Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the DUrbervilles (Professor Moriarty Novels) [Paperback]

You don't need to be a fan of Sherlock Holmes to know of Professor Moriaty, the original arch-villain, the Napoleon of Crime. Of course, he has always had to play second fiddle to the Great Detective. `Professor Moriaty: The Hound of the d'Urbervilles' sets out to give us his story - Moriaty's adventures beyond the Reichenbach Falls. Newman gives us a witty, entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable inversion of the Holmes canon.

Although a novel, the book appears to be collection of short stories, aping the form of the Holmes collections. The stories twist the Holmesian originals. Moriaty breeds wasps not bees. Colonel Sebastian Moran (Moriaty's former right hand man in `The Return of Sherlock Holmes') is our Watson, narrating the stories. The titles mimic Doyle's originals: from `A Volume in Vermillion' through to `The Problem of the Final Adventure'. Their plots similarly either are inspired by, intertwine with or springboard off the original stories. There is a joy in recognising the allusions to Watson's accounts of events (though there are footnotes to help out when your memory fails) or characters from them. Irene Adler turns up, for example, to frustrate Holmes's dark mirror too (`To Moriaty she was always that bitch.')

Whilst an amusing conceit in itself, this could easily become somewhat one note and tiring over the course of more than 450 pages. What gives it life is the way that Newman interweaves these elements from Doyle with other creations and the language used to express it.

Newman plunders freely from other literature of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Hardy's Wessex provides us with the d'Urberville family of the title story (and also other Wessex characters such as the reddleman from `Return of the Native'). Various members of the cast from `The Prisoner of Zenda' show up, as do Fu Manchu (under an alias), Raffles, the Maltese Falcon and some more obscure fictional objects and people. One doesn't need to get every reference to enjoy the feeling of recognition as these elements are woven into the narrative.

Perhaps the greatest achievement here though is Colonel Sebastian `Basher' Moran himself. It is after all his voice that gives life to the characters and the story. And what a charming rogue he is - a cross between George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and Mark Gatiss's Lucifer Box. Amusing and smart, he seems utterly unimpressed by the intellectual aspects of the adventures and contests. Like Bertie Wooster, he makes his Jeeves look all the brighter by having an entirely different outlook and set of interests. He also has a fine line in witty metaphor and simile. A thug reunited with a much used cosh `hug[s] the cane like a long-missing gold coin.'

This may not be deepest book I've read this year, it might not engage the truth of the human condition as much as some, but it has been one of the most pleasurable to read. Any fan of Holmes stories or of Flashman-esque capers might want to check this out.

Time spent in the company of narrator Colonel Sebastian Moran as he recounts his life and crimes as 'Watson' to Professor Moriarty's 'Holmes' is a total joy. The formula, an erudite mash-up of a Sherlock Holmes case with a piece of Victorian (or Victorian set) fiction, seen through the distorting lens of crimes of the utterly immoral Napoleon of Crime and the second most dangerous man in Britain, has far from run its course. Who can not be thrilled by the prospect of the Colonel stealing the Castafiore Emerald, breaking into the Ruritanian Embassy or tracking down the eponymous Hound in the mist-shrouded Chase at Tantridge. Here. I think, everything is right.

I really enjoyed this book, it's a great new imagining of the Napoleon of Crime. Kim Newman weaves his short story narratives around the very little we know of Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories without actually giving a whole lot more away. Where he develops a new aspect of the Professor it is in order to mirror Holmes, upturning the Sherlockian world - often with comedic effect. For example, where Holmes retires to keep bees, Moriarty breeds wasps! There are lots of in-jokes like this which will amuse readers of the original Holmes stories - my favourite comes in "The Greek Invertebrate" where we find that all three brothers Moriarty are indeed called James (and Colonel James Moriarty is a member of the Xeniades Club which encourages `lively debate').

Where Moriarty is the mirror of Holmes, Colonel Sebastian `Basher' Moran is the twisted equivalent of Watson. Again, Moran's back story in the original Holmes stories is sparse. Newman manipulates Moran's former army career to mimic Watson's return to England from Afghanistan, but under far more disgraceful circumstances. The origins of the stories are set up with a preface that explains the finding of Moran's archive in the care of Box Brother's Bank similar Sherlockian pastiches claim origins from Watson's box at Cox & Co.) Moran, being a criminal unlike Watson, is far more free with his narrative and unafraid to include more scandalous material (although foul language is still blanked out in the Victorian fashion). He is also the intellectual inferior of Moriarty, allowing the reader to share his astonishment when the master criminal's plans gradually unfold.

One issue I would take with this book is the title. Calling it 'The Hound of the D'Urbervilles' after the fourth in a collection of short stories may lead the purchaser to expect a novel in imitation of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' when in fact the book contains seven stories which could be read independently, as with the Holmes Canon. In fact, "The Hound of the D'Urbervilles" was for me the weakest of these stories, although this may be in part because I am not very familiar with Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' and probably unappreciative of some of the references. What the title does do is highlight Newman's penchant for overlapping the fiction (and fact) of the fin de siècle which he also did so well in Anno Dracula (reissued this year). Calling the collection something along the lines of 'The Crimes of Professor Moriarty' would, however, have been more appropriate.

But as you can probably tell, overall I loved this book and I would recommend it to everyone who is familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories. It is great fun, well-observed, and uses Moriarty's 'empire' to epitomise a time when Imperial power was at its peak (though the threat of war is always looming ever-closer). I am not sure if those who have yet to read Sherlock Holmes will appreciate it so much, but if you are an aficionado of the fin de siècle era I think this is a book you will enjoy.