interview with jack hamilton teed

JOHNNY: How did The Blood of Dracula come to be written?

JHT: At the time Mills and Boon were owned by a vast Canadian conglomerate called Worldwide Library , based in Toronto (still are now, so far as I’m aware). I later (1985 or thereabouts) did the first in the Deathlands series for Worldwide (Gold Eagle) called Pilgrimage to Hell, as well as the ‘Bible’ to the series, which was taken on by other hands. Anyway, back in 1976 or possibly early-’77, I was contacted by George Beal, who I’d known when I was on staff at IPC magazines, LTD., then the biggest publisher of magazines in the world, bar none. George was acting as a packager for Mills and Boon and said he was setting up this Venture Books thing, publishing novellas of around the 25,000-mark in wordage, and said he wanted: Action / SF / Horror / Adventure and was I interested? He was paying six hundred quid a shot and needed copy in six weeks. He wanted to do a ‘Dracula’ book and a ‘Frankenstein’ book, and could I do them?

At that time I was working fairly prolifically for the comics Action and Battle Picture Weekly.(‘Kids Rule OK’ and ‘Hells Highway’ in Action and a couple of strips in Battle.) I was also, I seem to remember, doing preparatory stuff for 2000 AD which hadn’t launched yet. I told George I’d do ‘Dracula’ and I’d get a hold of a pal of mine, Peter Ellis to see if he could handle the ‘Frankenstein.’

As it happened, he said yes, which was why although he’s written a pulse-pounding paperback for Corgi Books, which was due to come out at the end of 1977 as his first work of fiction, Hound in fact beat it into print by some months. Incidentally, my first book came out in 1968, a contemporary thriller for Mayflower books.

George said we could actually use swear-words, since it wasn’t for the juvenile market. He drew the line at fuck but said I could use shit if I wanted. Unfortunately, he had a chance of mind at the editing stage and substituted innocuous imprecations, such as Lord! for the word. I managed to get God in a couple of times but George decided he didn’t like Goddamn, so that went too.

I’m fairly certain I suggested that George get a hold of my old friend Frank Pepper to knock out one of the books, about mutant undersea monsters. Matt Chisholm wrote one, but I can’t remember his real name (Peter Christopher Watts - noted Western author). Patrick Macdonald was really Patrick Macdonald, although Mike Baker was in fact Fred Baker; Fred wrote about some monstrous mutant man created in a lab and going berserk. We were all contracted for another five books of each of our series. Alas, the books sold well enough, but not in the Phillipines, so that put the kybosh on the whole thing.

JOHNNY: I’ve only ever come across yours and Peters’ book. Do you know how well the others sold?

JHT: I have no idea, they all came out. Most I believe, were shipped off abroad, mainly to the Phillipines (army bases). For some arcane reason – possibly – to do with tax – the Canadian holding company (Worldwide Library or International Library) have an outlet in South East Asia, and you have to sell big over there. Or anyway, that was the deal back in the 1970’s. Australia was (is) another big outlet for their titles.

Sadly, with the onset of the internet, junky paperback bookshops full of 2nd hand stuff, are no longer to be seen in most back streets, and tons of old paperbacks are nowadays simply pulped, or used as landfill.

JOHNNY: How does Blood stand up for you today?

JHT: The patient is doing as well as can be expected! It’s pure pulp fiction after all: we’re not talking Mann-Booker material! Re-reading it only today (in less than an hour) it seems to gallop quite satisfactorily. At the time (or at any rate, a year or so after it was published) some American woman, to do with something called, I think, The Dracula Society, raved about it, which was nice, but again if I’d written a pulp novel called The Blood of Potzrebie no-one would have taken a blind bit of notice.

I did have fun doing it. I was in the middle of churning out a load of comic-strip scripts at the time, and the chance to get back to pounding out serious wordage again after a couple of years’ lay-off was quite cheering. The bulk of it took about a week – it is only 25,000 words after all, and as far as I can recall I hammered out something like a chapter a day. My then-wife kept urging me on because she read each chapter at night and wanted to know what happened next. I was happy to oblige, especially since the faster I got the book finished, the quicker I got the cheque.

JOHNNY: How then, when asked to write about Dracula, did you manage to get away with writing a book where he only appears fleetingly in the end?

JHT: That’s the chronic-irony-choke about the book, and its structure is based on a bet I made with myself that I’d try and write a book with Dracula in the title and not actually feature Dracula himself until the end of the final chapter. My old friend the late (and still much lamented) writer and pulp fiction commentator Bob Sampson got the joke instantly and actually rang me from America (Huntsville, AL) and said it was one of the best scams against a publisher by a writer he’s ever come across: You get paid for a Dracula Book and then just about sneak him in at the very end! Brilliant!

Mind you, I don’t suppose I ought to be admitting this, altho’ after 30-odd years I don’t suppose it matters a whole hell of a lot. If the book is enjoyable, what the hell! I also liked the actual length: you can do a lot in around 30,000 words, which was roughly the length of the old pulp magazine novelettes went to – you know in Horror Stories, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery Mag, Dime Detective etc.

