Bram Stoker was born in Dublin and was so sickly as a small child that he could barely walk until he was seven. He spent those years in bed, listening to his mother’s stories, some of them about the cholera epidemic she had lived through as a girl in the west of Ireland. Then he recovered completely and became a champion athlete at Trinity College Dublin.

He went into the civil service at Dublin Castle, where he wrote a guide called The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a book that may still hold the record for least likely first work by a famous novelist. In the evenings he worked as an unpaid drama critic, and in 1876 he wrote a glowing review of the actor Henry Irving’s Hamlet. Irving invited him to dinner. Two years later, Stoker moved to London to become manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre.

He held the job for twenty-seven years, running the business, answering the letters, organizing the tours, and devoting himself to Irving, a magnetic and domineering star. Stoker married Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty who had been courted by Oscar Wilde. And in whatever time was left, he wrote novels and stories.

In 1890, on holiday in the Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby, he came across the name “Dracula” in a library book about Wallachia and Moldavia. He spent years researching folklore and the geography of Transylvania, a place he never visited. Dracula, published in 1897, is told entirely through diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and a phonograph recording, so that the reader pieces the horror together alongside the characters. The count arrives in England by shipwreck, at Whitby.

The book did well but did not make Stoker rich, and he died in 1912 in modest circumstances. His widow had to fight to protect it. When a German studio made the film Nosferatu (1922) without permission, simply changing the names, she sued, and a court ordered every copy destroyed. Luckily for film history, a few survived. Dracula has never been out of print since it first appeared, and its count is one of the most adapted characters in fiction.