The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is the first in a series of steampunk-style adventure novels by Mark Hodder. It is set in Victorian England (well, sort of), and is filled with mechanical and genetic improbabilities. The heroes of the story are Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Charles Swinburne, guys who actually existed, though not exactly in the way they do in this novel.

There are a few overlapping plots in this story, and they all become in some way connected to the strange being known as Spring Heeled Jack, a frightening character who has been attacking and abusing young women. Burton, formerly a famous explorer and adventurer, has been given a special position by the king (yes, the king…that’s as close to a spoiler as I’m willing to give). He finds himself in the middle of all of this and applies his unique abilities and strengths to try to get to the bottom of the whole affair. His oddball poet friend Swinburne eventually helps him out and ends up being a valuable partner, if a bit eccentric and unpredictable.

The story is action-packed and fun, with elements of old-fashion pulp adventure, suspense, and hard science fiction. The setting is stuffed with funky machinery, such as roto-chairs and steam-powered penny farthing bicycles as well as genetically-modified animals, such as foul-mouthed messenger parakeets. These anachronisms really add a lot of fun to the story, especially since Hodder gives us so much detail about the steampunk props and the attitudes and philosophies that gave rise to those wonderful inventions. Here is a description of an engineer named Brunel, who has been modified to exist well beyond his natural life:

He stood on three triple-jointed metal legs. These were attached to a horizontal disk-shaped chassis affixed to the bottom of the main body, which, shaped like a barrel lying on its side, appeared to be constructed from wood and banded with strips of studded brass. There were domed protrusions at either end of it, each bearing nine multijointed arms, each arm ending in a different tool, ranging from delicate fingers to slashing blades, drills to hammers, spanners to welders…

            At various places around the body, revolving cogwheels poked through slots in the wood, and on one shoulder – it was impossible to say whether it was the left or right because Brunel had no discernible front or back – a pistonlike device slowly rose and fell. On the other, something resembling a bellows pumped up and down, making a ghastly wheezing noise. Small exhaust pipes expelled puffs of white vapour from either end of the barrel.

There are other historical figures in this novel besides Burton and Swinburne (and the Brunel mentioned above), such as Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, and Oscar Wilde. They each receive their own amusing (often darkly so) twists by Hodder. Spring Heeled Jack is also based on someone, or a few someones, who terrorized women in Victorian London. (He was mentioned in Her Little Majesty by Carolly Erickson.) Since the real Jack was never caught, nor really very well understood, he provided the greatest opportunity for the author to take liberties with his story, and Hodder does so with great creativity and high entertainment.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack was my first introduction to the steampunk genre, and there are two more books so far in the Burton and Swinburne series that I’m looking forward to reading as well. This was really a great piece of escapist speculative fiction to kick off some lazy summer reading.

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