[In the following excerpt, Ludlam describes the plot and circumstances surrounding the creation of several of Stoker's short stories.]

In the summer of 1893 a wider public learned for the first time a little of the character of the man who stood in Irving's shadow, when Hall Caine gratefully dedicated his book Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon to Bram. With a burst of unusual effusiveness Caine wrote:

When in dark hours and evil humours my bad angel has sometimes made me think that friendship as it used to be of old, friendship as we read of it in books, that friendship which is not a jilt sure to desert us, but a brother born to adversity as well as success, is now a lost quality, a forgotten virtue—then my good angel for admonition or reproof has whispered the names of a little band of friends, whose friendship is a deep stream that buoys me up and makes no noise; and often first among those names has been your own.

Down to this day our friendship has needed no solder of sweet words to bind it, and I take pride in showing by means of this unpretending book that it is founded not only on personal liking and much agreement, but on some wholesome difference and even a little disputation. …

One of the book's three stories, Caine explained, was an altered version, “presented afresh, with every apology, because you with another friend consider it the only worthy part of an unworthy book.” And of the book's title story, “Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon”, which featured Captain David Quiggan—“a typical Manx seadog; stalwart, stout, shaggy, lusty-lunged, with the tongue of a trooper, the heavy manners of a bear, the stubborn head of a stupid donkey and the big, soft heart of the baby of a girl”—Caine wrote: “I publish it because I know that if anyone should smile at my rough Manx comrade, doubting if such a man is in nature and now found among men, I can always answer him and say, ‘Ah, then I am richer than you are by one friend at least—Capt'n Davy without his ruggedness and without his folly, but with his simplicity, his unselfishness and his honour—Bram Stoker!”

It was all rather embarrassing and Bram was glad to leave the public gaze for two weeks at least, on his August holiday. This time he went off alone to explore the east coast of Scotland, where, friends had told him, the air was very bracing. Making his base at Peterhead, Aberdeenshire—the most easterly point of Scotland—he first walked miles along the coast north of the port, then returned and walked southwards. He walked south for exactly eight miles, then stopped; for what he found, and what he experienced on finding it, made his delight over Boscastle fade into insignificance. He had discovered the little village and port of Cruden Bay.

He was drawn to the place at sight. He looked upon a curved shore backed by a waste of sandhill behind which all was green, from meadows that marked the southern edge of the bay to rising uplands that stretched far away into the blue mist of the mountains at Braemar. In the centre of the bay was a miniature hill called the Hawklaw, which ran down to the sea; the sands were wide and firm and the sea ran out a considerable distance. He walked into the village that squatted beside the Water of Cruden, past the few rows of fishermen's cottages, with two or three great red-tiled drying sheds nestled in the sand dunes behind them. He saw the little coastguard lookout beside a tall flagstaff on the northern cliff; sturdy Slains Castle, home for generations of the Earls of Erroll; and the one small hotel down on the western bank of the Water of Cruden, with a fringe of willows protecting its sunken garden full of fruits and flowers. He walked into the hotel, the Kilmarnock Arms, and stayed.

The next few days were spent in fascinating exploration of Cruden Bay. To the north rose great rocks of red granite, jagged and broken; to the south, where a little promontory called Whinnyfold jutted out, rose other massive formations of rock. For half a mile or more they rose through the sea, singly or in broken masses, ending in a dangerous cluster known as the Skares. Here, he learned, was a tale of wreck and disaster that extended over the centuries; here could be seen the sea in its fiercest mood, the rocks lost to sight in the grand onrush of the waves.

When the wind blew into Cruden Bay there was no limit to the violence of the waves, which seemed to gather strength as they rushed over the flat expanse of shore. Bram spent hours, by day, scrambling among the rocks; and by night, in the moonlight, he looked across at the bleak promontory of Whinnyfold standing out stark and black as velvet, and the rocks of the Skares like black dots in the quivering sea of gold.

He spent hours with the coastguard in the little lookout on the cliff; and on the spot he began a new story.

