Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz
Harper, 2014, 1st edition, hardcover
285pp, deckled edges, special end papers,
cut-out dust jacket, illustrated cover
A Review by Gene Stewart
If you’re familiar with the Alex Rider YA series, the BBC-TV series Midsomer Murders, or the BAFTA-winning series Foyle’s war, you know the work of Anthony Horowitz combines well-realized characters grounded in well-researched and expertly-presented historical contexts, served with plenty of action and surprise set-backs, twists, and revelations.
Moriarty is the second novel he’s written in the Sherlock Holmes world, the first having been The House of Silk, authorized by the Doyle Estate.
This one takes place during the three-year Hiatus after Holmes & Moriarty ostensibly plunged to mutual destruction at Reichenbach Falls in Germany. As many writers since, including Doyle’s Watson, have pointed out, rumors of at least Holmes’s death were greatly exaggerated.
It features none other than Athelney Jones, whom we met glancingly in Watson’s tale The Sign of Four, in which he is referred to dismissively as an imbecile when he arrests an entire household on suspicion of murder. He’s given fully human characteristics by Horowitz, afforded respect, dignity, and a lovely family, and is in all manner refurbished from Watson’s harsh assessment.
A mass murder at Bladeston House in London, family and servants alike killed in their drugged sleep, sets things tilting toward a downward rush.
Jones joins a Pinkerton detective, Frederick Chase, in tracking down Clarence Devereux, a fiendish criminal mastermind come to London hungering for control of Moriarty’s scattered, headless crime syndicate. New York City’s equivalent to London’s Moriarty brings New World methods, a ruthless brutality chief among them. Jones and Chase quickly discover they are after a game that is afoot high and low throughout London, seemingly always a few steps ahead of them, and able to strike from dark places unseen by any witness.
Chase knows Devereux has come to London from his untouchable crime-boss throne in NYC with a letter of introduction to Moriarty himself. He knows the vicious Devereux had plans to kill Moriarty and take control of both New York and London, setting up a trans-atlantic crime organization that would easily spread its cancer to all of Europe. With Moriarty dead, consolidation would swiftly doom London to a new epoch of even darker crimes. Devereux is, due to greed and violence, even worse than Moriarty ever was. He must be found and stopped, if the body count does not become too high to surmount.
Tagging along, the reader is immersed in detailed Victorian settings, from dark Whitechapel back alleys crawling with vermin inhuman and otherwise to the grand ballroom of the American Legate’s Embassy, where none other than Robert Lincoln, the assassinated President’s son, holds court and where, they find, their quarry may have diplomatic immunity despite heinous crimes.
A headlong plunge from ever-worse dangers, ever more twisted situations, leads the reader to the shocking, amazing, and admirably devastating end of the story. Narration has rarely been handled as well.
Top-drawer entertainment with plenty of vintage local color. If you stay alert and look them up, you’ll add new words to your vocabulary, and new ideas about the world of Sherlock Holmes. Altogether a wonderful book.
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