The Blood of Dracula

Novel by Jack Hamilton Teed 1977.

Two common thugs are hired by Felix Andriadis, a mad occultist, to break into a mausoleum and steal a casket from one of the coffins therein. The casket contains a phial, and the phial contains the blood of Count Dracula, Lord of Vampires, which would bestow great powers onto whoever drinks it. However, the coffin also contains a normal vampire which promptly attacks them. One thug is converted into a vampire, the other escapes and is chased, unwittingly, towards an innocent young journalist and Jake von Ballin, the detective who was trailing them in the first place. Thus involved, Jake finds he has to destroy Andriadis before Andriadis destroys him in his mad quest for the phial.

On the face of it, after Frank S Pepper's Big Deep, surely one of the worst novels in existence, another Mills & Boon offering with a tacky cover somehow didn't seem too appealing. However, this one isn't actually all that bad: it is tacky and cliched, but it's also crafted well, the background is solid and it's basically pretty good fun to read. For a while, I believed that Teed was actually Brian Lumley experimenting to see if he could write a book in less than a day - it's certainly not in Lumley's class but with traditional Lovecraftian library descriptions, use of the Szgany and phrases like 'the blood is the life', it certainly dropped a lot of hints. But it turns out that though Teed is a pseudonym, it isn't one used by Lumley. The name was also used on the covers of the Gunships series of US Special Forces novels with titles like The Killing Zone and Sky-Fire, but the author apparently doesn't want to spread his real name about.