Mark Hodder

Burton & Swinburne — (2010-2012) Publisher: Sir Richard Francis Burton — explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne — unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade; for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin! They stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy. The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End. Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all!

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

I’ve had some mixed success with the steampunk trend the past few years, thoroughly enjoying it when the authors pay as much attention to story and character as they do in coming up with new ways to mash-up old and new technologies, but finding it dully disappointing when the basic steampunk premise is the high point of creativity (Look! Airships flying over horse-drawn carriages while Dickens is walking through the streets!). Mark Hodder’s new book, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, I’m happy to say, does not disappoint, despite some awkward moments and a less-than-adequate ending.

Being steampunk, the novel is set in an alternate-history England during the late-1800s. However, this isn’t technically a “Victorian” Age as Queen Victoria was assassinated decades earlier (an act that the book returns to again and again, no matter that it took place so long ago). Socially and culturally, there are far larger changes, as the new English Empire finds itself at odds between two warring camps. In one camp are the Engineers/Eugenicists rapidly transforming England with their new machines (steam vehicles, ornithopters) and biological creations (dogs that deliver mail, birds that deliver messages). In the other camp are the Libertines, who oppose the technologists’ “destruction” of society and aim to form one based on beauty and art, and the Rakes, an offshoot of the Libertines who want to free themselves (and society) from all constraints, moral or otherwise.

Bounding about amidst all this rampant disorder is the veritable personification of chaos: Spring-Heeled Jack — a frightening creature of folklore who is reputed to appear suddenly out of nowhere, attack a young girl, and then disappear. And whom at least one policeman swears was present at the Queen’s assassination.

Stepping into this maelstrom is Richard Burton, the famed Victorian explorer, linguist, translator, and all-around bad-boy. At the start of Spring Heeled Jack he is newly commissioned by the Prime Minister to take on a new position: a sort-of freelance agent in the King’s service with the full power of the throne at his back. His several tasks include investigating Spring-Heeled Jack, the two warring social groups, as well as reports of strange disappearances and the possibility of werewolves. He is aided by the aforementioned policeman as well as his young friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.

The setting is more original than many I’ve come across in the genre, especially the Darwinists’ creations (the engineered ones are more predictably familiar), which add a nice sense of weirdness as well as humor due to the dismaying formula that for every good “tweak” the biologists make in a creature, there’s a bad tweak as well (the parrots’ flaw is particularly funny). One problem, though, is that the introduction of some of these elements can be noticeably clunky at times. Hodder does a good job of portraying the seedy side of London, especially during Burton’s trips into the poorer parts of town; we get a more honest sense of how much of the population lives, it seems to me, than we often do in these sort of novels.

Burton is an excellent choice as main character, since his actual life is so fascinating and replete with adventure that one needn’t fictionalize much to make him a compelling figure. He’s certainly the best part of the novel, though Swinburne makes a nice match, especially as he begins to come into his own as a character in the latter part of the story. Spring-Heeled Jack evolves nicely throughout the story until we finally start to get a handle on him a bit more than halfway through. He’s certainly one of the more original characters I’ve come across. Another strong secondary character is the highly literate head of the Chimney Sweep League, a mysteriously intriguing figure. The other characters aren’t as fully realized, and some are a bit one-dimensional. Burton’s fiancée for instance never really comes alive, and the policeman isn’t particularly memorable. A pair of government “fixers” have some rich potential that goes oddly unused. However, Burton’s personality and the quick moving plot mostly make up for such problems.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack moves toward a big showdown at the end, but the book also manages to bog down somewhat while doing so. One problem is we fall into a dreaded monologue sequence, which while interesting, slows things down while also feeling a bit forced (though Hodder, perhaps in recognition of this, does try to build in some rationalization for the scene).

We’re clearly set up for further books involving Burton and Swinburne as an investigative team. Despite some of this book’s awkward or clunky moments, and a somewhat disappointing close, I look forward to the next one. Recommended. —Bill Capossere

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack was an unusual reading experience for me. It’s rare that I come away thinking that a book’s weaknesses exactly equaled its strengths, but that’s the case here. I also struggled to figure out what the tone and shape of the book reminded me of, and I’ve narrowed it down to two things; it’s either a prose version of graphic novels like Hellboy, or the Doctor Who universe. While many of us can get a visitor’s pass to a universe like the Doctor Who-verse, it’s really hard to move there and open a business, as Mark Hodder proves with this uneven but ultimately entertaining novel.

