Victorian Villainy

INTRODUCTION

When some years ago I was given the opportunity to write stories set in the world of Sherlock Holmes, I chose Professor James Clovis Moriarty as the protagonist of my tales largely because, although the world knew his name, no one knew anything about him, as there was not yet anything to know. Surprisingly, considering his notoriety among fictional criminals, he is mentioned in only seven of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty-one Sherlock Holmes stories, figures in the plots of only two, and appears onstage in none of them. We know that Holmes thinks he is “the Napoleon of Crime…the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in [London]” but we are never told why or how except in the vaguest terms.

I was not presumptuous enough to use Holmes himself (although he does appear in my stories), but with just a little twist I could take the nebulous, insubstantial Professor Moriarty and give him flesh and bones. My thesis is that he was a criminal-no getting around that-but that he was more like a Robin Hood, a Raffles, or a Simon Templar than a Napoleon of crime. Why then did Holmes describe him as “the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld…”? Because, I choose to believe, Holmes had what the French call an idee fixe on the subject of Moriarty. The professor was the only man Holmes had ever met, with the exception of his brother Mycroft, who was smarter than he was, and it maddened him to the point of unreason. He could never catch Moriarty in any of his imagined schemes, which only reinforced his conviction that the professor was, indeed, an evil genius. I have explored this theory in, so far, five novels (The Infernal Device, Death By Gaslight, The Great Game, The Empress of India, and the soon-to-be-released, Who Thinks Evil), and in these four stories.

(The middle name of “Clovis,” incidently is my addition, to differentiate Professor James Moriarty from his brother Colonel James Moriarty, who is mentioned in one of Sir Arthur’s stories.)