Bram Stoker

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Bram Stoker

Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 november 1847 - 20 april 1912) was an Irish writer wellknown for his novel Dracula. He was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was at his marriage on 18 september 1907. In that same year he conducted and wrote an interview with Conan Doyle: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Tells of His Career and Work, His Sentiments Towards America, and His Approaching Marriage.

When Bram Stoker managed The Lyceum Theatre in London, he produced the Conan Doyle play A Story of Waterloo (based on the story A Straggler of '15). Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography: « I had written a short story called "A Straggler of '15," which had seemed to me to be a moving picture of an old soldier and his ways. My own eyes were moist as I wrote it and that is the surest way to moisten those of others. I now turned this into a one-act play, and, greatly daring, I sent it to Henry Irving, of whose genius I had been a fervent admirer ever since those Edinburgh days when I had paid my sixpence for the gallery night after night to see him in "Hamlet" and "The Lyons Mail." To my great delight I had a pleasing note from Bram Stoker, the great man's secretary, offering me £100 for the copyright. »

Stoker was a Sherlock Holmes fan, he thought he could use it as a model in a first version of Dracula, as a specialist of psychic research named Singleton, with a policeman named Cotford and a watson-like history teacher named Max Windshoeffel.

Stoker and Conan Doyle both collaborated with other writers on the serial novel: The Fate of Fenella, in 1892.


Correspondence