The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was written as a bundle of letters, diaries and newspaper clippings.
My author borrowed my name from a real prince with a very unpleasant hobby.
I cannot enter your home unless you invite me in.
I cast no reflection and hold strong opinions about garlic.
A vampire count from Transylvania.
Dracula
Stoker never set foot in Transylvania. He assembled the whole country out of library books in a seaside town in Yorkshire.
Stoker assembled the novel from letters, diary entries, ship's logs and newspaper clippings, a technique that let him keep the count almost entirely offstage; he speaks in fewer than a fifth of the pages. He found the name in a library in Whitby, in a book on Wallachia, and seems to have taken little else from the historical Vlad III. The book sold modestly. What made the character permanent was film — including an unauthorised German adaptation in 1922 that changed the names, lost the lawsuit, and was ordered destroyed, surviving only because prints had already scattered.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #23 · today's mystery · the vault
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