by Mark Hodder
Burton’s neck buzzed as he turned his head to look down at his friend. “It’s you.”
“But I never know what I’m going to do next, even in human form.”
Burton snorted. It sounded like the clash of a cymbal. “I can’t imagine how it feels to know you’re a vegetable.”
“Probably not much different to the awareness that you’re an accumulation of cogwheels and springs. My hat, Richard! Animal, vegetable and mineral. What are we all becoming?”
Burton looked toward the tower-forested horizon.
“Time will tell, Algy. Time will tell.”
ISABEL ARUNDELL (1831–1896)
Isabel and Richard Francis Burton met in 1851 and, after a ten-year courtship, married in 1861. Marriage brought a change of fortune for Burton, seeing him more or less abandon exploration in favour of writing and the translating of forbidden literature of anthropological interest. Notoriously, upon his death in 1890, Isabel burned her husband’s papers, journals and unfinished work. She also consigned to the flames his translation of The Scented Garden, which he considered his magnum opus, and which he’d finished just the day before his demise.
ERNEST AUGUSTUS I (1771–1851)
Ernest Augustus I was the son of George III. When his niece, Victoria, became queen of the United Kingdom in 1837, Ernest was made king of Hanover, which ended the union between Britain and Hanover that had begun in 1714. Had Victoria been assassinated, Ernest would have been a prime candidate to replace her as the United Kingdom’s monarch. With rumours of murder and incest attached to Ernest’s name, this would not have been a popular choice.
CHARLES BABBAGE (1791–1871)
Mathematician, inventor, philosopher and engineer, Charles Babbage is considered the father of modern computers. He created steam-powered devices that were the first to demonstrate that calculations could be mechanised. However, his most complex creations, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, were not completed in his lifetime due to funding and personality problems. By 1860, he was becoming increasingly eccentric, obsessive and irascible, directing his ire in particular at street musicians, commoners, and children’s hoops.
BATTERSEA POWER STATION
The station was neither designed nor built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and did not exist during the Victorian Age. Actually comprised of two stations, it was first proposed in 1927 by the London Power Company. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (who created the iconic red telephone box) designed the building’s exterior. The first station was constructed between 1929 and 1933. The second station, a mirror image of the first, was built between 1953 and 1955. Considered a London landmark, both stations are still standing but are derelict.
JAMES BRUCE, EIGHTH EARL OF ELGIN (1811–1863)
Lord Elgin, orator, humanist, and administrator, was the British governor-general of Canada and later served diplomatic posts in China, Japan, and India. He did not say, “Talk, talk, talk, and while you are talking, the Chinese are exacting yet another tax, . . .”
ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806–1859)
The British Empire’s most celebrated civil and mechanical engineer, Brunel designed and built dockyards, railway systems, steamships, bridges and tunnels. A very heavy smoker, in 1859 he suffered a stroke and died, at just fifty-nine years old.
EDWARD JOSEPH BURTON (1824–1895)
Richard Francis Burton’s younger brother shared his wild youth but later settled into army life. Extremely handsome and a talented violinist, he became an enthusiastic hunter, which proved his undoing—in 1856, his killing of elephants so enraged Singhalese villagers that they beat him senseless. The following year, still not properly recovered, he fought valiantly during the Indian Mutiny but was so severely affected by sunstroke that he suffered a psychotic reaction. He never spoke again. For much of the remaining thirty-seven years of his life, he was a patient in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum.
THE CANNIBAL CLUB
In 1863, Burton and Dr. James Hunt established the Anthropological Society, through which to publish books concerning ethnological and anthropological matters. As an offshoot of the society, the Cannibal Club was a dining (and drinking) club for Burton and Hunt’s closest cohorts: Richard Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne, Henry Murray, Sir Edward Brabrooke, Thomas Bendyshe, and Charles Bradlaugh.
CAPTAIN SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821–1890)
1860 was one of the darkest periods of Burton’s life. Having returned the previous year from his expedition to locate the source of the Nile, he was engaged in a war of words with Lieutenant John Hanning Speke, who’d accompanied him during the gruelling trek through Africa. Though the expedition was Burton’s from the outset, and Speke was the junior officer, the lieutenant returned to London ahead of Burton and laid claim to having discovered the source independent of him. Feeling sidelined and badly betrayed by a man he’d considered a friend, Burton hoped to find some happiness through marriage to Isabel Arundell. Unfortunately, her parents forbade it. With everything going wrong, Burton escaped to America and embarked on an ill-recorded and extremely drunken tour.
