The field of 21st century vampire fiction is crammed with prolific and enthusiastic authors, most of them female and nearly all of them having published their first vampire story after the year 2000. Every one of them owes a large debt to the handful of authors who have been publishing vampire novels for decades, and who now have to fight for attention in the genre they helped to define.
Texas author P.N. Elrod is among the bona fide “ancestors” of such up-to-the-moment pop culture superstars as Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Elrod has been publishing vampire fiction since 1990 and has created several memorable and varied vampire protagonists, including the 18th century American Tory Jonathan Barrett, the ruthless despot Strahd, and Elrod’s revisionist take on Bram Stoker’s Quincey Morris.
But Elrod’s most complex and affecting character is Jack Fleming, a 1930s Chicago journalist who falls afoul of the Chicago Mob and is murdered—and subsequently embarks on the misadventures detailed in the Vampire Files series. Launched by Ace in 1990 with Bloodlist, the next five books of the series (Lifeblood, Bloodcircle, Art in the Blood, Fire in the Blood, and Blood on the Water) shot off the presses within two years as mass market paperbacks. They shrank behind the laughable cover art typical of pulp vampire novels at the time (depicting a long-nailed, white faced ghoul with fangs hanging down to his chin like walrus tusks), but the quality of the books themselves attracted the attention of reviewers and serious vampire fans.
At that time, Anne Rice was the reigning queen of vampire fiction and her mass-murderous, utterly inhuman vampires defined the trope. Jack Fleming fit into a different and far more authentic model. Like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain, Fleming retained a conscience and a connection to humanity, and he didn’t need to kill humans to survive. In fact, he tried to avoid preying on humans at all, and became a nocturnal habitué of the Chicago stockyards for his fresh meals. In the first book, Fleming is befriended by an English actor-turned-private-detective named Charles Escott, who offers the newborn vampire a badly needed job. But Fleming’s unlife is complicated by the fact that he can’t untangle himself from his connections to the organized crime network in Chicago—the harder he tries, the deeper he seems to get. It doesn’t help that he falls in love with a singer and former mobster’s moll, Bobbi Smythe, or that several of his best friends are gangsters, including African-American Shoe Coldfield.
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