There have been stories of vampires – or something very like vampires – for thousands of years. Modern ideas about vampires can be traced back to mediaeval times, with vampire myths being particularly popular in Eastern Europe. Vampires entered English fiction in the early 19th century, but really took off with the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897.
Given the long history of vampires and the different cultures that produced vampire stories, it’s hardly surprising that there are many different versions of the vampire myth. Since Dracula, though, there have been some recurring tropes. Vampires burn in daylight, they can be killed by fire, holy water, or a stake through the heart. They are driven off by garlic. They can take the form of bats or wolves. Not all the stories include all the attributes and, lately, writers have had fun in twisting and experimenting with the attributes of their vampires. My own vampire creation, Chief Inspector Pole, enjoys cooking with garlic and certainly can’t turn into a bat, but he is, if not immortal, very long lived and he needs to drink blood to stay healthy. These two attributes seem to be the bare minimum and almost all vampire stories stick with them.
Kirsten McKenzie’s vampires are very much in this modern tradition. They have lived hundreds of years and they have to feed on blood, but beyond that she has chosen to concentrate on some mythic elements of vampire existence and twist or ignore others. Garlic, for example, does not feature at all, and her vampires have no links to bats, but (perhaps in the wake of Game of Thrones) they do seem tied to ravens, which feature ominously throughout her story.
The Vampires of York Tower starts with a prologue set in 1793. I found it a bit confusing, but stick with it. All will be revealed over 200 years later.
We move to today (and there are some neat contemporary references scattered through the book). We’re in York Tower, an upmarket apartment block in New York City. There’s no strong feel of the city as most of the action takes place in the building. York Tower is its own little world. Bronzed windows filter the light. (Picking up any clues yet?) Round-the-clock security keeps residents safe, insulated from the outside world.
We see much of the story through the eyes of the two guards manning the front desk on the day shift. Will and Rufus are ex-cops, happy to be off the beat but taking their responsibilities for security at York Tower very seriously. They care about the tenants and they are sad when several of them die suddenly. But these are elderly people and there is no reason to be suspicious.
There are some strange things going on, though. A mysterious messenger, always making deliveries to the same room – a room that should be empty. There are unexplained power outages and inexplicable smells.
Something bites Will’s neck. Nothing so 19th century as the twin puncture marks of a traditional vampire. In fact, we never really find out how the bite was administered, but this doesn’t get in the way of a pacey story that carries you along with it. Will thinks it’s just an insect bite but soon he finds he loses his appetite, becoming thinner and almost literally wasting away. He thinks it’s cancer, but his sudden sensitivity to light and increasing desire for red meat might give the rest of us a clue as to the real problem.
We begin to meet more of the residents. There are a lot of them, but they are well-drawn and quite easy to keep track of. This becomes even easier as the story moves on and there are fewer and fewer of them. We also meet the Tower’s owner, Richard Blackwood. (I told you to pay attention to the prologue.)
The New York skyline glittered beyond the tinted windows of the York Tower penthouse, a view that had captivated Richard Blackwood for decades. But tonight, his attention was fixed on his wife, Elizabeth, as she stood on the terrace, her silk robe billowing in the evening breeze.
“My dear,” Richard called softly, “you shouldn’t be out there. The sun has barely set.”
I’ll say no more about the plot. At this point you could reasonably assume that you can work the rest of it out, but you’d be wrong. McKenzie’s tale is full of unexpected twists. The finale, a battle royal conducted, naturally, in darkness, brings the book to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion.
Since I started my own Galbraith & Pole vampire series, I’m naturally interested to see how other writers approach the subject. The Vampires of York Tower moves at the breakneck pace that you might associate with New York, while Galbraith & Pole is more attuned to the rhythm of London. The New York vampires also, predictably, have a much higher body count. The dramatic action allows little time for the quiet humour of Galbraith & Pole, but readers are unlikely to miss this as they hurry through the pages. I loved it. The ending does leave the door very slightly ajar for the possibility of a sequel. I’ll definitely read it if there is one.
Galbraith & Pole
If you enjoy vampire stories, do please give Galbraith & Pole a look. One of the characters in York Tower is a dancer “who had spent Sunday afternoons dancing the tango in the park”. I’d love to think this is a nod from McKenzie towards Chief Inspector Pole, who is a great tango enthusiast. It’s a wonderful hobby for a vampire as tango clubs famously operate mainly in the hours of darkness. When a girl is found stabbed through the neck with the stiletto heel of a tango shoe, Pole gets quite upset about it.
The first, tango inspired, Galbraith & Pole book, Something Wicked is just £2.99 on Kindle. (£6.99 in paperback). And look out for a FREE Valentine’s short story on this blog on 14 February.