A lot of fun came in the peripheral things. On p.46, the somewhat obsessed CID Sergeant (Bates) starts maundering on about his hobby of collecting old cameras, and mentions the 1893 Padgett + Anderson Mark IV Bulb-Holder and Sprocket – that comes straight out of either a Hancock’s Half Hour or possibly Kind Hearts and Coronets – I’m pretty sure it was Hancock though. And since I assume that you’re well up on horror John, you’ll have no doubt come across that list of ancient titles, whispered about books of strange eons and forbidden practises usually trotted out by writers in the Lovecraftian tradition, many of which were invented by Lovecraft himself – the Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred etc, etc; I think Cultes de Goules was by August Derleth, or, as he renamed himself, the Compte d’Erlette. Anyway on p.74 you’ll find a short list with a couple of additions of my own: The Pnakotic Manuscripts was, I seem to recall, a Lovecraft invention (might have been Bob Bloch – but I think it was HPL), but my wrinkle (as it were) was ‘Franz Bendel’s Translation’, which is on Andriadis’s shelves – Franz Bendel in reality was one of my Jewish ancestors, on my mother’s side, who just happened to be a Court musician in the Court of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. I always like trotting that out! My other addition was the ‘pirated edition of Turville’s Discourse on the Arte and Theories of Practikal Magick’.

There are quite a few other references hidden away in the text – for instance, I pulled out the name Andriadis from Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and the phrase ‘lose no time!’ uttered by Linus Nostrand to make Von Ballin get a move on is straight from Mr Quelch (the Billy Bunter stories by ‘Frank Richards’). Most of this stuff isn’t of course pondered over and thought about: like any pulp writer, you grab it, as it were, as it becomes available, right when you need it, out of your subconscious.

JOHNNY: Who was responsible for the cover illustration of your book?

JHT: The great Brian Lewis was slated to do the covers for all six books. Brian was a superb comic-strip artist and SF and horror illustrator who had quite a distinctive and characteristic line style. But for some reason George Beal (the editor) didn’t like the finished product and got someone else to do the job. You can still see Brian’s work, however on each of the books’ title-pages and rear covers. The cover artist might have been an Italian or Spanish (they were cheaper); whatever, he clearly didn’t understand the word ‘phial’ and painted what looks to me a rather cheap champagne flute.

Incidentally, I have a feeling that Brian Lewis did all the fc and title-page title lettering as well. Brian died a few years after the book came out. He was a hell of an illustrator and a terrifically nice guy – the two don’t always go together in my experience.

JOHNNY: Why do you think the series came to an end?

JHT: It may have been me who put the Black Spot on the whole business, since Dracula cost far more than any of the other books. The reason was this: I’d passed my proofs and bunged ‘em back, and then I got a phone-call from George saying that they made an error on the fc of Dracula. I could tell from his voice that he was trying to downplay things... I said, ‘Look, what’s the problem?’ He said ‘You know you wanted to use a pseudonym, have ‘Jack Hamilton Teed as a byline? They’ve spelt it...Tweed – Jack Hamilton Tweed. It won’t look as bad as it is, and it’ll cost an arm and a leg to change it on the plate.’

I told him that there wasn’t a chance, that it was Teed or I walked. I was furious. I mean, ‘Jack Hamilton Tweed’ sounds like a complete nincompoop! Although there was a published writers called Tweed – Thomas F. Tweed, who wrote a couple of highly regarded fantasies before the war, one of which was made into the movies Gabriel over the White House. But I chose that particular pseudonym as un homage to the great pulp writer G.H Teed. I later used it on a series of action-adventure paperbacks I wrote about the Vietnam War. Anyway, George gave in and the printers had to re-make the fc plate, and in those days that would’ve cost. So maybe, since the books didn’t sell well in the Phillipines, that extra cost was the deciding factor to knock the project on the head, who knows? If it was, sorry John!

JOHNNY: Would you consider bringing out Von Ballin again?

JHT: He was always going to be a continuing character; it’s just that I never quite got round to doing much about it. I’d written a couple of short stories about him long before (God knows where they finally turned up), and I know I wrote at least one – and I’m fairly certain it was in fact two other stories for a couple of the ‘summer specials’ that 2000 AD put cout, circa 1978 – 82. I vaguely remember one was a ‘dimension-shift’ story. I’ve always liked doing crossover stories – and I remember I put a lot of back story into one of them – ‘that werewolf business’, etc, etc. But other things had more urgency, and you find yourself going off in other directions. I doubt if I have the energy now. Though if someone was to write a cheque...

JOHNNY:  Did you ever read Peter Tremayne’s Hound of Frankenstein?

JHT: Of course I did. I have a beautifully signed copy on my shelves. You might say I was the book’s bastard godfather, since if it hadn’t been for me, Peter would never have written it!

I think that’s probably all I can summon up on Blood. I’m still staggered that it’s still remembered after 30-odd years, and that one or two people seem to think that it’s not that half-bad.