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Detecting and Detective Vampires

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire

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Abstract

The antagonistic slayer/vampire dynamic has always been part of the mythos though most famously realized in the roles of Abraham Van Helsing and Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These characters inherited some traits from earlier stories and influenced a great number that followed. This opposing relationship continued in literature and other media until the 1960s, where not only the vampire became much more complicated but so did their relationship with those that would slay them. No longer chiefly hostile to each other, they began to occasionally cooperate against other monstrous foes. By the mid-1990s, the “vampire cop” was well on its way to becoming its own sub-genre, with the success of television shows like Forever Knight (1992–1996), as well as book series like Tanya Huff’s The Blood Books and P. N. Elrod’s The Vampire Files. Countless reinterpretations saw the vampire being treated as a romantic, sympathetic, often troubled figure, and this humanizing process also impacted the role of the slayer. Through the lens of popular culture, the undead revenant of folklore has been reinterpreted as a romantic, immortal lover, while evolving from detected vampire to vampire detective.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Toronto, Canada

    Brad Middleton

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  1. Brad Middleton
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Correspondence to Brad Middleton .

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  1. Independent Scholar, Poznań, Poland

    Simon Bacon

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Middleton, B. (2024). Detecting and Detective Vampires. In: Bacon, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36253-8_51

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