(AI image of ravens from Microsoft Bing Image Creator)
Monsters in the Mist is the third of my books featuring Galbraith & Pole. It can be read as a stand-alone book, but it builds on the world established in the first two books. It certainly helps to have read the first in the series, Something Wicked.
Something Wicked explains how the vampire, Pole, came to be working with the Metropolitan Police, where he met Chief Inspector Galbraith and they worked together on their first murder investigation. Pole is not your conventional vampire. He lives in an elegant apartment in Chelsea were he enjoys cooking (often with garlic) and fine whisky. But he does avoid daylight and feeds on blood.
For the next five days, Something Wicked will be on offer for just 99p/cents. It’s quite a short book, so it gives you time to read it ahead of the publication of Monsters in the Mist on 27 October.
If you’re not sure about spending 99p, you can get an idea of the story because the opening is available free, read by me here:
“If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, the Something Wicked is definitely for you.”
“It has everything a good book needs: an engaging plot full of surprises, a critical portrayal of contemporary society, complex characters you identify with, and, most importantly: vampires!”
“A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!”
Monsters in the Mist is the third book I’ve written featuring Galbraith and Pole. Galbraith is an old-school London detective who finds himself working together with a vampire to solve some distinctly unusual crimes.
The first book in the series, Something Wicked, found them investigating a murder that had left a peer of the realm dead in his study, drained of all his blood. Obviously vampires were involved by why, after hundreds of years of hiding in plain sight, were they revealing themselves now? The investigation takes in a tango hall (vampires are big on tango) and night classes at Birkbeck College (vampires can hardly be expected to study during the day) before an explosive climax in Brompton Cemetery.
In the second book, Eat the Poor, a werewolf is attacking people on council estates across London. Is this a supernatural beast with a political agenda? Galbraith and Pole team up again to track down the killer, who, it seems is close to the heart of government.
In their latest adventure they are called in when a dismembered body is found on a Welsh moor. The urbane Chief Inspector Pole is well out of his comfort zone in rural mid Wales and Galbraith is almost equally uncomfortable so far away from London. Pole is unhappy, too at suggestions that there might be another werewolf on the loose. He is certain that there must be an alternative explanation for the killing but others are not so sure. This time their investigation takes them to a classified government research facility and a dramatic showdown in a secret military base.
The cover is another wonderful effort from Dave Slaney.
The Galbraith & Pole stories are not your conventional vampire tales. For a start Pole is hardly your conventional vampire. An enthusiastic cook (not that he needs to eat solid food), he loves garlic as well as tango. His Chelsea flat is an oasis of calm, where Galbraith finds himself Increasingly at home. It’s fair to say that these books do not take the genre too seriously.
Monsters in the Mist will be available in time for Halloween and can be pre-ordered now. Watch out for it: a police procedural with added bite.
It’s still October, so I’m still blogging about my fantasy novels.
The second was Something Wicked. Something Wicked is a vampire/police procedural crossover. It is firmly tongue-in-cheek and, according to one reviewer, it is “frequently funny and clever”, which is not to say that it does not have its share of blood and horror. But these vampires are not the traditional creatures of darkness, hunting through the night to drain the blood of virgins. Instead, like regular people (or ‘Mortals’ as they think of us), they come in all shapes and sizes, from the perpetual student (“Jacob’s at least 110 years old. Still, they say you’re never too old to learn”) to the senior partner in a top law firm. Urbane and sophisticated (at least for the most part) they just want to be left alone, taking the odd sip of blood where it can do no harm. When things go wrong and a peer of the realm turns up drained and dead, the vampires send their own investigator to work alongside the Metropolitan Police to close the case before things get out of hand.
Brompton Cemetery
I had huge fun writing this story, taking all the standard vampire tropes and tweaking them to make a credible London subculture. Brompton Cemetery features heavily because after a visit it is difficult not to believe that there are creatures inhabiting some of the amazing sepulchres there. Tango also figures prominently. Partly this is because authors are always encouraged to ‘write what you know’ and I am passionate about the dance, but also because I have always associated tango – its social rituals and nocturnal lifestyle – with the Undead. My vampires love tango and humans who join in their dances can consider themselves privileged.
“Tango is, I think, a point at which your world and ours converge. The music speaks of great beauty and unbearable sorrow; of love and of death.”
Because I usually write historical novels, I tried to provide some historical context for my vampires, so we have visits to the world of Anglo-Saxon Britain, an interview with Charles II and a final solution to what actually happened to Princess Anastasia during the Russian Revolution.
So there you are: police procedural, vampire fantasy, an essay on tango and some history thrown in. What more could you ask for?
Something Wicked is available on Kindle at £2.99 or in paperback at £6.99.