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

On the text: I have made few corrections to Moran’s spelling or syntax, except for consistency. He did go to Eton, after all. Some contemporaries took him for a fool, but he was an educated, well-read, intelligent man and articulate when he chose to be. The manuscript is overrun with hyphens and dashes which are pruned to some extent in the typescript, and have been pruned further by me. Moran held to nineteenth-century conventions (‘cow-boy’, ‘gas-light’, ‘were-wolf’) which would distract the modern eye. I have resisted a temptation to cut digressions or offhand references which raise tantalising matters upon which no further information is available. A thorough search of the vaults of Box Brothers has turned up no other Moran manuscripts — so we’re unlikely to find out more about the ‘Mystery of the Essex Werewolf’ or the ‘Affair of the Mountaineer’s Bum’.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his candour, Moran exercised a degree of self-censorship. Make no mistake, the Victorians could be as foul-mouthed as we are. Moran won an Army — Navy swearing contest held in Bombay in 1875, outlasting ‘the vilest bosun in the Fleet’ by a full half-hour of obscene profanity without repetition or hesitation, but with a great deal of deviation. However, in his manuscript, he blots out swear words. Some pages look like heavily redacted CIA intelligence reports. The typescript is clearer, but still tactful (‘c-t’, ‘f-k’, etc.). Where necessary, I have kept that archaism.

I have chosen not to include several passages which would prove offensive or stultifying to modern readers. Some material (dealing with race, sex or politics) exists in manuscript but not typescript, suggesting Moran himself had second thoughts. As a sometime pornographer, Moran’s accounts of sexual encounters run to dozens of detailed, unedifying pages; he writes about big-game hunting, horse-racing and card games in an identical manner. Where not directly germane to the narrative, I have trimmed paragraphs on these subjects. They are only of academic interest and this academic wasn’t especially interested — Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas has been out of print for over a hundred years for good reason. If Moran had been only a tiger hunter and libertine, he would be forgotten. As he admits, if he is remembered at all, it is because he was Moriarty’s lieutenant. In this edition of his memoirs, I have concentrated on that association, sparing the reader aspects of his life and times which now make Moran seem more appalling a human being than his inclinations towards larceny, duplicity and homicide.

Professor Christina Temple, BA, MA, PhD, FRHistS.

School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy,

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology

Birkbeck College, London.

February 2011.

I

I blame that rat-weasel Stamford, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can’t afford to mix up your accents grave and your accents acute. Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the gravitational pull as he would have said, of Professor James Moriarty.

In 1880, your humble narrator was a vigorous, if scarred, forty. I should make a proper introduction of myself: Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, late of a school which wouldn’t let in an oik like you and a regiment which would as soon sack Newcastle as take Ali Masjid. I had an unrivalled bag of big cats and a fund of stories about blasting the roaring pests. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and faced a surge of sword-waving Pathans howling for British blood, potting them like grouse in season. Nothing gladdens a proper Englishman’s heart — this one, at least — like the sight of a foreigner’s head flying into a dozen bloody bits. I’d dangled by a single-handed grip from an icy ledge in the upper Himalayas, with something huge and indistinct and furry stamping on my freezing fingers. I’d bent like an oak in a hurricane as Sir Augustus, the hated pater, spouted paragraphs of bile in my face, which boiled down to the proverbial ‘cut off without a penny’ business. Stuck to it too, the mean old swine. The family loot went to a society for providing Christian undergarments to the Ashanti, a bequest which had the delightful side effect of reducing my unmarriageable sisters to boarding-house penury.

I’d taken a dagger in the lower back from a harlot in Hyderabad and a pistol-ball in the knee from the Okhrana in Nijni-Novgorod. More to the point, I had recently been raked across the chest by the mad, wily old shetiger the hill-heathens called ‘Kali’s Kitten’.

None of that was preparation for Moriarty!

I had crawled into a drain after the tiger, whose wounds turned out to be less severe than I’d thought. Tough old hellcat! KK got playful with jaws and paws, crunching down my pith helmet like one of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, delicately shredding my shirt with razor claws, digging into the skin and drawing casually across my chest. Three bloody stripes. Sure I would die in that stinking tunnel, I was determined not to die alone. I got my Webley side arm unholstered and shot the hell-bitch through the heart. To make sure, I emptied all six chambers. After that chit in Hyderabad dirked me, I broke her nose for her. KK looked almost as aghast and infuriated at being killed. I wondered if girl and tigress were related. I had the cat’s rank dying breath in my face and her weight on me in that stifling hole. One more for the trophy wall, I thought. Cat dead, Moran not: hurrah and victory!

But KK nearly murdered me after all. The stripes went septic. Good thing there’s no earthly use for the male nipple, because I found myself down to just the one. Lots of grey stuff came out of me. So I was packed off back to England for proper doctoring.

It occurred to me that a concerted effort had been made to boot me out of the subcontinent. I could think of a dozen reasons for that, and a dozen clods in stiff collars who’d be happier with me out of the picture. Maiden ladies who thought tigers ought to be patted on the head and given treats. And the husbands, fathers and sweethearts of non-maiden ladies. Not to mention the 1st Bangalore Pioneers, who didn’t care to be reminded of their habit of cowering in ditches while Bloody Basher did three-fourths of their fighting for them.

Still, mustn’t hold a grudge, what? Sods, the lot of them. And that’s just the whites. As for the natives… well, let’s not get started on them, shall we? We’d be here ’til next Tuesday.

For me, a long sea cruise is normally an opportunity. There are always bored fellow passengers and underworked officers knocking around with fat notecases in their luggage. It’s most satisfying to sit on deck playing solitaire until some booby suggests a few rounds of cards and, why just to make it spicier, perhaps some trifling, sixpence-a-trick element of wager. Give me two months on any ocean in the world, and I can fleece everyone aboard from the captain’s lady to the bosun’s second-best bumboy, and leave each mark convinced that the ship is a nest of utter cheats with only Basher as the other honest hand in the game.

Usually, I embark sans sou and stroll down the gangplank at the destination, pockets a-jingle with the accumulated fortune of my fellow voyagers. I get a warm feeling from ambling through the docks, listening to clots explaining to the eager sorts who’ve turned up to greet them that, sadly, the moolah which would have saved the guano-grubbing business or bought the Bibles for the mission or paid for the wedding has gone astray on the high seas. This time, tragic to report, I was off sick, practically in quarantine. My nimble fingers were away from the pasteboards, employed mostly in scratching around the bandages while trying hard not to scratch the bandages themselves.