He returned to the Lyceum invigorated and in high spirits, undaunted by the immediate prospect of an exhausting tour of Canada and the United States that would take the Irving company to its greatest number of cities yet, doing many one-night stands. The size of the tour, which began in September, was very necessary, for the theatre had suffered a loss on the last season.

Three things marked this tour for Bram, the first being when the company played Philadelphia. Here, a close friend of Walt Whitman handed him a packet the poet had entrusted him with before his death. It contained, “For our friend Bram Stoker”, the original notes from which Whitman had delivered his famous public lecture on Abraham Lincoln in 1886. It was his gift from the grave.

The second event was when Bram published in the North American Review an article on “Dramatic Criticism”. After acknowledging the patience and liberal-mindedness of critics both in Britain and America, he hit out at others he called “provincial writers”. Airing long pent-up feeling he wrote:

This individual (the provincial) is gifted with a sort of impregnable cocksureness, and to him nothing is hidden, for he reads the whole Arcana like an open book. His vanity supplies the blanks that his ignorance has passed, and his self-sufficiency covers up with a blinding glory all doubts as to fact. In some of the most intellectual centres of the English-speaking world such specimens are to be found, and it is to them that the word ‘provincial’ can be most suitably applied.

Suggesting, politely, what a critic should strive to be, he commented: “I know, for instance, of one dramatic critic and translator of plays either so perversely stupid or so lamentably ignorant of the first principles of his calling as to write thus, ‘The actor, however little he may like to be told so, is a parasite upon the play.’ If his statement were metaphysically true, what a slur he, a critic, has cast by inference upon his craft; for if the actor be a parasite upon the play, what, in the name of logic, is the critic, who earns his bread or pursues his mission by writing of the actor?”

This latter shaft sent William Archer, in London, dashing for his pen. In a long and detailed examination of Bram's “turn at the popular sport of chastening the critics,” he noted that “his doubt proceeds, I gather, from a generous but illogical jealousy for the dignity of criticism. The critic,” he announced solemnly, “is not a parasite upon the actor, but a co-parasite with the actor upon the play.”

Third and most important event on the American tour was a simple one; just a sight, in northern California, of the massive snow-capped peak of Mount Shasta, the solitary cone of an enormous extinct volcano, rising splendidly and starkly to the clear blue sky from foothills a mass of billowy green. Shades of The Snake's Pass—here was a mountain of great personality. Before the tour was over he had jotted down another story idea.

But before this tale, The Shoulder of Shasta, and the story which he had begun at Cruden Bay—The Watter's Mou'—came to fruition he published three short stories, each of them a stepping stone to Dracula. One was a joke about a corpse; the other two were just plain ghastly.

“The Man from Shorrox'” was a deliciously droll tale in rich Irish dialect, told in over-the-bar fashion. It made its debut in the Pall Mall Magazine alongside such contributors as Rudyard Kipling and Quiller Couch.

The man in question was from Manchester, a traveller for Shorrox'—“the greatest long-cotton firm in the whole world”—who in the course of his travels in Ireland came to an inn kept by one Widow Byrne.

“My! but she was the fine woman,” enthused the narrator. “A gran' crather intirely; a fine upshtanding woman, nigh as tall as a modherate-sized man, wid a forrm on her that'd warrm yer hearrt to look at, it shtood out that way in the right places. She had shkin like satin, wid a warrm flush in it, like the sun shinin' on a crock iv yestherday's crame; an' her cheeks an' her neck was that firrm that ye couldn't take a pinch iv thim—though sorra wan iver dar'd to thry, the worse luck! But her hair! Begor, that was the finishing touch that set all the min crazy. It was jist wan mass iv red, like the hearrt iv a burnin' furze-bush whin the smoke goes from aff iv it. Musha! but it'd make the blood come up in yer eyes to see the glint iv that hair wid the light shinin' on it. There was niver a man, what was a man at all at all, iver kem in be the door that he didn't want to put his two arrms round the widdy an' give her a hug immadiate.”

