After reading a bit about the authors, my first thought was that their lives would make a fantastic historical novel! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Claude_Askew)

However, this 1914 story is wholly by-the-book.

Vance and Dexter are a Holmes and Watson-esque detective pair who specialize in the supernatural. In this story (one of a collection featuring the partners), a young man comes asking for their aid: before he married her, his bride told him her family was afflicted by a vampiric curse. He pooh-poohed the superstitious idea - but now that his health is failing, and his wife refuses to leave her ancestral Scottish castle, he fears that she may have been telling the truth. ( )

After reading a bit about the authors, my first thought was that their lives would make a fantastic historical novel! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Claude_Askew)

However, this 1914 story is wholly by-the-book.

Vance and Dexter are a Holmes and Watson-esque detective pair who specialize in the supernatural. In this story (one of a collection featuring the partners), a young man comes asking for their aid: before he married her, his bride told him her family was afflicted by a vampiric curse. He pooh-poohed the superstitious idea - but now that his health is failing, and his wife refuses to leave her ancestral Scottish castle, he fears that she may have been telling the truth. ( )

Davenant fell in love with her almost at once and he had every reason to believe, in spite of her many admirers, that his love was returned. At this time he knew very little about her personal history. He was aware only that she was very wealthy in her own right, an orphan, and the last representative of a race that had once been famous in the annals of history--or rather infamous, for the MacThanes had distinguished themselves more by cruelty and lust of blood than by deeds of chivalry. A clan of turbulent robbers in the past, they had helped to add many a blood-stained page to the history of their country. ( )