Curtis Bowman

Mark Blyth on the Austerity Delusion

Paul Krugman's latest fulmination against austerity economics mentions a new book by Mark Blyth entitled Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The author's name and his subject matter rang a bell, and then I remembered that Professor Blyth published an essay adapted from his book in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.

I went in search of more information about Professor Blyth, and I found this entertaining video critique of austerity economics that he made a while back:

It's refreshing to see someone acknowledge so forthrightly the class politics in the recent turn to austerity. I'd have greater respect for economists if more of them recognized the political aspect of their discipline. After all, economics used to be called political economy for a reason.

A Few Thoughts on Philip Sabin's "Simulating War"

From time to time I write a bit of autobiography for this blog. It's time for some more, I think, since I need to provide some background for what I have to say about Professor Philip Sabin's Simulating War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games. So sit tight, since it will take me a while to get back to the book.

In the mid-1970s I started to play wargames with a friend of mine. He taught me the basics, and then we would sometimes get together to play. Most of the time, though, like many, perhaps most, wargamers, I played solitaire. Even back then, when wargaming faced vastly less competition for a gamer's attention, it was still hard to find an opponent.

My gamer friend tended to buy games from Avalon Hill, whereas I tended to buy games from SPI. I soon realized that I enjoyed wargaming enough to subscribe to SPI's house magazine Strategy & Tactics. Because each issue included a complete game on some topic in military history, and because I also ordered directly from the company, I quickly accumulated a lot of games from SPI. It was my good fortune that my first issue of S&T contained Panzergruppe Guderian, which was easily my favorite of all the games that I received during my years as a subscriber. It was also my misfortune, since the high quality of PGG spoiled me. Most of the subsequent games were not nearly as good, and a few were fairly dreadful. I'm still having nightmares about Armada, an unplayable game that should never have been sent to subscribers. Magazine wargames are still sometimes hastily rushed out the door, and so their reputation for being underdeveloped, which they acquired in the glory days of S&T, lives on.

I more or less stopped wargaming after I graduated from high school. My games stayed at home when I went away to college, but I pulled one off the shelf now and then when I went back home to visit my parents. Otherwise, though, I didn't make any effort whatsoever to keep up with new developments in wargaming for roughly thirty years. About three years ago, however, I started to get back into it.

If you've looked my autobiographical posts or my academic autobiography, you've seen that I've had problems with my back and right shoulder for several years. Fortunately, I've gotten better, but I still have to ration my time in front of the computer. That characteristic typing position — you know what I mean, the one that involves having your elbows at your sides and your hands over the keyboard — seems to be what most aggravates my pinched ulnar nerve. That's why I've had to cut back on blogging the last few years, and, just in general, the progress of my scholarly work has slowed as a result of this pinched nerve. But, fortunately, as I said, I'm feeling better these days.

Anyway, it's still a good idea for me not to spend too much time in front of the computer. (So, to tell you the truth, I really ought not to be writing this post. But we don't always do what we should, do we? This may or may not be to your advantage, depending upon what I have something of interest to say about Prof. Sabin's book below.) I was thinking about this in early 2010, trying to figure out what to do about it.

I cut back on my blogging and my reading of news and current events. I was never much of a computer gamer, which meant that there wasn't much computer time to be saved there, but I stopped playing the occasional game of Klondike. I also reduced the amount of email that I send. And so forth. (If you're reading this post, then you probably spend too much time at your computer as well. Therefore, you don't need me to recite all the ways in which you could reduce your dependence upon it.) I wanted something else to do away from the computer besides reading books, listening to music, and watching movies. I've been doing those things for years. So what else was there?

That was when I started wargaming again. It's true that I play a few boardgames, but, really, I enjoy wargames more, especially since they tend to be better suited to solitaire play. Because I'm no longer an academic philosopher, I no longer have to read as widely as I did when I was teaching my many different classes. So I've reduced the size of my philosophy library and greatly increased my holdings in history. I've long been an avid reader of military history, and so my renewed wargaming nicely dovetails with my steady consumption of books on military history. I'm currently writing a commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, since it was written during the dark days of the Third Reich, takes on the topic of fascism. So my reading about Nazi Germany even fits in with my interest in wargaming.

