Nice Guys Finish First: The Autobiography of Monte Irvin Book

Graf Dracula is back! Having been thrown out of power in Britain at the end of Anno Dracula, the Transylvanian bloodsucker has now gained the good graces of Kaiser Wilhelm and launched the world into an all encompassing war. Now it’s 1918 and both sides are anxious to make a big push to end the combat, but this being the newly modern world, the true heroes are the ones who fight in the sky.

Essentially this should be the dirt and grime of the Victorian age swapped for the dirt and grime and terror of World War One, with fictional characters intermingling with real people (or based on real people) to create a horror epic. However – as is often the case with sequels – it doesn’t quite work out that way. Even though this is a book which frequently crosses the English Channel, instead of locking itself up in one city, it manages to feel a lot less epic than its predecessor. ‘Anno Dracula’ seemed to capture the drumbeat of Victorian London, expertly painting its streets, lanes and rundown alleyways. It was a book prepared to get dirt under its fingernails as it refused to flinch from the want and poverty of London of the 1880s. Even vampires can be poor and hungry, and so when dealing with the supernatural. Newman was able to engage properly in the genuinely iniquity of that society. ‘Bloody Red Baron’ is much more superficial. Biggles wasn’t the most hard-hitting of World War One stories, and Biggles with giant bats is never going to be. Occasionally the horror of the real first world war does make an appearance, but this a battle for the rarefied. The occasional battered and bloodied Tommy may occasionally show up, but this is Allied superheroes versus German Superheroes and Newman never managed to get above the superficiality of that idea.

(Struggling even more to raise itself above the level of superficiality, is the short story which follows ‘Bloody Red Baron’ – ‘Vampire Romance‘. It centres on Genevieve Dieudonne, one of the major characters in the original ‘Anno Dracula’ who Newman clearly couldn’t find a place for in the meat of ‘Bloody Red Baron’. Here she is investigating a manor house murder mystery in Wodehouse land, in a tale told partly from the perspective of an overly-romantic schoolgirl.)

Still this is a book where Edgar Poe (yes, that one) writes the Red Baron’s memoirs, having earlier talked with Franz Kafka; Doctor Moreau and Herbert West denounce the kind of work Doctor Mabuse and Doctor Caligari are getting up to one the other side; while Roderick Spode and Aunt Agatha try to determine who is King of the Vampires. Obviously there’s a lot of fun here, but this isn’t the essential volume its predecessor is.