Burton and Swinburne in the Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

Burton and Swinburne in the Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs and anarchy. Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as 'King's Spy'. His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured former friend, John Hanning Speke. Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all.

Mark Hodder is the author of The Curious Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, which won the Philip K. Davis Award for Best Novel. The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, which won the 2010 Dick Prize, is a sequel to The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. He built the Blakiana website (http: //www.sextonblake.co.uk) to commemorate, document, and renew Sexton Blake, the most written-about fictional detective in English publication history. Mark is a former BBC writer, editor, journalist, and Web producer who has worked in both new and conventional media. He spent most of his professional life in London until 2008, when he moved to Valencia, Spain, to de-stress and create novels. He has a cultural studies degree and enjoys British history (1850 to 1950 in particular), delicious food, cutting-edge gadgets, cult television (ITC forever! ), Tom Waits, and a wide range of curiosities.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781906727208
ISBN 10	1906727201
Title	Burton and Swinburne in the Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
Author	Mark Hodder
Series	Burton And Swinburne
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Snowbooks Ltd
Year published	2010-04-01
Number of pages	512
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.