The man from Manchester no less, though his sudden advances were made with one object, to get the best room in the inn for the night; he refused to believe that it was occupied. After creating a rare disturbance he was finally allowed his own way and went to bed in the dark, only to be rudely awakened to find himself sharing a bed with a corpse quietly awaiting burial.

Bram's Irish character cameos were gems, lilting along to the final scene of the widow crooning over her grisly joke, as seen by the narrator.

“I thought the widdy had gone to her bed; but whin I wint to put out the lights I seen one in the little room behind the bar, an' I shtepped quiet, not to dishturb her, and peeped in. There she was on a low shtool rockin' herself to an' fro, an' goin' on wid her laughin' an' cryin' both together, while she tapped wid her fut on the flure. She was talkin' to herself in a kind iv a whisper, an' I heerd her say: ‘Oh, but it's the crool woman I am to have such a thing done in me house—an' that poor sowl, wid none to weep for him, knocked about that a way for shport iv dhrunken min—while me poor dear darlin' himself is in the cowld clay! But oh! Mick, Mick, if ye were only here! Wouldn't it be you—you wid the fun iv ye an' yer merry heart—that'd be plazed wid the doin's iv this night!”

A very different tale was “The Burial of the Rats”. This, the outcome of notes taken on holiday in Paris in 1874, almost twenty years before, described a silent, ghostly chase by thieving and murderous chiffoniers after an exploring Englishman, trapped in a squalid district of the city. After a scramble in the dark among dreadful mounds of dirt, the stranger just managed to elude his pursuers and so escape burial at the teeth of the district's teeming rats.

The third story, “The Squaw”, was to become one of his best known short horror pieces. This developed from the visit to Nuremburg ten years before, and the story-teller slyly observed, “Nuremburg was not so much exploited as it has been since then. Irving had not been playing ‘Faust’, and the very name of the old town was hardly known to the great bulk of the travelling public. …” The story was of a garrulous American visiting the city who, from the castle wall, idly dropped a pebble on to a kitten below, and killed it. Its revengeful mother stalked him for the rest of the tour and when, for the realistic thrill of it, he had himself bound with rope and stood inside the Iron Virgin in the torture chamber, the cat cunningly brought about its own ghastly justice by leaping at the tower custodian and forcing him to release the rope holding back the Virgin's great spiked door. The gruesome result was powerfully imagined and described.

With these short excursions into horror behind him Bram concentrated as well as he was able, during a heavy Lyceum season, on the two novels he had begun, particularly that inspired by his visit to Cruden Bay. This, The Watter's Mou', he completed on his return there in the summer of 1894, when he was able to introduce Florence and Noel to his great discovery of the romantic piece of Scotland by the sea. Happily he wrote in the visitors' book of the Kilmarnock Arms, “Second visit—delighted with everything and everybody and hope to come again.” He was indeed to do so, many times; and here Dracula was soon to be born. …

Three months after Dracula was published Bram was back on holiday at Cruden Bay, with his wife and son, pacing the sands that brought inspiration. He was now, at forty-nine, author of six books and several short stories, the last two of which, written since Dracula, carried on the horror theme.

The first, “Crooken Sands” was set in Cruden Bay—thinly disguised as “Crooken Bay, a lovely spot between Aberdeen and Peterhead” and concerned a London merchant who thought it necessary, when he went for a holiday in Scotland, to provide himself with the entire rigout of a Highland chieftain—claymore, dirk, pistols and all. His shock came on Crooken Sands one night when he saw his own image sucked down before his eyes by a hungry quicksand. The plausible twist to the tale was as genial as it was grim.

The second story, “The Secret of the Growing Gold”, was an unrelieved shocker about a man who attempted to murder his mistress by sending her, coach and all, over a precipice in Switzerland. Unfortunately for the would-be murderer the girl lived to reappear at his home, albeit battered, which proved rather an embarrassment, as he had since married. He was consequently obliged to finish the job and bury the girl under the stone flags in the hall—only to be haunted by her tell-tale golden hair, which uncannily continued to grow and push itself up through a crack.