MICK FARREN (1943–2013)
A singer-songwriter, music journalist and science fiction author, Farren fronted the proto-punk band the Deviants. During the late sixties, he was for a brief period at the helm of the underground newspaper International Times and also ran a magazine called Nasty Tales, which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. His essay for the New Musical Express, entitled “The Titanic Sails at Dawn,” is considered a seminal analysis of the state of the music industry during the mid-seventies and a clarion call for the birth of punk rock. Farren continued to write novels, poetry and songs, and to perform with the Deviants, right up until his death onstage at the Borderline Club in London on July 27, 2013.
GEORGE V (GEORGE FREDERICK ALEXANDER CHARLES ERNEST AUGUSTUS) (1819–1878)
George V, the son of Ernest Augustus I, was the last king of Hanover. His reign ended with the unification of Germany.
SIR DANIEL GOOCH (1816–1889)
Daniel Gooch was a railway engineer who worked with such luminaries as Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was the first chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway and was later its chairman. Gooch was also involved in the laying of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable and became the chairman of the Telegraph Construction Company. Later in life he was elected to office as a parliamentary minister. He was knighted in 1866.
THE GROSVENOR SQUARE RIOT OF 1968
On March 17, Grosvenor Square, London, was the scene of an anti–Vietnam War demonstration that quickly turned into a riot due to what many regarded as heavy-handed police tactics. It ended with eighty-six people injured and two hundred demonstrators arrested. Mick Farren was present.
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES, 1ST BARON HOUGHTON (1809–1885)
Monckton Milnes was a poet, socialite, politician, patron of the arts, and collector of erotic and esoteric literature. He was also one of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s closest friends and supporters.
JOHN HANNING SPEKE (1827–1864)
An officer in the British Indian Army, Speke accompanied Burton first on his ill-fated expedition to Somalia, which ended when their camp was attacked at Berbera. Speke was captured and pierced through the arms, side and thighs by a spear before somehow managing to escape and run away. This expedition also marked the beginning of his deep resentment of Burton, caused by his misunderstanding of a command, which he took to be a derisory comment concerning his courage. When Speke accompanied Burton on his search for the source of the Nile from 1857 to 1859, their relationship quickly broke down. Speke then returned to London ahead of his commanding officer and sought to claim sole credit for the discovery. The two men fought a bitter war of words until 1864, when Speke shot himself while out hunting.
HERBERT SPENCER (1820–1903)
One of the most influential, accomplished, and misunderstood philosophers in British history, Herbert Spencer melded Darwinism
with sociology. He originated the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which was then taken up by Darwin himself. It was also adopted, misinterpreted, and misused by a number of governments, who employed it to justify their eugenics programs, culminating in the Holocaust of the 1940s. Spencer, unfortunately, thus became associated with one of the darkest periods in modern history. Bizarrely, he is also credited with the invention of the paper clip.
SPRING HEELED JACK
Spring Heeled Jack is one of the great mysteries of the Victorian age (and beyond). This ghost or apparition, creature or trickster, was able to leap to an extraordinary height. Helmeted and cloaked, it breathed blue fire and frightened unsuspecting victims, mostly young women, over a period mainly from 1837 to 1888 but also extending into the twenty-first century.
ABRAHAM "BRAM" STOKER (1847–1912)
Born in Dublin, Ireland, thirteen-year-old Stoker was still at school in 1860. In adulthood, he became the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. On August 13, 1878, Stoker met Sir Richard Francis Burton for the first time and described him as follows: “The man riveted my attention. He was dark and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance. As he spoke the upper lip rose and his canine tooth showed its full length like the gleam of a dagger.” Stoker’s novel Dracula was published in 1897.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837–1909)
A celebrated poet, playwright, novelist and critic, Swinburne was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and once more in 1909. In 1860, Swinburne returned to Balliol College, Oxford, having been rusticated the year before. He never received a degree and after leaving the college plunged into literary circles where he quickly gained a reputation as a great poet, an extreme eccentric, and a very heavy drinker. Swinburne is thought to have suffered a condition through which he sensed pain as pleasure, which might explain his masochistic tendencies. He and Burton were very close friends.
