Aylmer Vance and the Vampire

Aylmer Vance #1

by Alice Askew, Claude Askew

Many of the penny dreadful stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Genres: Horror, Vampires, Short Stories, Classics, Ebooks

30 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2011

About the author

Alice Jane de Courcy Leake Askew
aka
Alice Askew

She was part of the husband-and-wife team of Alice and Claude Askew, both of whom perished when their passenger ship was torpedoed during the Great War in 1917. Askew was co-author of the Aylmer Vance stories wherein the protagonist, Vance, undertakes investigations on behalf of the ‘Ghost Circle’ and regularly exposes false mediums and the like.

Reviews

[Althea Ann]

After reading a bit about the authors, my first thought was that their lives would make a fantastic historical novel! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_a...)

However, this 1914 story is wholly by-the-book.

Vance and Dexter are a Holmes and Watson-esque detective pair who specialize in the supernatural. In this story (one of a collection featuring the partners), a young man comes asking for their aid: before he married her, his bride told him her family was afflicted by a vampiric curse. He pooh-poohed the superstitious idea - but now that his health is failing, and his wife refuses to leave her ancestral Scottish castle, he fears that she may have been telling the truth.

[A.M.]

An old family with a curse, and a new husband who has married into the family and finds himself the latest victim. His beautiful wife thought they could avoid the Macthane curse, but now she is drawn back to the castle, and her husband is ill.

I had not heard of this psychic detective, Vance, and his Watson Mr Dexter, but I will keep an eye out for more of their adventures.

3 stars

[Benjamin Stahl]

This treads very familiar ground with several popular tropes reappearing. Nevertheless, the story is still told well enough, the atmosphere is unsettling, and the pacing if effective, though I feel like I'm not wholly won over by the happy ending.

[Michael Sorbello]

The Sherlock Holmes of the paranormal. An enjoyable read, but this one ended a bit too abruptly.

[Liz]

There is a series of stories about Aylmer Vance, who is an occult detective, and his sidekick Dexter.
A recently married couple is struggling with a possible vampiric curse that seems to be passed down through the generations on the wife's side of the family. The husband enlists the aid of Vance and Dexter.
I won't say this story is overly thrilling, but it does hold out hope for an interesting series, so the judge is still out on this one, as I am generally a fan of this type of story with the late 19th/early 20th century detective/ghost buster.
The couple, Alice and Claude Askew were prolific writers until their tragic deaths when their ship was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine in 1917.
Originally published in 1914 in Weekly Tale-Teller.

[Jessica]

its pretty sad when a book can't even get me through 20 pages. the old english speak made it painful to read so I quit. onto bigger and hopefully better things