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.”
At this point, Dracula reveals how it functions—for the characters inside this world, it’s a total mystery. The anemic and restlessly-sleepy Lucy’s conditions are incomprehensible to her three suitors (her eventual fiancé Arthur Holmwood, a cowboy named Quincey Morris, and the sanatorium-owner Dr. John Seward), and so Seward calls on his quirky old professor, Abraham Van Helsing, who sees two marks on the side of Lucy’s neck and has some ideas about what devilry might be behind it. It’s obvious to the readers that this is the work of Dracula—that he has traveled to England, landed in the vicinity of his solicitor’s wife’s sexy best friend’s house, and is feeding on her.
Unless he’s caught red-handed, though, there is no way for the suitors to discover that Dracula, the vampire, is behind all this. Unless Jonathan returns. Which, miraculously, he does. Mina is thrilled, and heads to meet him. But it’s too late for Lucy, who dies from blood loss despite many transfusions from all three of her suitors and the professor (blood typing wasn’t discovered until 1901, just deal with it). After Lucy’s death (but, twist!, before her unndead rebirth), Van Helsing begins to read through her letters to and from Mina, which discuss Jonathan’s strange disappearance. He starts to wonder about a possible connection between the incidents, and arranges a meeting with Mina and Jonathan. She shares her notes, he brings his journal.
* * *
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; as scholar Stephen Arata points out, it expresses antisemitism and fears of racial “otherness” and un-civilization embodied by its European but distinctly “Eastern” villain, and as scholar Christopher Craft observes, it offers a kind of panic about homoeroticism and the feminization of the male body that the vampire, with its penetrative tendencies (and alternative-reproductive capabilities) might cause. Scholar Talia Schaffer has read Dracula alongside the Gross Indecency trial of Bram Stoker’s own friend, Oscar Wilde, seeing the novel as manifesting a kind of monstrous sexuality. Scholar Franco Moretti has analyzed Dracula as offering a reading of capitalism, as a kind of feudalism that requires intense labor to produce the wealth for the stagnant, embodied by the evil, old-fashioned, bloodsucking landlord Dracula. And, steeped with the progressive spirit of the age, Dracula is principally about a group of young people who use technology to defeat a fuddy-duddy impostor, a “how do you do, fellow kids”-kind of undead fogey. (There’s a funny detail in the text about how, when in England, the Count sports a new hat, but doesn’t know that it’s out of fashion.)
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.
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.
So, the monster story is naturally a kind of detective story and certainly a kind of mystery. Indeed, as Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 short-story collection In a Glass Darkly reminds us, the detective and proto-horror categories were not, in their Victorian context, seen as mutually exclusive—the gambit of LeFanu’s collection itself is that they are the published accounts of an “occult detective” named Dr. Hesselius, and the corpus involves two detective stories, two ghost stories, and one vampire story, about a female vampire named Carmilla who preys on women at night. And certainly several of the Sherlock Holmes stories, written by the occult-enthusiast Arthur Conan Doyle, toy with the unreal, most notably the 1904 novella The Hound of the Baskervilles. These genres—detective and monstrous—share an investment: a concern with making known what is unknown.
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.
But, of course, for Dracula to be a detective story too means that it must have a detective.
* * *
Mina Murray (eventually, Harker) is the brains of the vampire hunting operation. She has trained for this position. She says of her journal, discussing her own self-education in a language of professional development, “I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day.” She trains herself to remember and record everything that happens to her.
The novel is told via the diary entries, letters, telegrams, and even audio recordings of many characters, and of all these characters, throughout these missions, it is Mina who compiles, transcribes, types, and assembles all their documents into a neat dossier, along with notes, observations, and plans of her own devising (scholar Nina Auerbach humorously refers to Mina as having “almost occult secretarial competence”).
