Richard Tate - The Dead Travel Fast

[dem bones]

Richard Tate - The Dead Travel Fast (Sphere, 1972)

blurb:

Deep in the eerie reaches of the Carpathian mountains a film company is making a new version of Dracula. Ghoulish threats menace the cast ... then explode into macabre reality. Garlic and crucifixes are nailed to bedroom doors. The female star dies, her throat lacerated by the ravenous teeth of something unknown. The producer dies, staked to the ground. Then, into this terrifying atmosphere of demonic killing steps Marcus Obadiah, enigmatic, powerful, sinister. But who - or what - is Marcus Obadiah? Policeman? Priest? Or psychotic killer?

Prolific author Anthony Masters, author of the non-fiction book The Natural History Of The Vampire (1972) and editor of Cries Of Terror (1976) died on April 4th [2003], aged 62. He wrote a number of books in the young adult Weird World, Dark Diary and Ghosthunters series'. As 'Richard Tate', he wrote the Dracula-themed mystery paperback, The Dead Travel Fast.

- from Stephen Jones & Kim Newman, Necrology, Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror # 15 (Robinson, 2004)

Problems beset a film crew shooting a new version of Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains. Unbeknown to each other, the cast are being independently blackmailed, everybody is receiving threats, and the director has just been gruesomely done away with. There also appears to be a vampire lurking about the village, judging by the state of the lead actress's jugular.

Unfortunately, Occult detective Marcus Obadiah makes it his business to investigate, and he's such a shrewdie you just know he'll put a stop to all the fun and games.

My abiding memory of this book is the grotesque image of one of the corpses after a particularly sadistic murder.

The Theme - "Don't make Dracula Films in Transylvania (or anywhere else) - they're trouble"- is familiar from several other novels (Peter Saxon's The Torturer and Ian Dear's Village Of Blood being particular favourites).

****

A revamp of a very bad, ancient review but I have to get back into writing about books somehow and have just began a rematch with The Dead Travel Fast hoping to do it justice this time. The Dead Travel Fast will always be a special novel to me as, not only is it an entertaining and surprisingly violent read but it's the one franklin and me got into a correspondence over and that effectively decided us that we wanted to start a board.

[franklinmarsh]

A special one for me in the difficult 'child to adult reading material' transfer. The wonders of the internet! Discovering someone else who'd not only heard of the damn' thing but actually read it was nothing short of magical!

[dem bones]

After making a false start on this back in February, finally got stuck in last night and it's a good 'un alright.

Part one of four, Garlic & Crucifix, runs something like this: The crew set up at a remote inn in the village of Urnst, Austria, to film their "definite" version of Dracula (Regina Corperation, 1968). Of the cast and crew, Director Victor Dassant, photographer Doug Wilson, Quentin Ryan (Dracula), Polly Lambert (Mina Harker), Jason Best (Jonathan Harker) and location scout Maggie Stacey are each being blackmailed by someone on the set. They believe the culprit to be camp producer Laurence Wisehart, a spiteful queen given to playing tiresome, often malicious practical "jokes". When a nocturnal wanderer in full Dracula regalia savages Polly's neck, her colleagues at last pluck up the nerve to confront Wisehart in his room. Fuck, but do they get a shock! An all time classic pulp moment!

Our narrator is the aforementioned Quentin Ryan, recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, who made his name playing the creature in a series of five Frankenstein revivals and has since proved his versatility by taking on ever more challenging roles.

"Apart from Frankenstein, Mr. Ryan has played the role of a mummy, a manic depressive with schizoid tendencies, a satan-worshipping priest and an unidentifiable vegetable mass"

After Wisehart takes his leave of the novel in such spectacular circumstances, the blackmailer ups the ante. The splendid rhubarbing inn-keepers, Herr and Frau Gottler demand that the crew leave before they give their fine Establishment a bad name, and mutter darkly of the "people of the forest", better known to us as the undead. Enter Inspector Kaspar and the English friend he's just been enjoying a skiing holiday with in Wirholz, psychic detective and ordained priest Marcus Obadiah ....

"We have a situation where the six of us with Mr. Obadiah, the Gottlers and a handful of uninvolved villagers are cut off from the rest of civilisation - in the most traditional manner"

Marcus Obadiah is ... deceptive. Granted, as Franklin has noted elsewhere, he's a little on the undynamic side, alternating between "infectious lethargy", fingernail-gnawing anxiety and being boring, but he's got that whole Columbo "scruffy git but underestimate him at your peril" aura about him in spades. As much as he underplays his ability to deputise for the police chief Kaspar (conveniently, Herr Kaspar was called away to investigate a robbery, and now he's stranded in Wirholz along with the bulk of the film crew), Obadiah soon has the main players dancing to his tune even though he's still conceivably a murder suspect just as they are. His methods are unconventional to say the least and even downright irresponsible. When the telephone lines to the inn are cut - proving that the murderer is still among them - he reacts by taking a bottle of whiskey to his room and misses all the action. Just in the nick of time, Maggie is discovered, gagged and bound to a chair in a gas filled room but this appears to be a smoke screen for the killer's real intentions as, while Marcus and Quent Ryan are busy rescuing her, another suspect is drowned in his bath. Maggie denounces Ryan - a man she's recently taken to sleeping with - as both the man who assaulted her and the blackmailer and life has got so weird for him since his breakdown, he's not even sure of the truth himself. Confined to his room while Kaspar and Obadiah continue to interview her, Ryan attempts to overdose himself on sleeping pills, realising too late that he's picked up the wrong bottle and taken speed! Evidently, it's decent stuff as he's soon going absolutely gaga, bashing people and making a run for it across the snow with Marcus in hot pursuit. Obadiah wants to tell him something important ....

190 pages of pure pulp bliss!

[andydecker]

Finally I read this, and I thought it rather middle of the road. The part with the thinly veiled Hammer Films was fun, but it is basically a crime novel, and as this its plot was not very convincing, to say the least. Too much in the Agatha Christie school of insane behavior and ridiculous coincidences.

But it was suspenseful told and a quick read. And it gives a lot of love to Stoker´s Dracula, which of course always is a plus.

Still, compared to other storys of the same topic like Kim Newman´s Coppolas Dracula it just doesn´t cut it; it would have made rather a nice episode of Midsomer Murders, but never Masters of Horror, if you know what I mean

[dem bones]

Argh! a bum review for The Dead Travel Fast! Even allegations of Midsomer Murders pleasantness! I mean, sure, the lugubrious Mr. Obadiah is a little on the lethargic side, but still ....

I'm just too shocked to continue.

[andydecker]

No, it is a classic Midsomer Murder. Think about it. A filmcrew in the village. A horror movie. There is hate, blackmail, eccentric characters. Then there is a grisly murder. And another. and another. The killer does the vampire thing. The police is clueless.

This describes half the episodes I have seen