Sinking his critical teeth into 'Dracula'

After writing nearly 2,000 footnotes for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes corpus, one might think Leslie Klinger would take a respite. After all, he has a thriving tax law practice in Los Angeles. But when the three volumes of "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" received glowing reviews upon their publication beginning in 2004 and wound up selling more than 50,000 copies, Klinger felt emboldened to ask his publisher, W.W. Norton, what his next project might be.

"Norton was taken aback by that," said Klinger, who had edited previous editions of Holmes novels. "I mean, that was a terrible way to start out as a writer -- with a taste of success."

Klinger may be one of the world's leading Sherlockians, but he wanted to stretch a bit. His wife suggested Dracula. After all, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel is arguably the most famous book of the late Victorian era, and Stoker was a contemporary of Doyle's. "Arthur Conan Doyle actually interviewed Stoker for a magazine late in his career," said Klinger, who lives in a house overstuffed with Holmes books in the Malibu hills. "Doyle was a great admirer of 'Dracula.' "

But Klinger wanted to make sure he would be contributing original scholarship about a book that has been studied and deconstructed for more than 100 years. The result is "The New Annotated Dracula," a lavishly illustrated volume overstuffed with arcana that's both authoritative and lightheartedly nit-picking, leavened by Klinger's playful stratagem of treating Stoker's novel of the great vampire as reportage.

Bram Stoker, born to a civil servant, was an unlikely candidate for literary immortality. But his association with the great artists and writers of his day was extensive, as he was manager of London's famed Lyceum Theatre. Yet it was only years after his death that "Dracula" came to be recognized as a horror classic.

The Dublin native suffered from unidentified maladies that confined him to bed until age 7, when he swiftly recovered. This "memory of revivification," Klinger writes in the introduction, might have "put its stamp on the narrative."

While at the Lyceum, Stoker began writing stories in his spare time, but nothing much came of them. He began jotting down ideas for "Dracula" while studying for his law degree, but it took him seven years to complete the novel. Ironically, the bestselling of Stoker's books during his lifetime was a two-volume biography of actor Henry Irving, his Lyceum boss. "Stoker was a wannabe writer for a long time," Klinger said. "But most of his books are garbage. 'Dracula' was the one book that he took time with, to which he gave a lot of thought."