The basic point of the preceding paragraphs — and this is why all of this autobiography is relevant to my discussion of Prof. Sabin's book — is that I have a fair amount of personal experience of wargaming. (Yes, my involvement has been somewhat episodic and thus scattered over time, but it continues to this day.) More important, though, is that my interest in wargaming has never been driven primarily by a passion for gaming, but rather by a lifelong fascination with history. (This, by the way, is why boardgames have never interested me as much as wargames.) Wargames are games, of course, but I've never regarded them as just games. I've always seen them as vehicles for historical understanding. Of course, they need to be entertaining (and thus their primary duty is to entertain), but they can be much more when they are sufficiently ambitious, properly researched, and carefully designed.

Okay, enough background information about me. Now on to my discussion of Prof. Sabin's book.

The most remarkable thing about Prof. Sabin's book is that it exists. Really, it's that simple. That an accomplished academic has written a book about an activity that some people are certain to dismiss as childish is quite a step forward in the intellectual appreciation of wargaming. Not only does the book discuss wargaming in a serious (which is not to say a solemn) manner, it even contains games that the reader can build and play (or download from Prof. Sabin's website and then build and play). A scholarly book with games in it! Gasp!

So we should just take a moment to appreciate the mere fact of the publication of Prof. Sabin's Simulating War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games. (And while we're at it, we should also applaud Continuum Books for deciding to publish the book. Too many academic publishers are given to following the latest academic fashion, rather than searching for innovative projects and fields of study to promote.) It's just nice to be able to read such a book.

The book consists of three parts: theory, mechanics, and examples. For my money, the most interesting part is the first one devoted to the theory of wargaming. I was especially intrigued by Prof. Sabin's tales of how he has used relatively simple wargames in his classes in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. The opening sentence of chapter 3 deftly summarizes his vision of the educational utility of wargaming: "The most important function of wargames is to convey a vicarious understanding of some of the strategic and tactical dynamics associated with real military operations" (31).

In the classroom this precept, he argues, requires for its realization small conflict simulations that can be easily learned and quickly played. (The phrase "conflict simulation" is often used as a synonym for wargames, especially the ones that strive to model some historical conflict as accurately as possible. Wargamers routinely debate the extent to which a particular wargame simulates the historical contest that gives the game its theme and guides its design. Also, sad to say, the phrase is sometimes employed to avoid embarrassment or so-called "game shame" on the part of wargamers. It's sort of like saying "film" or "cinema" instead of "the movies".) The first color photo in the book, immediately after page 72, shows groups of his students playing a simulation of his own design. Students quickly learn to appreciate the complexities of military operations, because, Prof. Sabin writes, they "must grapple with real strategic and tactical dilemmas as they struggle to beat their colleagues" (37).

The element of struggle is extremely important and not fully grasped by attending lectures and reading textbooks. Real warfare, after all, isn't a thought experiment or an intellectual exercise. It is a contest in which opposing sides typically pay a high price for participating, especially the loser. The players of a wargame attempt to beat each other in a manner similar to that of real combatants, and they do so in the full knowledge that something important, as defined in the victory conditions of the game, hangs on the outcome.

Real military contests, thankfully, happen only once, but wargames give us the opportunity first to simulate some particular conflict and then to replay it again and again. As Prof. Sabin writes in his book's most incisive sentence, "Wargames bestow in miniature the almost God-like ability to rewind time over and over again and to experiment with all kinds of random variations and alternative decisions, thereby creating the ultimate counterfactual sandbox" (55). When I was first playing wargames as a teenager, I certainly didn't know the word 'counterfactual', but no less certainly did I appreciate this aspect of wargaming. (So, by the way, do wargame publishers. Their advertising often challenges potential purchasers to change history.) This is one of the things that always fascinated me about the best conflict simulations.

Prof. Sabin's discussion of game mechanics will probably be of less interest to those who are already oldhands at wargaming, and those who are just beginning to take up wargaming will probably find it somewhat bewildering. He covers typical wargame mechanics, e.g. hexagon map grids, zones of control, stacking limits, and the like, as well as how designers attempt to simulate combat and command in different periods of history. Much of this was already familiar to me, of course, but I appreciated the ways in which Prof. Sabin articulated how these design choices can be brought together to create individual wargames.

Prof. Sabin then provides his readers with eight simple games of his own design. They make use of the techniques described earlier in the book, and thus give his readers an opportunity to see his design principles in action. I have to admit that I have yet to play any of these games. I already have enough unplayed games in my collection. But I recently purchased the commercial version of "Hell's Gate" from Victory Point Games. This game simulates the Korsun Pocket of 1944, a battle between German and Soviet troops. I'll be playing it in the near future, and I should be able to post about it. So more on this game at a later date.