First of all, let me list the many things I like about The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. Sir Richard Burton’s real-life 19th century exploits make him a fine match for this steampunk fantasy-adventure, and the pairing of Burton with poet Algernon Swinburne as a Holmes-and-Watsonish pair is brilliant. Burton is not only a man of action, but one of letters too, with a gift for languages, disguises and more arcane gifts such as mesmerism. (And you know who else lived in the house of his landlady/housekeeper? That’s right, Sherlock Holmes.) Most importantly, Hodder seems to enjoy writing Burton, and that keeps the book alive.

Swinburne barely escapes being a stereotype, but escape he does, and his character is valiant, intelligent, and innovative. Swinburne is better at drawing information out of people than Burton, and he volunteers for an undercover assignment that puts his life at risk. Burton’s musings about Swinburne’s motivations add a level of emotional suspense.

The alternate-history premise is original, and because of the time-travel element in the book, it’s deftly done. The book has a cabal of larger-than-life super-villains, which I think provides the graphic novel feel, and Hodder’s visuals in many parts of the book are awesome. Spring-Heeled Jack himself, with his stilts and the blue lightning wreathing his head, is breathtaking, and a later character, Mr. Belljar, works quite well too. Hodder’s pinnacle achievements of visual setting, for me, came with three locations in the book; Beetle’s chimney aerie; Darkening Towers, the crumbling mansion that serves as home-base for the Rakes, and especially the Battersea Power Station.

The steampunk premise works pretty well, although a few more details would have sold it better for me. If people really are soaring about London in rotor-powered armchairs, for example, where is the enterprising soul who sells earplugs to the passengers? Since genetically engineered swans pull box-kite carriers for humans, do all pedestrians carry extra-strength umbrellas? You know what pigeons can do to a car; think about swans.

Then there are the book’s weaknesses. Hodder’s writing and storytelling both suffer from disconcerting tics. For the first third of the book, every time a new invention appears on the page, the story judders to a halt while the author describes it in detail. The only saving grace is that he runs out of inventions eventually, and the pace picks up a bit until the jarring point-of-view shift in the second part, with a long explanation of what was really going on.

Hodder makes a misstep with the character of Isabel Arundell. This book does not need Arundell, but the writer gives us a passage in her point of view on Page One, thereby setting the expectation that she matters. Later, she is unceremoniously dumped out of the book. Later still, there is a discussion about her, as if she is important to Burton. In real life, Arundell was Burton’s wife and partner, a writer herself and a woman with strong opinions and contempt for convention. I think that Hodder may plan to bring her into later books in the series, perhaps as Burton’s adversary, but he handles her awkwardly here and it distracts from the story.

Hodder’s most distracting writing problem, though, is his habit of using synonyms for “said” at the end of lines of dialogue. Clearly, the now-dead J.I. Rodale, author of the The Said Book — it’s real, look it up — time traveled to our decade and put Hodder into a mesmeric trance, forcing him to substitute flashy words for “said.” The biggest victim of this is Swinburne. He trills, he shrills, he shrieks, he whines, he screeches. Other characters growl, snarl, reply, return and respond. They stutter, they yell, they cry. This is unnecessary. “Said” is a good soldier of a word that lets the reader focus on the dialogue itself. I invite Mr. Hodder to make its acquaintance.

Almost as distracting is the Star Trek dialogue from a climactic scene on the airship, with a red-shirt character in the cockpit saying, “I can’t do this on my own! She’s losing altitude!” (“I’m givin’ her all I’ve got, Captain!”). At the same time, another character yells, “She’s a nurse, not a bloody mechanic!” This is probably a deliberate wink to the fanboys, but it didn’t work for me.

How can these anachronisms and pop-culture references work in Doctor Who and not work here? Doctor Who has three decades of credibility; thirty years creating an irreverent and quirky fictional universe with its own rules. Hodder hasn’t earned my trust yet, so the references feel derivative, not clever.

Hodder does have an interesting vision, a good team of fictional inquiry agents, and enough skill to improve his storytelling and his writing if he chooses to. The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack is not a great book, but it is a good book, certainly worth reading. Ultimately, enjoyment edged out the flaws, and I will definitely check out The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, the next book in this series. —Marion Deeds

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man is Mark Hodder’s second steampunk novel with Sir Richard Burton as the protagonist, following The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack. Though it is a sequel, and reading the first book will give you a fuller sense of setting and character, Clockwork Man stands pretty independently, so not having read the first certainly doesn’t preclude you from starting here. Unfortunately, while I mostly enjoyed Spring-Heeled Jack, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man took a surprisingly large step backward in terms of reading enjoyment.

