Progeny of the Adder by Leslie H. Whitten

Heartless bloodsuckers descend on DC

Three dead prostitutes wash up along the banks of Washington DC’s Potomac River. In life, each were bombshell blondes, but when their bodies are discovered, they are to a woman shriveled, emaciated, and apparently exsanguinated.

For Harry Picard, the homicide detective charged with solving their murders, the case is a real head-scratcher. To start with, leads are few and far between. Other than driving a distinctive black automobile, the only clue to the perpetrator is that he is apparently a wealthy foreigner. Not exactly a needle in the haystack of the nation’s capital — a city brimming with international dignitaries and civil service workers.

But as the killings continue — and the killer apparently escalates his prey beyond the irrelevant ladies of the night — Picard is forced to confront a most unfathomable truth: the killer might be a genuine vampire. Or at least someone who believes himself to be.

In Will Errickson’s introduction in Valancourt Books’ Paperbacks From Hell edition of Progeny of the Adder, he credits the novel as being the first example of fiction to take a classical horror villain and transpose them from their traditional setting into one more contemporary.

Exactly how accurate that is, I don’t know, but Errickson goes on to point out that Progeny of the Adder was originally published in 1965, a full five years before Jeff Rice’s more renowned novel, The Kolchak Papers, was completed. (That novel infamously inspired a series of movies and TV shows — and directly influenced The X-Files.)

Indeed, Progeny of the Adder feels much more in the mode of a procedural-focused crime novel than a typical horror genre piece. But that’s precisely what makes it so compelling.

Yes, we horror readers know going in that the killer of this story is a vampire (the cover illustration kind of gives it away) but for the bulk of the novel, the characters themselves are in the dark.

And so, we get to be a fly on the wall as this archetypal hardboiled cop slowly pieces together the clues available to him to try and catch the killer.

For the entire first half of the book, that’s what Progeny of the Adder is. It’s a police detective story. And it’s great. Dark, gritty, utterly compelling. We come to sympathize with Picard the same way we do, say, McNulty in The Wire, as gives his all to crack the case assigned to him, all the while hitting roadblocks, getting caught up in political red-tape, and all the rest of it.

We are with Picard all the way. He’s not a faultless hero, but neither is he just a cop. He has hopes and dreams of his own, damnit. He has a crush on a policewoman from the Women’s Bureau called Susy. Soon enough the two of them embark on a burgeoning romance and she is inevitably harangued into going undercover as a blonde streetwalker in an effort to help capture the killer.

And then everything changes. After identifying their prime suspect and cornering him on the property where he’s holed up, realization hits that there might actually be more to this murderer than anyone expected. Although Picard is still reticent to admit the killer is actually a vampire, it’s clear at least that the killer certainly wishes or believes himself to be a vampire — which, as far as the policeman cares, is all that really matters.

All of a sudden, this modern sleuth is up to his neck in research into vampiric folklore and movie tropes — and advocating for his colleagues to carry crucifixes and garlic to help bring this night stalker with superhuman strength to justice.

The fact that no-one ever truly believes the killer to be a vampire is in itself interesting. The novel plows on as it began, as a police procedural first and foremost. In that way, Whitten doesn’t just bring an ancient evil into the modern day, he supposes how the modern world would react to it. Of course no one would believe in the magic of it all! People would recognize that the vampire was a danger, sure — but not that he was really a vampire.

Progeny of the Adder is a lean, mean, violent and very different horror novel. It is a page-turner of an enjoyable cheap paperback, but one that provides a unique lens to engage with impossible monsters through a gritty, reality-focused perspective.

I grew up watching The X-Files. To me, it makes perfect sense that FBI agents should routinely hunt down liver-eating mutants who can squeeze through air vents. It never occurred to me that mainstream storytelling had to evolve to a point where the adventures of Mulder and Scully were possible. Even though their predecessor was inarguably Kolchak, Progeny of the Adder provides an engaging window into how entertainment got there — and we are all the better for it!

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