the window. At this point, "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" could have become the ultimate Sherlockian tragedy. In his rage, the vampire could have literally torn Sherlock Holmes to pieces. Doctor Watson would have made a fine night’s meal for the bloodthirsty Baron, only to arise undead three nights later to spend eternity as Baron Gruner’s faithful chronicler, using his talents to record future volumes of "Souls I have ruined." And Baron Adelbert Gruner might still have been with us today.

Fortunately for us all, Kitty Winter was not as obsessed with pure reason as Sherlock Holmes. She could see Gruner for what he was, and deal with him accordingly.

"Water!" Baron Gruner screams as he runs back into the house with his hands over his face. "For God’s sake, Water!"

The Baron, however, is not calling for water as Watson thinks. He is screaming in horror at the cause of his burning face.

Water.

To be precise, holy water.

Apparently the Baron was not aware of all the dangers a vampire faces. Looking out for garlic, crosses, and wooden stakes is one thing, but holy water, that came as a surprise. Kitty Winter knew just how to get her revenge, for the Baron’s agony had only begun.

To Holmes and Watson, blissfully ignorant of the true danger they faced, the case is over. Gruner’s book is turned over to their client, and Watson notes that the marriage of Gruner to Violet DeMerville has been called off.

No more is said of Baron Gruner. Now blind and hideous to look at, yet still plagued with nocturnal cravings for blood, his life had to become a true hell. He could request that his servants bring him animal blood, but eventually such conduct would make him a candidate for the asylum. There he would slowly die of starvation, gaining some small sustenance from what lower life forms crawled into his cell. Flies, spiders, and rats would feed him for a time, but eventually even a vampire must die from lack of nourishment. Facing such prospects, the day would surely some when a man such as Baron Gruner would put a stake through his own heart and let it end.

In closing, it must be stated that this article contains more than its share of conjecture. For this the author apologizes. That the events described in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" really occurred, we can be certain. John H. Watson is a very reliable fellow. Anything past what he tells us, we cannot truly be sure of.

Why, Baron Gruner’s face may have healed after all. one never knows about vampires.