The Winged Man or 'Twix Midnight And Dawn (1913)

<p><strong>The Winged Man; or 'Twixt Midnight and Dawn (1913)</strong> by E. Dudley Tempest marks the last major evolution of the Spring-Heeled Jack myth. First serialised over twenty-eight issues of <em>The Wonder</em> (1913) and here presented as a continuous narrative for the first time the story transforms the Victorian leaping phantom into an aerial avenger who dominates the skies on the eve of the First World War.</p><p></p><p>Edited and introduced by J. S. Mackley this edition situates <em>The Winged Man</em> as both sequel and reinterpretation of <em>The Human Bat</em> (1899-1901). Its detective Danby Druce pursues a brilliant but deranged strange genius whose mechanical wings and sense of divine retribution embody the tensions of modernity: empire technology and the moral cost of progress. Drawing on Gothic melodrama crime fiction and early science-fantasy the narrative fuses fin-de-siècle paranoia with the thrill of aerial adventure.</p><p></p><p>The extensive introduction traces the character's lineage from <em>Spring-Heeled Jack</em> through the penny-dreadful tradition to Edwardian popular culture exploring how each incarnation mirrored contemporary fears-urban violence industrialisation and the loss of moral certainty. The volume also surveys later sightings and impostors from the 1904 Liverpool Leaping Man to the 1929 Stockport Spring-Heeled Jack Dog-Poisoner showing how the legend mutated across media and decades.</p><p></p><p>Richly annotated and sourced from rare British Library copies <em>The Winged Man</em> completes <em>The Spring-Heeled Jack Library</em> offering scholars and enthusiasts the definitive conclusion to Britain's most persistent urban legend-a myth that began in the gaslight streets of 1838 and ended almost eighty years later among the clouds.</p>