When the vampire hunters are out destroying the Count’s resources (his coffins) at a house in Piccadilly they believe he is secretly renting, Mina stays home and spies on the Count at Carfax Abbey, recording his movements and sending a telegram to her friends to alert them that he might be coming their way. Because of her news (and the expeditious technology she uses), they’re able to ambush the Count.
Mina also begins to analyze the data she has collected. When Dracula tries to escape London, Mina builds a complicated schematic that allows her to figure out which way he is going. She researches every possible route Dracula can take to head back to Transylvania. Her discovery is comprehensive, highly deductive, and is undertaken under great stress at a critical juncture. She explains to the men that she has analyzed maps, schedules, and other materials and she has intuited the only escape route Dracula may have, out of England. And she’s right. Mina and the men find Dracula along that very route, out of all other possible trails. She brings a travel-sized typewriter with them as they travel to the Carpathians to head off the vampire, so she can keep taking notes. She is the only one who can get information out of Dr. Seward’s crazed patient, the one who is expecting his “Master” to arrive. Van Helsing, in his broken English, proudly announces to the group that Mina has a “a great brain which is trained like man’s brain.” She is treated, by this group, as an exceptional woman—as a paragon of her gender (a real backhanded compliment). But Mina stands out among the men in her crew. She is Dracula’s main adversary. She is his greatest threat.
When Dracula realizes that Mina has put together such a thorough, useful, and, frankly incriminating report about him, he hurls all her files into the fireplace.
Furthermore, the materiality of Stoker’s novel Dracula aids in the establishment of Mina’s intelligence, resourcefulness, and industriousness; within the story, she is responsible for Dracula’s existence as a physical book. The bundle of documents she assembles helps facilitate the hunters’ identification of Dracula as Lucy’s otherworldly murderer, and is an essential resource in the formation of their many strategies to destroy Dracula. It also provides documentation of the existence of the vampire, in the first place. Indeed, when Dracula realizes that Mina has put together such a thorough, useful, and, frankly incriminating report about him, he hurls all her files into the fireplace. She, however, has already outsmarted Dracula, having made copies of everything—copies which will prove successful in aiding his apprehension and elimination, and copies which are, within the world of the story, preserved physically as the novel Dracula.
In other words, Mina, with her monumental archive, causes both the termination of Dracula the character and the proliferation of Dracula the story. Mina is its primary investigator—so much so, that she becomes its author.
* * *
Dracula sees Mina as valuable, too. He tells her, before he attacks her, later in the novel:
“…You, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call.”
His promise echoes Genesis 2:23; he refers to Mina with the language Adam speaks after God has fashioned the first woman from his body. Mina is Dracula’s best candidate to be his partner in world-domination, or the mother of his vampire race—but she is chosen because of her impressive skills. With Mina on Dracula’s side, he thinks, he will be unstoppable.
Unlike the bitten Lucy, whose brain, will, and veins are controlled by the whims of the Count, after Mina is bitten and slowly begins to transform into a vampire, she figures out that she gains access to Dracula’s mind, and is determined to use that to destroy him. It is Mina who figures out that, after the Piccadilly ambush, the Count is fleeing to his homeland. With this, she remains the novel’s detective, while resisting transformation into its second femme fatale.
Dracula’s adaptation history doesn’t give Mina much credit along these lines—in a way, the absence of the physical book in a visual retelling of the story automatically erases most of her labor. And often, all traces of an investigative process are totally removed. In the derivatives it has spawned, Dracula has become a love story, or a forbidden love story, or simply a monster story.
But it is not unreasonable to see a detective story in Dracula, the novel. This is due to more than the inherent flexibility of all genre literature. Dracula shares the soul of the mystery novel: an understanding that attempting to reconstruct the crime that has happened might lead to information about it. Dracula is nothing if not a series of interlocking puzzles worked out on paper, sharing, with the mystery genre, a commitment to epistemology and ontology: of seeking to know how a crime has happened, and then to know why. And, of course, it features a brilliant detective hellbent on justice—determined to, against all odds, catch a monstrous villain or die trying.