I would have liked to have seen more on two particular topics, however. In the book's introduction Prof. Sabin talks about military gaming, that is, the tradition of Kriegsspiel that began in the early 19th century. Since I'm not a military professional, and since I've never read much about this type of gaming, which I assume is quite different from the largely commercial, hobby wargaming that Prof. Sabin discusses, I'm in the dark as to how the wargaming I know differs from what military professionals have been doing for two hundred years. That's just my ignorance, of course. But I think that Prof. Sabin's book would be even better if it not only said more about this difference but also illustrated it in some appropriate fashion.

The second topic that could have used more discussion is that of the morality of wargaming. Prof. Sabin discusses this briefly on pages 161 to 163. What I would like to see discussed is whether or not there are moral restraints on what aspects of a military conflict a designer should seek to simulate. Should, for example, the genocidal aspect of Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union be simulated? There are many, many wargames that simulate the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but as far as I know, none of them attempt to model the Einsatzgruppen and concentration camps that followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht's advance. This aspect of the historical conflict was hardly an afterthought. It was a key component of Nazi ideology, yet it is hard to imagine that someone will ever design a game that simulates the Holocaust and makes it a major element of the German war effort. Maybe there is such a game, and I'm just not aware of it. I certainly hope that there is no such wargame, but is this just squeamishness on my part, or is it grounded in some sort of moral objection? I would be interested to read what Prof. Sabin's has to say on this topic. As of this writing, I have no clear thoughts on the matter.

As you can see, I have a very favorable opinion of Prof. Sabin's book. If you're interested in wargaming as an intellectual activity that goes beyond merely having fun playing games based on military history, then I recommend Simulating War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games to your attention.

Philip Hoare Reviews Arthur Conan Doyle's "Dangerous Work"

Philip Hoare reviews a new book by Arthur Conan Doyle entitled Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure.

Yes, that's right, a new book by Arthur Conan Doyle. Apparently, his descendants held back a diary written during a whaling voyage in 1880 but recently consented to its publication.

Two Books by Justin Gustainis: "Hard Spell" and "Evil Dark"

A year ago I began a subscription to Weird Tales with issue #358. I figured that reading the latest incarnation of Weird Tales would be fun, and also that I could learn something about contemporary horror fiction along the way. (I really don't know very much about it, since my knowledge of the genre mostly resides in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) An article by Cynthia Ward led me to check out the website of a new genre fiction press called Angry Robot Books. I moused around a bit, and saw several books that I thought I might enjoy reading. But the work of one author in particular, Justin Gustainis, caught my eye.

Mr. Gustainis' first book with Angry Robot is an urban fantasy novel called Hard Spell. It's also a police procedural. I don't know much about urban fantasy, except that it seems to be everywhere these days. So I was intrigued. I don't know how many hours of Law & Order and its spinoffs that I've seen over the years. But, I thought, that a combination of urban fantasy and police procedural could be entertaining. So I was doubly intrigued. Furthermore, according to his website, Mr. Gustainis was once in the military, and is now a Professor of Communication at Plattsburgh State University. That's an unusual background for a writer of any sort. So I was triply intrigued. Finally, the hilarious trailer in support of the book had me laughing out loud. In short, I was sold. (The excerpt on the Angry Robot website didn't hurt, either.)

The book was great, and, lucky for me, the first in a series. The second book is called Evil Dark, and it's just as much great.

Detective Stan Markowski is a member of the Occult Crimes Unit of the Scranton Police Department. Scranton, as in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Okay, so it's not New York City. I never thought that I'd start reading a series of books set in Scranton. Not that I have anything against Scranton, of course. It's just that this sort of thing is usually set in more famous, more colorful cities. Although I lived in Philadelphia for many years, there were large parts of Pennsylvania that I never saw. (I didn't have a car, you see.) And so I never set foot in Scranton. But for all I know, Scranton (where Professor Gustainis attended college) is a great setting for supernatural phenomena. Just don't expect any famous landmarks to crop up as you follow Markowski's investigations.

