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

The newspapers had made a lot out of Dame Philomela’s resemblance to a Disney cartoon villainess. I wondered if she didn’t cultivate the effect.

Her computer was gone. The Fraud Squad were going through thousands of Zeppelin.jpgs and.avis while looking for evidence. A brass-hinged wooden box stood on her desk where the monitor would have been.

‘Sit,’ she ordered.

I complied. She stood by her desk, long fingers on the box.

‘Do you know the legal status of items left undisturbed in safety deposit for, oh, eighty years?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Neither do I,’ Dame Philomela admitted. ‘That was Colin’s area. Bloody idiot. Anyway, I can tell you what we do with them here… it hardly matters any more. We use a master key our depositors don’t know about to open the box, and divvy up the contents if obviously valuable… or stick them in a sub-basement junk room if not. That started before my day. A necessity, with new clients coming in and needing secure space. There’s a waiting list — or, rather, there was — for our vault. Rather than go to the trouble of getting new boxes put in, it was easier to clear out lost causes and move on. Contrary to what you read in those awful rags, it’s not all crown jewels and wodges of banknotes. If you want a giggle, I’ve a collection of musty old letters used to blackmail people who’ve been dead so long no one could possibly care about their sad old secrets. Have you heard of Sebastian Moran?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was a minor Victorian. A soldier and explorer, big-game hunter. Implicated in something called the “Bagatelle Card Club Scandal”. He was caught cheating by a man called Adair, who was later shot dead. Moran was arrested for the murder, but didn’t hang… no one is quite sure how he got off, though he did go to prison for a few years. The only reason he’s remembered is because the Adair case was the first solved, after the socalled “great hiatus”, by…’

‘Good, yes, fine, you know your scoundrels,’ Dame Philomela interrupted. ‘Now, don’t go on, woman. Showing off is all it is. Anybody can Wikipedia this stuff now, so there’s no need to have it all up in your head to be spat out again. Very unattractive, it is. I’ve no earthly interest in the old dead bastard, anyway. Except for this.’

She took the box from her desk and gave it to me.

On the lid was a brass plate, inscribed: ‘Col. Sebastian Moran, 1st Bangalore Pioneers, Conduit Street.’

‘It’s not locked,’ said Dame Philomela.

Inside was a manuscript. Two separate sheafs, which I guessed were different drafts of the same material: a longhand version, neatly written on lined paper, and a typescript, with crossings-out and emendations in ink.

‘Is it authentic?’ she asked.

‘I couldn’t possibly say without closer examination.’

Dame Philomela looked annoyed. That cracked her tight face and brought out her inner hag.

‘Well then, you silly bitch, examine closely,’ said Dame Philomela.

I thought about leaving.

Mr Hassan came back with the espresso. It was criminally strong. I decided to stay, for a while.

‘I want to know if there’s money in this,’ said Dame Philomela. ‘And how quickly I can get it.’

‘I’ll have to take this away and have it looked at. Besides analysing the text, tests can be done on the paper and ink to get an estimate of the age.’

‘I should cocoa,’ snorted Dame Philomela. ‘This stays here. You can read it in the next room. Then tell me what I’ve got. And how much it’s worth.’

I took the typescript out of the tin, and riffled through it. It was a book-length manuscript, with numbered pages, divided into chapters. There was no title page, or author credit.

On the first few pages, someone had carefully inked out a recurring name and written in ‘Mahoney’ above the black patches. Then, the same hand scribbled ‘sod it, can’t be bothered!’ in the margin, and gave up on the pretence of concealing identity.

The name someone had thought briefly to hide was Moriarty.

‘Professor Moriarty?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Dame Philomela said. ‘I dare say you’ve heard of him.’

‘A client of Box Brothers?’

‘One of the originals. So was Moran.’

‘He left a safety-deposit box?’

‘Yes. Inside was a pornographic deck of Edwardian playing cards I’ve put on eBay, a string of pearls I’m keeping for my old age, and this. Now, do you want to read it or not?’

I did. I have. And, with minimal editorial alteration, this is it.

Dame Philomela didn’t and doesn’t care if it’s an authentic memoir, though she was keen to establish that if it’s fake, it’s at least an old fake. No living author will come forward to claim royalties.

Tests were done. I confidently assert that this is the work of Colonel Sebastian Moran. Vocabulary and syntax are consistent with his published books, Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas (1881) and Three Months in the Jungle (1884)… though his tone in these memoirs is considerably less guarded. He incidentally settles a long-standing academic dispute by identifying himself as the anonymous author of My Nine Nights in a Harem (1879) [6] 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. . The undated longhand pages were written between 1880 and 1910. Different paper and inks indicate the author worked intermittently, writing separate chapters over twenty years. It is probable sections were drafted in Prince Town Prison, where Moran was resident for some time after 1894.

Internal evidence suggests Moran intended to publish, perhaps inspired by the commercial success of others whose memoirs — many overlapping events he recounts — had already appeared. Of course, those authors did not confess to capital crimes in print, an issue which might have given Moran second thoughts. He was considering publication as late as 1923–4, when the typescript was made. We cannot definitively identify the person or persons who typed his manuscript for him [7] 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. , but can be sure it was not Moran — though the annotations are in his handwriting.

Without a research project which Dame Philomela, who is now serving a seven-year sentence in Askham Grange open prison, is unwilling to fund, a full assessment of the veracity of Moran’s memoirs is impossible. Given that the author characterises himself as a cheat, a liar, a villain and a murderer, we are entitled to ask whether he was as dishonest in autobiography as he was in everything else. However, it seems he felt — perhaps later in life — a compulsion to make an accurate record. Few in his time thought Sebastian Moran anything but a rogue, but his famous associate saw straight away that he was what we might now diagnose as an adrenalin junkie. When age kept him from more active pursuits, perhaps writing a book which could lead to him being hanged was a substitute for the thrill of hunting tigers or breaking laws. However, he was in healthy middle age when he began writing up the crimes of Professor Moriarty — and was in fact busy helping commit them. Where dates, names and places that can be checked are given, Moran is a reliable historian — more so than some of his less crooked contemporaries.