The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack is a steampunk novel by the British writer Mark Hodder, the first novel in the Burton & Swinburne series; it won the 2010 Philip K. Dick Award.

[1] The series follows the adventures of two Victorian-era protagonists based on two historical figures, Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Charles Swinburne, in mid-late 19th Century London.

The series is framed as an alternate history, and takes place in actual locations such as the Cannibal Club and London's East End, involving many notable personalities of the era, such as Florence Nightingale, Charles Darwin, and explorer John Hanning Speke.

It includes actual historical events, namely the Spring-heeled Jack case, the assassination attempt on Queen Victoria in 1840,[2] the search for the source of the Nile and the development of Darwin's theory of Evolution.

He is recruited by the Prime Minister, in the capacity of King's Agent, to investigate the Spring-heeled Jack affair and the strange manifestations plaguing London's East End.