So how do the books work? First off, what's the deal with supernatural beings (called "supes" in both books) roaming the mean streets of Scranton? According to Markowski, supes pretty much steered clear of the United States for a long time, what with its history of Puritanism. And we all know what happened in Salem, don't we? Well, two world wars put millions of Americans overseas, and air travel became widespread. So supes made their way to the New World in large numbers for the first time. In the 1960s they got the same civil rights as everyone else, and in Scranton there are a bunch of ley lines, i.e., sources of magical energy that attract supes whether they know it or not. So now they're Markowski's problem.

Markowski is the narrator, and his voice is what provides so much of the fun. His language is simultaneously profane and hilarious. I'll give you an example from Hard Spell. (And just so you know, that's me slightly editing the saltier language. After all, this blog is a family show.)

Markowski and his partner Karl Renfer have been sent out on a call to investigate reports of Satanists who are performing sacrifices. They find more than they expect, for the Satanists have successfully summoned a minor demon by means of a human sacrifice. Markowski goes hand-to-hand with a couple of the cultists, and then realizes that he has unintentionally stepped inside of the pentagram used to contain the demon. Not that he sees that he has done this. No, he realizes that he's in big trouble when he feels the demon grab his ankle. Here's how things play out on pages 42 and 43:

Most people can think pretty fast when they have to. Even me. In a flash I considered my options, and none of them looked very good. I still had my gun, but shooting a demon is a waste of time, even with silver bullets. And Arnie Schwarzenegger in his prime couldn't have broken the grip that thing had on my leg.
      I was just thinking that my best option was to put the pistol in my mouth and pull the trigger when Karl Renfer appeared behind one of the smaller cultists, grabbed him at the neck and crotch with those big hands of his, and heaved.
      "Here's dinner, Hellf-ck!" Karl yelled, as he threw the struggling man at the demon's ugly, misshapen head.
      The kid was stronger than he looked.
      Class-four demons aren't very smart. If this one had been brighter, it would have hung on to me with one clawed hand and grabbed the airborne cultist with the other one. Kind of like dinner plus dessert.
      Instead, the stupid thing let go of me to grab its new prey, and I rolled away from that pentagram faster than a scalded cat on speed.
      I got to my feet in time to see the demon bite the cultist's head off and swallow it whole.
      I waved my gun at the rest of the coven. "Freeze, motherf-ckers! Hands in the air - you're all under arrest!" One of them made a dash for the door, but only got a few steps before Karl shot his leg out from under him. It didn't take long for us to get the rest face down on the floor, fingers interlaced behind their necks.
      I looked at Karl. "You call for backup?" I asked. My voice was a little unsteady.
      He shook his head. "Wasn't time, once I saw what was going down in here."
      "Okay, I'll do it now."
      I took out my radio, got the station, and told them what we were dealing with. The dispatcher promised to send help immediately. "Be sure to tell 'em to send an exorcist," I told her. "We got something that needs to be sent back to Gehenna."
      As I clicked the radio off, I looked toward the pentagram. The demon was still devouring what was left of the unlucky cultist. Demons are real messy eaters.
      Karl saw where I was looking. "Ate the outfit, too," he said. "Must be the extra fiber."
      It wasn't all that funny, and definitely a 10 on the Insensitivity Scale, but I laughed. And laughed. It was all I could do to stop it from turning into tears. Coming that close to being eaten alive can shake you up some.
      Even a tough guy like me.

This gives you a good idea of the tone of both books. Funny and scary.

But neither book is just a series of random calls. Instead, each book has a larger plot. In Hard Spell someone is killing vampires for some nefarious purpose that Markowski and Renfer have to uncover. And in Evil Dark someone is videotaping torture murders for a different but equally nefarious purpose. At times the books can be a bit gruesome, but the funny moments always come along to lighten the mood.

I had one minor quibble about something most readers won't notice (and that the editors at Angry Robot Books obviously didn't catch). Since Mr. Gustainis is a veteran, he generally does a good job of describing the use of firearms. I noticed, though, on page 252 of Hard Spell that he has Renfer thumb back the hammer of the Glock pistol that he carries. Well, Glocks don't have hammers. They're striker-fired semi-automatic pistols. Check out the Glock website and see for yourself.

Anyway, that's just a quibble, as I said.

Hard Spell and Evil Dark are loads of fun. I highly recommend them, and I'm definitely ready for the next one in the series.

Sir John Keegan Has Died at Age 78

Sir John Keegan, the eminent British military historian, has died at age 78.

