I had the stock to my cheek, the telescope sight to my eye.
There was no more Firm. It was smashed and scattered. In his talk of starting anew, Moriarty had spoken in the singular person. There was no ‘we’ in his world.
I had prospects. Even without funds, I had my wits. And Sophy was handy. I had not been netted by Scotland Yard and even had the last of my reputation as a hero of the Empire and a cool hand in a crisis. In time, London would welcome Basher Moran. I could always get up a hand of high-stakes whist at the Bagatelle Club.
Tiny figures were struggling down the mountain path.
Through the telescope sight, I saw the antagonists come face to face. They had words. They broke off. One scribbled a note he left on a rock — a notice of the cancellation of milk delivery in Baker Street?
I saw two masterminds, two hunters, two tigers. From my perch, above them, they were small boys playing fight. A red and a white ant. Bacteria.
Then, it was on.
Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes rushed at each other.
Moriarty raised his arm — the signal!
I took my shot.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My parents, Julia and Bryan Newman, named me after a character in a Victorian popular novel. My mother’s second favourite book was Gone With the Wind, so I narrowly escaped Rhett. I imagine this has shaped the course of my life.
The Hound of the d’Urbervilles has been percolating a long time, so I must own up to many debts. First off, to state the obvious, this book would not exist without Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Every time I went back to the source, I found minor characters he made up and dropped who could sustain an entire series (if you want more Sophy Kratides, so do I). Primary secondary influences (as it were) are Zane Grey, Anthony Hope, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, J. Milton Hayes and Arnold Ridley. Other elements crept in, so shout-outs are due to Guy Boothby (creator of Dr Nikola and Simon Carne), Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey, H.H. Ewers, Louis Feuillade, John Gardner, William Gillette, Dashiell Hammett, Hergé, William Hope Hodgson, E.W Hornung, Norbert Jacques (and Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou), Michael Kurland, Maurice Leblanc, William LeQueux, Gaston Leroux, Peter Lovesey, L.T. Meade, Nicholas Meyer, Bertram Millhauser (and Roy William Neill and Rondo Hatton), Spike Milligan, Jamyang Norbu, Sax Rohmer, Bram Stoker (and Christopher Wicking and Valerie Leon), Mark Tansey, Dudley D. Watkins, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, Carlo Zangarini and Enrico Golisciani (and Ermano Wolf-Ferrari), and others.
My grandmother Miranda Wood — who introduced me to Marvel Comics and MAD Magazine, without realising how important things she picked at random would become to me — gave me a hardback of The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories for my twelfth birthday. I still have it. Later, the first thing I bought when I got a cheque guarantee card (remember them?) was W.S. Baring-Gould’s two-volume Annotated Sherlock Holmes. The first Holmes novel I read was, oddly, Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper by Ellery Queen (actually, Paul W. Fairman), a canny novelisation (and expansion) of Donald and Derek Ford’s screenplay A Study in Terror. I was aware of Peter Cushing in the 1968 BBC-TV series, but the first media Holmes I remember is Carleton Hobbs in a BBC wireless production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I should acknowledge the screen’s great Moriartys (some in not-great Holmes films and shows), all of whom have filtered into my version of the Napoleon of Crime: Gustav von Seyffertitz, Ernest Torrence, Lyn Harding, George Zucco, Lionel Atwill, Henry Daniell, John Huston, Laurence Olivier, Viktor Yevgrafov, Eric Porter, Paul Freeman, Anthony Higgins and Vincent d’Onofrio. There are fewer Morans to choose from, but Patrick Allen is fine opposite Jeremy Brett in The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Alan Mowbray is suitably duplicitous opposite Basil Rathbone in Terror By Night.
The too-good-to-resist notion of Holmes co-existing with characters created by other people has been around since his heyday (in Boothby’s Prince of Swindlers and C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, for instance, Holmes is mentioned as a real person) but took hold in my mind thanks to Philip José Farmer’s ‘biographies’ Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage — His Apocalyptic Life, which mean more to me than anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lester Dent. A comedy sketch TV series of the early 1970s starring a forgotten Welsh double act (Ryan and Ronnie) had Holmes pursue Dracula; this may be what started me thinking along lines which would lead to the Anno Dracula and Diogenes Club books, and now this Moriarty-Moran effort. The 1971–3 ITV series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, based on Sir Hugh Greene’s anthologies, introduced me to the likes of Simon Carne and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder; both seasons of the show are now out on DVD (thanks to Luciano Chelotti and Grace Ker of Network Releasing) and worth your while. Would that there had been spin-off series starring Roy Dotrice and Donald Pleasence as Carne and Carnacki. In this book, it’s been hard to avoid the long shadow of George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman, so I should especially mention Royal Flash (and Richard Lester’s film), the Prisoner of Zenda pastiche, and Flashman and the Tiger, in which Flashman meets Moran. Doyle’s Sebastian Moran and Fraser’s Harry Flashman have much in common: they’re both amoral rogues with a shelfload of medals, but at least Moran actually earned his gongs.
Besides other writers’ novels, collections and short stories, I wouldn’t have been able to write The Hound of the d’Urbervilles without reference books. Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Biography are still the best place to start, but Leslie S. Klinger’s more recent New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Annotated Dracula are just as essential. In addition, I kept turning to Jess Nevins’ The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (Dr Quartz and M. Sabin wouldn’t be here without it), Matthew E. Bunson’s The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia, Leonard Wolf’s The Annotated Dracula, David Kalat’s The Strange Case of Dr Mabuse, Sally Mitchell’s Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, and more reference sites on the internet than I can list, inevitably including Wikipedia (how did writers get by before they could instantly to look up whose signature was on British banknotes in 1891 or find out where the Astronomer Royal lives?).
Doyle invented Professor Moriarty to kill off Holmes in ‘The Final Problem and, ten years later, invented Sebastian Moran to bring him back in ‘The Empty House’. This circumstance means Moriarty and Moran, supposedly partners in crime, share no scenes in the canon. Given that, like many archnemeses, Moriarty is a dark doppelganger for the hero, hints at the notion that Moran might be his ‘Watson’ — which is present in several early plays and films. In Silver Blaze, aka Murder at the Baskervilles, which tips the villains into an adaptation of the Moriarty-free short story (and sets it at Baskerville Hall to boot), Moran (Arthur Goullet) is plainly a sounding board and fetch-and-carry man for Moriarty (Lyn Harding). When reviewing this minor 1937 film for Nathaniel Thompson’s DVD Delirium, I noted the Moran-as-Watson angle and mentally filed it away. Later, Ann Kelly of BBC Online asked me to write a Holmes story (something I’ve strictly avoided doing) and I returned to the Moran-Moriarty idea for ‘A Shambles in Belgravia’, which became a template for a series (one Doyle ‘guest star’, one other Victorian literary source, a parody title, a ‘case’ that doesn’t turn out well). Subsequently, Marvin Kaye commissioned ‘A Volume in Vermilion’ for Sherlock Holmes’ Mystery Magazine and Charles Prepolec solicited ‘The Red Planet League’ and ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ for his anthologies Gaslight Grimoire and Gaslight Arcanum. Thanks to these editors for their input into something I knew would be a novel disguised as a collection as soon as I wrote the meeting of Moran and Moriarty and realised how this relationship would end at the waterfall. Thanks also to David Barraclough, who suggested me for Titan’s fiction line just before leaving the company, and Cath Trechman, my stalwart and intrepid editor. My agents, Antony Harwood, James Macdonald Lockhart and Fay Davies were involved.