Moriarty

moriarty

When Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis Moriarty fell to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, a vacuum on both sides of the criminal nexus was created.

Who would become England’s greatest consultant detective and who would become the new Napoleon of crime?

The solution is the singular focus in Anthony Horowitz’s MORIARTY (Orion) his follow up volume to The House of Silk, a continuation novel to the Conan Doyle canon.

With Holmes the subject of the mystery and not the investigator, the mantle of the elementary falls to Scotland Yard Inspector, Athelney Jones, previously mentioned in desultory fashion in John Watson’s chronicles of Holmes cases.

So mortified by his mediocrity as an investigator, Jones has obsessively studied every skerrick of Sherlockian sleuthing, and now models himself after the Baker Street detective.

He has followed Holmes to Switzerland to investigate the final and lethal assignation with Moriarty. Also on the trail of Moriarty is an agent of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who has uncovered a trans-Atlantic deal between a notorious American criminal and Britain’s Napoleon of Crime.

Only one body has been retrieved from the Falls – identified as Moriarty – but is it? And what became of the mortal remains of the deductive detective?

The games afoot, as the pair – taking the mantle of Holmes and Watson- hightail it back to London to engage with Moriarty’s heir apparent, the abhorrent and agoraphobic Clarence Deveraux, ensconced in the sanctuary of the United States legate, protected by no less a personage as Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert.

Horowitz’s Holmesian homage is a rollicking adventure, smattered with literary reference, particularly The Sign of Four and The Adventure of the Red Headed League, historical fact and abundant in the Victorian vernacular.
There’s ambush, murder, torture, carriage chases, in locations that stretch from meat works to barber shops to embassies.

There’s the blackest of black hats and hearts, the reddest of red herrings and the whites of white lies as Horowitz puts his Holmes hybrid through a stunning and sustained series of set pieces, more amusing and entertaining than any of the Guy Ritchie cinematic forays.

As a bonus, there’s a kind of coda presented as an original Strand Magazine Sherlock Holmes story, featuring Athelney Jones and a crime concerning jubilee dust catchers, called The Three Monarchs.
Having acquitted himself in a singularly stupendous duo of Conan Doyle-esque escapades, Mr. Horowitz has been commissioned to take up the continuation of another British literary icon, James Bond. On the strength of MORIARTY I can think of no better choice.