David Blackbourn Reviews Jonathan Steinberg's "Bismarck: A Life"

David Blackbourn, author of The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, reviews Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck: A Life.

Two Passages From Roger Bootle's "The Trouble With Markets"

I recently read Roger Bootle's The Trouble with Markets: Saving Capitalism from Itself. If you're looking for an intelligible, not especially technical explanation of the causes of the financial crisis, then this might be the book for you. I read the revised and expanded paperback edition.

Mr. Bootle's book is well written, but two passages really jumped out at me.

Here's the first, from page 181:

Is there a need to do anything at all? Indeed, is there anything that can usefully be done? According to some people, recessions clean things up and sort things out. So, far from complaining about the recession or trying to stop it, we should simply lie back and enjoy it.

I see things differently. Yes, a little bit of recession can sometimes do you good. So too, I am told, can the occasional cold bath. But spending the whole day immersed in freezing water is not to be recommended. The current economic downturn has gone well beyond a short, sharp dip. The fashionable phrase for crisis deniers is "creative destruction," first coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. However, remember that this phrase and the associated idea only gained traction from the contrast with their more frequently observed cousin, destructive destruction.

Here's the second, from page 217:

It has long amused me that the doctrine of efficient markets, and the much looser but wider endorsement of free markets in general, find their strongest supporters in university economics and finance departments, by and large peopled by individuals who, protected by their tenured appointments at not-for-profit institutions, never come face to face with the capitalist system in action. They are the ones who blithely assert the case for free markets, even to the point of arguing the merits of allowing the whole financial system to be allowed to implode, confident in its later resurgence, stronger and healthier—and presumably in the resilience of their own pension schemes. They would not last five minutes on a trading floor before being eaten alive.

Taken together, these two passages express an idea that I've often had, namely, that those who most vociferously extol the virtues of capitalism are never those whose jobs are creatvely destroyed by the workings of the marketplace. This has always struck me as morally obnoxious, especially when those whose jobs have survived untouched use their influence to obstruct or defeat policies designed to help those who have been thrown out of work through no fault of their own.

Anyway, I recommend Mr. Bootle's book to your attention.

Advertisements for Myself - #12

In mid-2007 I agreed to work as one of the translators of an anthology of the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. These things take time to see the light of day, and so only recently has the book been published by Brandeis Universty Press.

The book is entitled Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible and includes a wide selection of Mendelssohn's work from 1769 to 1786. Michah Gottlieb edited, introduced, and annotated the book. Elias Sacks did the translations from Hebrew, and I did the new translations from German. I also made some suggestions for slightly revising the excerpts from Allan Arkush's 1983 translation of Mendelssohn's Jerusalem.

My new translations make up roughly forty percent of the book as a whole. This page will provide you with the full table of contents. I translated selections 1-3, 5, 6-8, 10, 11-13, 15-16, and 20-25.

Paul Hockenos Reviews "Germany's Genocide of the Herero" and "The Kaiser's Holocaust"

Paul Hockenos reviews Jeremy Sarkin's Germany's Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers and David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen's The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism.

If you don't have time for book-length treatments of this topic, then you might consider looking at chapter 33 of Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. Judging, though, from the audio excerpts read by Mr. Olusoga, you'll find much more about German racial attitudes in these new works.

Kim Newman's "Anno Dracula"

From time to time I've mentioned that I'm interested in gothic fiction, horror film, and the like. I haven't done much with this interest for several years, but now that I'm working on new projects and trying to blog more often than in the past couple of years, I thought that it might be fun to write a bit about what I'm watching and reading along these lines. Someday I hope to write some sort of book on this sort of thing, and I might as well start to work out some of my thoughts in some tentative fashion on my blog. How's that for a well-defined plan of action?

Anyway, I recently read Kim Newman's Anno Dracula. The book originally appeared in 1992, but Titan Books re-issued it earlier this year. It's the first of a series of three books, all to be re-printed by Titan Books; and it looks as if a fourth volume will be coming out in the near future.

The first thing you should notice when you pick up a copy of Anno Dracula is that the book is set in London in late 1888. If you know anything about the history of London, especially as it is mined for historical fiction, then you know that 1888 is the year of the Ripper murders. So you know in advance that the story has something to do with Jack the Ripper. But here's the twist. Unlike, say, Edward B. Hanna's The Whitechapel Horrors, which simply puts Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the Ripper in what is otherwise the historical London of 1888, Newman's Anno Dracula alters the plot of Bram Stoker's Dracula and then re-fashions the historical timeline of Great Britain from 1885 to 1888.

