Sherlock Holmes And Count Dracula Deep Dive

This deep dive follows right on the coattails of a blog post on how not to use supernatural elements in a story (which was also about a Sherlock Holmes novel). In “The Classified Dossier —Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula” by Christian Klaver, there are a lot of supernatural elements, but they’re well-incorporated in the four stories and they actually work out well.

There will be spoilers, as I want to dive into how the book deals with its ample supernatural content!

This book dives fully into the supernatural from the beginning, as Count Dracula appears in the first chapter of the first story — to seek Sherlock Holmes’ help. In most novels which include Sherlock Holmes and Dracula (and you might be surprised at how many there are), they are set against each other. Not so in this book. In this book, they’re on the same side.
While there have been rare cases where they were not directly on opposite sides of the board (“A Betrayal in Blood”, in which Holmes tries to figure out the whole Dracula affair, springs to mind), they usually are not working together. Dracula is considered a villain (for good reasons) and Holmes is a hero — they’re not supposed to be on the same side of anything. Normally, it is Holmes who comes to the aide of someone threatened by Dracula (often one of the Vampire Hunters around van Helsing) and takes up the fight against the undead count.
This book, on the other hand, does it well by making Dracula a client who wants Holmes to help him find his wife Mina (yes, that Mina). They’re not knocking about together for mutual friendship and Holmes doesn’t always like his clients — he’ll still work for them if the case is interesting or the stakes are high enough. The stakes in this case certainly are high enough.

Vampires are also introduced as people with an infection. They are still alive, but they have a changed body which barely breathes and has a seriously slow heartbeat. The audience hears it from Dracula, but later on also from Watson, who is turned into a vampire, too.
As the story is still told from Watson’s perspective, this also means the audience comes to understand the differences between humans and vampires as Watson does. Watson is a rare vampire who keeps his personality and morals after the change while most vampires who make it through the first ‘animal’ stage of the change become predators with little left of their convictions as humans. They are intelligent, they remember their past, but they don’t care about human morals any longer. Mary Watson (who turns her husband) becomes an example of that.

In the climax, I would have liked for the big bad in the background, the ‘Mariner Priest’ to have been someone else, though. Moriarty is just a villain in the Sherlock Holmes canon, not the only villain. Anyone else would actually have been better — except perhaps for Irene Adler.
It’s not that Moriarty (who had apparently just become a vampire before Reichenbach) doesn’t make for a good villain. Cold-blooded mastermind and vampire is a dangerous combination and he comes up with an interesting solution to the ‘animal’ stage of the vampire transformation. Yet, ‘it was Moriarty all along’ is just too common to still be a proper plot twist by now.

One thing which breaks things up a little is the influence of Lovecraftian horror in the second story (this plot will eventually be taken up again in the sequel), yet this also shows that the oceans — where Moriarty is floating about with his followers — are more dangerous than one might think.
This also means there are more supernatural powers around than just the vampires (the Jekyll-Hyde transformation will follow in the sequel) and gives Holmes and Watson something to do while the main plot is brewing in the back and coming around again eventually.
Personally, I think that introducing the deep ones and Dagon is a nice idea, given the whole ‘vampire ship on the seas’ situation and the title of ‘Mariner Priest,’ which could very well point to a Lovecraftian background and makes for a nice red herring.

While each of the four stories which the book is comprised of is self-contained to a degree, all four also form a larger story of a kind. They fit together, boosting Watson’s understanding of his new powers and Holmes’ understanding of the supernatural which in the end make the victory possible. They also introduce the audience to a wider world than just ‘vampires exist.’ There’s deep ones out there. There’s vampires. There’s supposedly other creatures as well.
The world is much larger and stranger than the regular person is aware of — and Watson is now inevitably part of this larger world for good and has drawn his closest friend into it, too (although Holmes is still fully human). Now, Holmes and Watson also have to keep a secret from the world — Watson’s change. He has new needs — and I still don’t know what Holmes has told Mrs. Hudson about that teapot of warm chicken or cow blood which Watson now takes in the evening when he gets up. He has new powers, but also new weaknesses.
Watson works through his new relationship with his wife Mary eventually (it helps that she dies, it doesn’t help that he’s the one who has to kill her to save his friend) and has to face the fact that he will probably spend more time in this world with Kitty Winters (who has also been turned) or the Count and Countess Dracula than with his best friend. Holmes refuses to be turned early on, claiming he’d be a huge danger for mankind as a vampire.

The author is also excellent at dropping hints for what will happen. It’s never too obvious and always close to when it becomes important, which is how I love my foreshadowing.
Especially in the last story when the big confrontation happens, there is a hint dropped which enables the whole twist in the end — the simple mention that Holmes and Dracula are the same height and build and both have a similar facial structure. This is what brings Moriarty down in the end — thinking he’s caught the human Holmes, but really having brought the vampire Dracula too close. A lot of things established before, like a vampire having next to no scent for another while a human has a strong one or vampires having a much stronger sense of smell than sight, play a huge role in that situation.
All of this is mentioned before and enables the audience to see how clever the plan which Holmes and Dracula come up with really is.

Unlike “The Dartmoor Horror”, “Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula” makes the best of its supernatural aspects. Every aspect is useful. Every aspect plays its role in the story. Even the seeming tangent of the deep ones and the Lovecraftian horror has its use. This is ‘supernatural Sherlock Holmes’ done right.