“And grief shall endure not for ever, I know . . .”
—From The Triumph of Time
“I hid my heart in a nest of roses . . .”
—From A Ballad of Dreamland, Poems & Ballads (second and third series)
TERMINAL EMANATION
Though it’s been theorised for many years, research was published during the writing of this novel that supports the proposition that the brain sends out a strong electromagnetic pulse at the moment of death. According to the Washington Post: “Scientists from the University of Michigan recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in nine anesthetized rats after inducing cardiac arrest. Within the first 30 seconds after the heart had stopped, all the mammals displayed a surge of highly synchronized brain activity that had features associated with consciousness and visual activation. The burst of electrical patterns even exceeded levels seen during a normal, awake state.” (Source: “Surge of Brain Activity May Explain Near-Death Experience, Study Says,” Washingtonpost.com, August 12, 2013.)
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866–1946)
A prolific writer, Wells is best remembered for his science fiction. He was also a proponent of the idea that the world would function best under the auspices of a single state.
“The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.”
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”
“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”
—From The Invisible Man
“Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”
—From New Worlds for Old
Throughout the Burton & Swinburne series, I’ve used real people from history as the basis for many of my characters. Mostly Victorians, they are long dead and thus cannot be properly known, no matter how many biographies of them might be read. However, the truth of their many achievements can be explored, and to compensate for the liberties I’ve taken with their personalities, I’ve added to each novel an addendum to highlight aspects of their real lives, hoping that my readers are curious enough to research a little further.
With Mick Farren it’s been different. With Mick, when I started this novel, I was introducing into the series a man who still lived.
For those of you unfamiliar with him, Mick was an important voice in the UK counterculture who rose to prominence during the late 1960s. He was the editor of the alternative newspaper International Times, a songwriter and lead singer in the rock group the Deviants, a music journalist (he accurately predicted and supported the advent of punk), and a science fiction novelist.
You can probably understand that I felt rather apprehensive when I approached him and asked if I could hijack him for a work of fiction. I sent him the first three Burton & Swinburne novels to read. I told him what I intended. I made it clear that the Mick I wanted to portray would be, at best, an approximation of the real thing.
He was delighted. Really. He laughed, he enthused, and he said he was thoroughly flattered. “Damn! I love it. I’d be delighted. Do your worst. Burton has always been a major hero of mine.”
So I went ahead, got writing, and sent the early draft chapters to him. He gave me a thumbs-up. We communicated regularly over a period of about six months.
Then he died.
This man, who was one of my heroes, who was fast becoming my friend, got up on stage with the Deviants on Saturday, July 27, 2013, and, after two songs, suffered a heart attack, collapsed, and didn’t regain consciousness.
He never got to read this novel.
I never got to say thank you or good-bye.
So I’ll say it now. Thank you, Mick. You inspired me, impressed me, entertained me and intrigued me. Thank you for the Deviants. Thank you for the novels and many brilliant articles. Thank you for so enthusiastically embracing what I have done with you in The Return of the Discontinued Man.
And good-bye. I’ll miss you. I hope everybody who reads this novel looks you up on Wikipedia, listens to your music, and buys your books. I’m glad you went out rockin’.
Mark Hodder
Valencia, Spain
Photo by Yolanda Lerma Palomares
Mark Hodder was born in Southampton, England, but has lived in Winchester, Maidstone, Norwich, Herne Bay, and for many years in London. He has worked as a roadie; a pizza cook; a litter collector; a glass packer; an illustrator; a radio commercial scriptwriter; an advertising copywriter; and a BBC web producer, journalist, and editor. In 2008, he moved to Valencia, Spain, where he settled with his Spanish partner, Yolanda. Initially, he earned a living by teaching English, but then he wrote his first novel, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, which promptly won the Philip K. Dick Award 2010. Mark immediately and enthusiastically became a full-time novelist, thus fulfilling his wildest dreams, which he started having around the age of eleven after reading Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Philip K. Dick, P. G. Wodehouse, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He recently became the father of twins, Luca Max and Iris Angell.
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