Moriarty [Hardcover]

John Gardner's historical novel centers on the dark and violent underworld that circles around the criminal genius of Professor James Moriarty and his war against Sir Jack Idell. the evil criminal warlord who seems to be taking London by storm. Moriarty has just secretly returned to London, after escaping the clutches of Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland after reportedly enduring a fight to the death. Excited to be living at home at last, in the city that he so loves, Moriarty is comforted by the knowledge that his one true love Sal Hodges is still close by. It comes as a shock then to learn that many of Moriarty's loyal followers, his henchmen and "his boys" with whom he uses to bribe and torture those who would dare to step on his stamping ground have left to take up with Idell even as Idell seems to be effortlessly expanding his criminal enterprises throughout London. Frustrated at best, Moriarty discovers what he had long since suspected: that his family of villains can no longer be completely trusted with some forty percent leaving and defecting.

Certainly Idle Jack is considered a coming man in the criminal fraternity. He's proved his intelligence and he has plenty of contracts and is determined to reek profits from all the "pleasure houses" and also from the sale and prostitution of children. He has few scruples about his urges and desires, and other people's susceptibilities were never held much to the fore by him. But much to Moriarty's chagrin, he's now he's branching out to the selling of protection to commercial businesses on high streets, on the edge of illegality that Moriarty, has up until now run or took at least taken his cut from with quite a bit of success. Just one look hard into those cold grey eyes and you might possibly glimpse the real man - heartless and cruel: "Idle Jack, robber of innocence, a pillager of families, a thief of time and decency."

Moriarty realizes that he cannot depend entirely on the close members of his so-called Praetorian Guard, and he can depend only partly on his beloved Sal. He certainly hasn't lost any of his evil. From the outset is determined to get back at Jack. Divided by his very nature, Idell's clandestine organization has become an impossible burden that consumes Moriarty's soul, leaving him powerless and conflicted. From the opening act Moriarty's carefully laid manipulations begin. As he sits alone in his rooms on the second floor of the elegant house on the fringes of Westminster staring at a portrait above his mantel of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the rationale for his life and his inspiration, the shaft of light that appears from her image makes his criminal labyrinth crystal clear in his mind.

The four men who comprise Moriarty's so-called Praetorian Guard, Ember, Albert Spear, the evil Chinee Lee Chow - running opium dens and dispensing cruel justice, and Tom Terrment, all become the major players in Moriarty's grand schemes. These are street men who specialize: the confidence sharks, and assassins. But only Spear and Terrment are the leading street gangers, the men who make the final decisions as Moriarty's special brand of fear begins to be broadcast out through the highways, byways and back alleys of London. A complex man who comprehends lust but not love, Moriarty constantly hammers at the number of men and women who appeared to have his employ but then have gone to try their luck with Jack. Certainly they must pay the highest penalty and as the story unfolds their grisly murders are played out against the fog shrouded freezing streets, silent cold and menacing, "the world constantly muffled by the think, bitter mist." It is the increasing suspicions of authorities that lead Moriarty to take the necessary terrible steps to enable his great plan for his future as the one superlative criminal mastermind in all of London.

As Gardner's narrative races around London from Oxford Street to Hyde Park to Marble Arch and St. Paul's, and then onto Brick Lane, all of the chop houses, the ale and saloon bars and comfortable drawing rooms of Park Lane provide the powerful backdrop to the action. The author's writing is rich with image and energy as London is constantly thickened with the scent of horse dung and humanity, the cat-and-mouse game to destroy Idell accelerating constantly through the side alleys and byways, the pervasive atmosphere of this great metropolis made all too real. Perhaps a more compelling story for those who have invested in Garner's previous Moriarty novels, this installment is still a solid and sharp look at the criminal underworld of Victorian England in the late 1890's where fear and promise inevitably become two sides of the same coin. Mike Leonard November 2008.

This is not so much a spin-off of Doyle's creation as a transplantation of Don Corleone to turn-of-the-century London. It is both violent and dull.

Doyle presents Moriarty as a "worthy rival to Sherlock Holmes", but this Moriarty, though he is devious, scheming and unscrupulous, is not a particularly intelligent man. Moriarty's "adversary", Sir Jack Idell, is apparently as unintelligent as he, simply another aspirant "Godfather", rather than the "gentleman-villan" Gardner seems to want to evoke. The book is filled with implausibilities and limps from one lurid or violent scene to another with little sense of development. (At one point, for no very good reason, Moriarty conducts a Black Mass.) There is a nagging sense that these are "sweepings together" of some scraps left behind by Gardener when he died in 2007, though apparently Gardner had finished it, but was in dispute with his publisher over terms for the book.

Gardner, the writer who continued the James Bond novels after Ian Fleming died with fourteen books and two film novelisations, was more at home with the "snobbery and violence" of the Bond books.

John Gardner, BSI is likely to be remembered as the author of a dozen or so authorised novels about James Bond. That's a pity, because he did much more and much better than that. In 1974 he published "The Return of Moriarty" followed a year later by "The Revenge of Moriarty", in which he placed the Napoleon of Crime firmly in the real, violent and squalid world of late Victorian crime, revealing him as a sort of nineteenth century Godfather. The place and time are scrupulously researched and excitingly portrayed, but above all it's the characters that stay in the reader's mind -- in particular Moriarty himself, his criminal "family", and his enemy Inspector Angus Crow. The third volume of the Moriarty Journals was not completed until shortly before John Gardner died in 2007, but it's as richly atmospheric, as breathtakingly violent, as startlingly authentic as the first two. In "Moriarty" the Professor returns to London from America to find that control of his organisation is threatened by a gentlemanly villain named Jack Idell, known ironically as "Idle Jack". The story of Moriarty's reclamation of the London underworld is the sort that grabs the reader by the lapels and won't let go. The unexpected ending even suggests a sequel, but that must wait for another chronicler.