Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Doyle invented Professor Moriarty to kill off Holmes in ‘The Final Problem and, ten years later, invented Sebastian Moran to bring him back in ‘The Empty House’. This circumstance means Moriarty and Moran, supposedly partners in crime, share no scenes in the canon. Given that, like many archnemeses, Moriarty is a dark doppelganger for the hero, hints at the notion that Moran might be his ‘Watson’ — which is present in several early plays and films. In Silver Blaze, aka Murder at the Baskervilles, which tips the villains into an adaptation of the Moriarty-free short story (and sets it at Baskerville Hall to boot), Moran (Arthur Goullet) is plainly a sounding board and fetch-and-carry man for Moriarty (Lyn Harding). When reviewing this minor 1937 film for Nathaniel Thompson’s DVD Delirium, I noted the Moran-as-Watson angle and mentally filed it away. Later, Ann Kelly of BBC Online asked me to write a Holmes story (something I’ve strictly avoided doing) and I returned to the Moran-Moriarty idea for ‘A Shambles in Belgravia’, which became a template for a series (one Doyle ‘guest star’, one other Victorian literary source, a parody title, a ‘case’ that doesn’t turn out well). Subsequently, Marvin Kaye commissioned ‘A Volume in Vermilion’ for Sherlock Holmes’ Mystery Magazine and Charles Prepolec solicited ‘The Red Planet League’ and ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ for his anthologies Gaslight Grimoire and Gaslight Arcanum. Thanks to these editors for their input into something I knew would be a novel disguised as a collection as soon as I wrote the meeting of Moran and Moriarty and realised how this relationship would end at the waterfall. Thanks also to David Barraclough, who suggested me for Titan’s fiction line just before leaving the company, and Cath Trechman, my stalwart and intrepid editor. My agents, Antony Harwood, James Macdonald Lockhart and Fay Davies were involved.

Thanks as ever to people who helped out with emotional support, random kindness and odd bits of information or inspiration: Pete Atkins, Eugene Byrne, Susan Byrne, Meg Davis, Pat Cadigan, David Cross, Alex Dunn, Val and Les Edwards, Jo Fletcher, Christopher Fowler, Christopher Frayling, Neil Gaiman (who has also written a Moran-as-narrator story — and came up with the ‘Professor Moriarty retires to Essex to keep wasps’ joke), Mark Gatiss (who parallels the ‘consulting criminal’ premise, but added a Jim’ll Fix It joke I wish I’d thought of), John Courtenay Grimwood, Maxim Jakubowski, Rodney Jones, Stephen Jones, Yung Kha, Jean-Marc Lofficier, Tim and Donna Lucas, Paul McAuley, Maura McHugh (who maintains my website at johnnyalucard.com), Helen Mullane, Sara and Rita Paço, Sarah Pinborough, Chris Roberson, Russell Schechter, Dean Skilton, Brian Smedley, Tom Tunney, Stephen Volk and the members of the ‘Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula books’ Facebook group.

Kim Newman, Islington, 2011

…and reputedly, as Montacute Blore Box (1896–1953) was wont to boast, ‘in Hell!’

‘Regardless of other crimes, anyone who founds a UK-based white rap label and signs up Danny Dyer should have his head kicked into an Essex marsh.’ — Charles Shaar Murray, Facebook update, November 16, 2008.

London: Virago and Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004.

An expansion of my article ‘Mrs Warren and Mrs Halifax: Controlling Male Desire and Female Economic Emancipation’, Victorian Studies, 41 (2), 1998. Considering the mentions, passim, of Mrs Halifax in the Moran manuscript, further research into this remarkable woman is a priority.

Victoria Gorse, Gender in Asylums, 1890–1914. Ms Gorse’s thesis remains incomplete, and the student’s whereabouts unknown… though odd text messages purporting to be from her are received to this day. The last I had was ‘cha0s ra1nz!’.

In his introduction to an otherwise valuable edition of this long-suppressed work (University of Brichester Press, 2004), Dr Paul Forrestier dismisses Moran’s candidacy and settles on Lord John Roxton as the author. As I pointed out in a review (History Today, February 2005), the editor’s ‘conclusive evidence’ boils down to a scattering of big-game hunting terms throughout the text — which equally supports the case for Moran. We await a retraction from Dr Forrestier.

Box Brothers offered their clients discreet secretarial services in the interwar years. Looking over their employee lists from the early 1920s, it is probable that the typist of the Moran manuscript was either Miss Kathleen Greatorex, later popularly known as the ‘Penton Street Poisoner’, or Mrs Elsa Shank-Goulding, who was shot as a spy in 1943.

Henry James Prince (1811–99), excommunicated from the Church of England for ‘radical teachings’, founded a pseudo-religious order, the Agapemone (Abode of Love), in Spaxton, Somerset, in 1845. His most fervent disciples were women with money. The Agapemone was one of several nineteenth-century communions run along the lines of the groups later established by Sun Myung Moon or L. Ron Hubbard. The circumstances of Moran’s encounter or encounters with Prince are not known at this time. See: The Reverend Prince and His Abode of Love (Charles Mander, EP Publishing, 1976).

A more balanced account of these incidents can be found in Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey, Harper & Brothers, 1912).

See A Study in Scarlet (John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887).

‘bread and honey’. Yes, the slang expression ‘bread’, usually associated with American crooks or hippies, is Victorian cockney rhyming slang: ‘bread and honey — money’.

Past and future exponents of this long con include the explorer Allan Quartermain (H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, Cassell & Co., 1885) and the journalist Tintin (Hergé, Le Temple du Soleil/Prisoners of the Sun, Casterman, 1949).

According to ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ (John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, 1888), Irene Adler was a coloratura soprano. None of these are coloratura roles.

For more on the Ruritanian succession, see The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman (Rudolf Rassendyll and Anthony Hope, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1894) and Rupert of Hentzau (Friedrich von Tarlenheim and Anthony Hope, The Pall Mall Magazine, 1895). For a revisionary view of Ruritania in the 1890s, see ‘The Ruritanian Resistance: How and Why’ (‘Doc M’, http://www.silverwhistle.co.uk/ruritania/).

In the original manuscript, the allusion is followed by a parenthesis which has been heavily scored through. From the few discernible words, the redacted section seems to be a homophobic rant. Other passages in the memoirs, especially those concerning his time at Eton, indicate Moran shared his era’s prejudice against homosexuality, but didn’t despise gays more than he hated anyone else. Equally, his bile against ‘natives’ and foreigners is tempered by general misanthropy. Sebastian Moran especially loathed straight white male British Christians.

Ruritania is a German-speaking country, though Rudolf II tried to make French the court language.