England of the 1860’s has been changed by the time-traveling events of Spring-Heeled Jack, turned upside down by new and accelerating technology, genetic modifications, and mystical powers such as clairvoyance and astral travel. With this as the background, Burton and his assistant, the poet Algernon Swinburne, end up involved with mythical diamonds that seem to lend strange powers to those who possess them, a returned-heir-who-may-not-be-who-he-says-he-is inheritance case, a sudden uprising of England’s lower classes, ghosts, zombies, flesh-eaters, a clockwork man, and possible threats from America, Prussia, and Russia.

If that sounds like a lot, well, it is. In fact, I’d say it’s too much. “Less is more” is a trite phrase, I know, but that it is a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. And here, I’m afraid, it should have been considered much more. There’s a line between “wildly inventive” and “messy,” and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man feels messy. Rather than be satisfied with giving us a roller coaster ride of a story, it seemed Hodder wanted to give us the whole theme park. To be honest, the more that got tossed in, the less I felt interested, so that by the end I was skimming the last few chapters. Which is too bad, because there is a good story (or two or three) at the core.

The steampunk/alternative setting is generally strong, as it was in the first book, with lots of great new technologies and eugenic creations — such as huge insects used as modes of travel or a genetic modification gone horribly wrong that turns Ireland into a wasteland — to go along with alternate history moments such as England entering America’s Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. As with the plot, though, the setting would have been stronger had Hodder not served up quite so many ideas, so that we could linger over each idea and more fully enjoy it before the next came barreling through.

The main characters feel a bit more flat this time around. Some of that may have to do with the breakneck plot, and some with what felt like repetitive characterizations or actions (drunkenness, trance states, etc.), while the secondary characters are mostly two-dimensional. Herbert Spencer has some potential, but never really comes alive.

The pacing, as might be expected from the overstuffed plot, is hectic and uneven, often jolting from one scene to another. While doing so occasionally can be a nice technique to mirror what the characters are feeling, here it carries on throughout much of the book. The end feels like one fight scene after another and, as mentioned above, I lost much interest in what happened and started skimming to wrap up the basic plot questions. The big showdown with the villain is a bit anticlimactic and, as was one of the flaws with Spring-Heeled Jack, fell into the dreaded monologue mode. And you know an event is a bit forced when a villain has to announce “you realize of course that I have allowed your companion to approach merely to satisfy my curiosity.” It’s never good when a character has to rationalize acting stupidly.

I really wanted to enjoy this book, and I did for the first few chapters, but it went steadily downward from there for me. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed this had been Hoddard’s first work and not Spring-Heeled Jack, as it was so much more flawed in so many ways. We end with a third book clearly in the works, and based on how much I enjoyed Spring-Heeled Jack, I’ll certainly pick it up. But since The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man seems to stand enough on its own that it won’t be a must-read to continue on in the series, I can’t recommend it. And I hope book three recaptures the magic of the first one. —Bill Capossere

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man has all the annoyances of its predecessor with less than half the fun.

In Mark Hodder’s first Burton & Swinburne adventure, the novelty of his steampunk universe and the comic-book adventure sustained me, even though Mr. Hodder’s storytelling was awkward. All the writing and structural problems are still driving The Curious Case of Clockwork Man, exacerbated by a plot that accelerates past “implausible” and careers into “incomprehensible.”

Botanical disaster in Ireland! Theft of enigmatic “black” diamonds! Looming Prussian aggression! Fairies, mind control, mysterious asteroids; Britain’s involvement in the American Civil War; ghostly Rakes, almost-zombies...  and I left out one or two. Buried under all this is an intriguing story, based on an historical case of a missing heir, a haunted house and an imposter come to claim the family fortune.

This part of the book, all too short, almost captures the feel of a steampunk Hound of the Baskervilles, with strange goings-on at a British country house. Unfortunately, soon this mystery is “solved,” with one of the less believable moments in the book, and we move back to London. The book’s pacing is strange, probably because Hodder is trying to juggle so many ideas. The book seems to come to an end twice, only to stagger on not unlike one of its almost-zombie characters.

