The Rivals of Dracula by Nick Rennison

Author:Nick Rennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Count Magnus

MR James (1862–1936)

Montague Rhodes James was the greatest English writer of ghost stories of his era and many of his tales (‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘A Warning to the Curious’) have found new and appreciative audiences through television and radio adaptations. First and foremost James was a scholar. He was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge from 1905 to 1918 and of Eton from 1918 until his death. He was also director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge for fifteen years. His primary scholarly interest was in mediaeval manuscripts – an interest reflected in the plots and protagonists of many of his stories – and some of the work he produced on them is still of value to scholars today. His ghost stories began as entertainments to be read out to friends and were later collected in volumes such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). A handful of James’s tales could arguably be classified as vampire stories. ‘An Episode of Cathedral History’, which is an exemplary title for a James story, has appeared in anthologies as such in the past. ‘Count Magnus’, about a travel writer on a journey in Sweden who unleashes something awful from an ancient mausoleum, may not concern itself with blood and bloodsucking but the terrible count and his monstrous companion undoubtedly feed on the life of their victim.

By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a statement of the form in which I possess them.

They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and fifties. Horace Marryat’s Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of hotel accommodation and of means of communication, such as we now expect to find in any well-regulated guidebook, and they dealt largely in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.

Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination.

The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding houses.

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