The critic Ludovic Flow once wrote of Stoker: 'He is a master of the commonplace style in which clichés flow as if they were impelled by the same pressure as genius. Even his best-known novel ends with his heroes looking at the written evidence they have amassed and saying that it all looks highly improbable. So a triple enigma: the man himself, his transformation from bureaucrat to writer of Dracula, and the way in which enthusiastic readers have subsequently remade him. Beyond this, he seems to have lived in the shadows. His manuscript and typescript working notes for Dracula – or some of them – have also survived the final draft of the novel, with last-minute corrections, turned up as recently as the 1980s. He wrote thousands of surviving letters, most of which are detached and businesslike and tell us only about the social network of the Lyceum, or about its customers. We know that his first full-length book, written in Dublin, had the appetising title The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, and that this was followed by novels, lectures, short stories, articles, serials and a two-volume memoir of Irving. We know that Stoker was born in Dublin, studied at Trinity College while working in the bureaucracy of Dublin Castle, moonlighted as a drama critic for an evening paper, moved to London in 1878 with his new wife, Florence Balcombe – Oscar Wilde's ex – and became an excellent administrator of the Irving Company at the Lyceum theatre in London. One problem is the paucity of primary sources. But none of them, it seems to me, gets near the inner man. So biographies of Stoker – and there are four of them – all emphasise his most famous book and interpret the man through the prism of his work. Since the rise of the movies, Dracula has become one of the most widely known books in all world fiction, and the most filmed character in the history of cinema ( Sherlock Holmes comes in second).

W hen Bram Stoker died, 100 years ago, his obituaries, such as they were, emphasised his geniality, his long-term friendship with the actor Henry Irving, his association with the power-brokers of the day – and, only in asides, the 19 books he wrote.

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