Spring-Heeled Jack
(Doubleday, 1989; USA, Knopf, 2002)
This was originally a play I wrote for the school where I used to teach. Spring-Heeled Jack was a character from Victorian penny dreadfuls, a sort of early Batman, who dressed up as the Devil to scare evil-doers. When I was making it into a book, I thought it would be a good idea to have a sort of comic-strip look, with speech balloons and lots of action going on in the pictures, which were drawn by David Mostyn. Another thing I had fun with was the chapter-heading quotations. This is the first book in the world to feature a quotation from itself (Chapter 11).
Read an extract
| 