What I'm about to tell you doesn't give away any important plot details. Consequently, you won't have to worry about any spoilers. So here we go.

In Mr. Newman's re-writing of Dracula the Count defeats his enemies, openly rises in British society, and marries Queen Victoria to become Prince Consort. At the beginning of Anno Dracula his influence is extending throughout Great Britain, and to a lesser extent throughout the British Empire. Now that a vampire is part of the royal family, vampirism has become fashionable. Vampires, old and new, no longer need to hide what they are. After all, if being a vampire is good enough for the Queen, then it should be good enough for everyone else. But, of course, there is resistance to Dracula's spreading power.

Mr. Newman doesn't spell it this back story in any detail, although his characters often allude to it. For the most part, Dracula remains off stage, and thus is a menacing, insidious force, slowly worming his way into the world of the living. Consequently, his occasional appearances make a more powerful impression on readers.

Generally speaking, Mr. Newman handles these appearances quite well, especially the extended encounter at the end of the novel. Unfortunately, however, one appearance that is crucial to his alternate history fails to answer what I imagine to be the attentive reader's most pressing question. If you've read Dracula, then you want to know what went wrong. (It isn't actually necessary for you to have read Bram Stoker's novel, but I can only assume that having done so makes Anno Dracula more enjoyable.) That is, why did Van Helsing and his allies fail to destroy Dracula? Mr. Newman's answer to this question comes in what I found to be the least convincing episode of his novel.

John Seward, one of Dracula's pursuers in the Stoker novel, is a major character in Anno Dracula. In chapter 16 of Anno Dracula Seward's journal recounts the episode from chapter 21 of the Stoker novel in which Seward, Van Helsing, and the others confront Dracula as he is feeding on Mina Harker in the Harkers' bedroom. In the Stoker novel they force the Count to flee, but in Newman's novel Dracula effortlessly defeats his enemies. During this re-imagined encounter he speaks some of the dialogue from chapter 23 of the Stoker novel — "You think to baffle me …" — and then kills Quincey Morris and Jonathan Harker. Seward, Van Helsing, and Lord Godalming retreat in despair. Dracula is triumphant, thereby setting the stage for his rise in British society and the subsequent events of Anno Dracula.

This is just too easy, especially after we have been held in suspense for the first third of Anno Dracula. So it seems to me that Mr. Newman's imagination failed him at this point. But since the very possibility of the plot of Anno Dracula rests on the failure to destroy Dracula, we just have to accept what Mr. Newman writes in chapter 16 and move on. This isn't an insurmountable obstacle to appreciating Anno Dracula, but at least in my case it somewhat lessened my enjoyment of what is otherwise a fine novel.

As for the actual plot of Anno Dracula, well, vampire prostitutes are being murdered in Whitechapel. You saw that coming, right? But for the reader the identity of the Ripper isn't a mystery. That's revealed early on, but I won't give it away. The novel centers on the investigative efforts of Geneviève Dieudonné, an elder vampire of a bloodline other than Dracula's, and Charles Beauregard, a member of the Diogenes Club, an unofficial government organization whose membership includes Mycroft Holmes. Dieudonné and Beauregard form the inevitable liaison as they work together. Their pursuit of the Ripper leads them to a climatic encounter with Dracula.

One noticeable feature of Anno Dracula is its intertextuality. That is, Mr. Newman alludes to other stories and novels, and even films, taking whatever he feels like tossing into his mixture. This can get a bit tiresome at times. So, for example, the armadillo from Todd Browning's Dracula takes a bow in chapter 57. The Titan edition of Anno Dracula includes a chapter of annotations that explain some of the borrowings, but others are left unexplained. You can simply read straight through and not bother with the annotations. Appreciating Mr. Newman's complex tale doesn't really depend upon on understanding this sometimes fiddly business.

Overall, though, I greatly enjoyed Anno Dracula. It's clever and well written. I'm not much of a fan of gooey horror fiction and films, and so I was glad to discover that there isn't an enormous amount of bloodshed in the book. But, of course, there are a few scenes to rattle the squeamish.

I'm looking forward to reading the other volumes in the series.