The book has two villains, one who is identified about halfway through, although a medium informs Burton that this “puppeteer” is an unknowing puppet of another. Mediumistic powers make up a large part of the story, with the ghost of a sorceress haunting the country house, strange tapping heard at night and a piano that plays itself. The “front” villain has a power for which no foundation has been established, and while I was willing to accept astral projection, I was not able to believe this power when it manifested without warning. Later, Burton tries to explain this, but the reasoning just isn’t there. Along the same lines, the astral-projection knocks on walls in the house, trying to find a secret passage. If you can pass right through a wall, do you need to knock on it to determine if it is hollow?

The real scheme, however, involves the brainwashing of the workers of London by use of strange black diamonds. Soon the laborers are rioting, and then they develop a taste for human flesh. Meanwhile, the villain is forcing the Rakes to astral-project, and they develop a craving for “life,” which generally means tearing out living people’s vital organs. Hodder does stop short of having them shuffle and moan, “Brainnnsssss...,” but only just.

One of Hodder’s villains is two-dimensional. The other, the “front,” is, if it were possible, shallower than two-dimensional. They function in service to this haphazard plot, not out of any believable historical or fictional motivations of their own. In the case of the mastermind, this makes him not only unbelievable but frankly boring, an “evil” character from history acting evilly out of a love of...  evil.

As with the first book, there are little beacons of brilliance; the tiny poet Swinburne crouched atop a giant dray-horse, holding a lance; the best use of a cookbook in a fight scene; or the note, B below middle C that sounds on the piano at the Tichborne house when no one is near it. The idea behind the “black diamonds” is a powerful one, as is this idea of knowing that you are somehow in the wrong timeline. I wish the book had explored those avenues more, and spent less time with ecto-plasmic zombies. —Marion Deeds

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon is the third and possibly final book in Mark Hodder’s steampunk/alternate history series starring Sir Richard Burton as the main protagonist, along with his good friend, the poet Algernon Swinburne. I was a fan of the first, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, but far less enamored of the second and messier one, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon falls somewhere in between the two, though major pacing issues tip it over a bit too much to the negative side.

The earlier books set up the basic premise, which is really too complex to get much into here. Basically, time is awry thanks to earlier events and history has gone off the track, barreling toward a World War fought not with guns but with horrifyingly strange weapons created by genetic engineering and eugenics: carnivorous mobile plants, giant walkers made of scooped-out biological organisms, and the like. The novel is told via two storylines. One finds a disoriented, amnesiac Burton at the end of the war, with the British Empire down to its last stronghold in Africa and about to lose that. In this time period, Burton meets a young reporter named Herbert Wells and as Burton slowly regains his memories, Wells helps him finish the task he was sent to the future for.

The other timeline is back in the late 1800s and has Burton sent by Lord Palmerston back to the Mountains of the Moon to seek the last of the three magical Eyes of Naga (the first two were found in books one and two). Meanwhile, Burton’s onetime friend now rival John Speke is leading a German force with the same goal. The race is on.

There are several pluses to enjoy. The fantastical creations of the eugenicists and the genetic engineers are one, horrifying as many of them are. The characters are another. Burton, who was a favorite historical personage of mine, is a great choice as a fictional character thanks to his sense of adventure, independence, intelligence, and most importantly his flexibility of thought which allows him to move smoothly between languages and cultures. Wells was another good choice to pluck from history and makes a strong match for the reduced Burton of the future. Swinburne is less active for most of the book unfortunately, but his presence is more than redeemed by the closing events. Burton’s wife Isabella, who shows up as a fierce and clever guerilla fighter, is a welcome female presence. And several of the side characters, despite little page time, offer up some of the most poignant scenes.

Unfortunately, the positives are balanced or possibly even outweighed by the negatives. One is the overly complex time issues. Others are the annoying traits of some of the secondary characters, some awkward shifts between scenes, and some clumsy recaps of prior events. I also wished Hodder had slowed down a bit and let us linger over some of the scenes, let us enjoy his creativity more fully. Most damaging by far though is the poor pacing of the storyline. When Burton goes on his weeks-long safari-like quest in Africa, for instance, we trudge along with him in what feels like almost real-time so that the slog through the jungle becomes a slog through the book for the reader.

In the end, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon suffers, much as book two did, from trying to do a bit too much. I really liked the dual storyline and the major characters, but a more streamlined narrative; a clearer, cleaner plot; fewer characters; and about 75 fewer pages would have made this a much, much more enjoyable read. —Bill Capossere