I’m a fan of Sherlock Holmes, and I’m a fan of a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so when Holmes and Moriarty (2024) by Gareth Rubin floated across my radar as being endorsed by the Conan Doyle estate as, possibly, the new official Sherlock Holmes novel…colour me intrigued.

And yet, does endorsement make this book part of the canon? I ask because, while Rubin does an excellent job with the characters and tone of this, and displays a keen eye for humour and inventive situations while doing so, the plot…does not feel like the sort of place Doyle or the people who should have an awareness of his most famous fictional work would want Holmes to end up. I know people had reservations about the ground the last (to my knowledge…) official Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk (2011) by Anthony Horowitz, mined, and this equally veers into the sort of territory which feels rather alien to the Victorian motivations of the original canon.

But, I get ahead of myself.

Visiting elder Holmes brother Mycroft in the Diogenes Club — right from the start Rubin is not aping Doyle’s style at all, but still captures the characters in a way that feels true — Sherlock and Dr. John Watson are approached by George Reynolds, an actor who has some serious doubts about the low-rent production of Richard III in which he is currently appearing. Not only are the other actors rank amateurs who forget their lines and fluff even the basics of stage-craft, but the audience is freakish in their own way: firstly, because they react at the end of the play as if they’ve seen a masterpiece put on, and secondly, more eerily, because they seem to be composed of the same dozen or so people every night, donning various wigs and disguises so as not to be recognised as repeat customers.

Alongside this, Rubin tells alternating chapters from the perspective of Colonel Sebastian Moran, right-hand man to Professor James Moriarty, as this pair find themselves increasingly enmeshed in a gang war for the streets of London. The contrast of the pairs, arguably the seed for the book in the first place, is delightful, with Moran evincing a sort of restrained savagery that feels like his violence is only just kept in check.

“There’s no dispute,” drawled Calhoon. His accent was just like a banker I once shot dead on a boat to Southampton.

From his delight at the noise of gunshots (“I love that sound. It runs right up and down my old spine like a cat. Nothing like it.”) to his dismissal of Watson as a “pigeon-livered dunghill”, Moran really comes to life in these pages: enjoying a spot of dog-versus-bear fighting, engaging in some decidedly unsportsmanlike fisticuffs, and generally cheating, cussing, and grumbling his way through proceedings, kept in check only by the mixture of respect and fear Moriarty mixes up from his chief lieutenant’s muddied depths. It’s always fun spending time with Moran here, and at times — the final lines of chapter 10, say — Rubin is spectacular.

The pace remains brisk, the characters are fun, and Rubin shows a light touch with the few touchstones he unearths. An early comparison to ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893) is well-judged and, while I don’t share the fascinations Sherlockians seem to have with the Giant Rat of Sumatra (c’mon, it’s a big rat — what’s interesting about that…?), it must be said that the utilisation of Mycroft in the opening chapter, especially the note on which we leave him, might well be the single best writing about the character outside of Doyle’s original stories.

Odd little touches throughout are also greatly appreciated, from tiny moments like the spelling “sopha” for what American call a ‘couch’ through to a grandstanding deathtrap just before the halfway point that, while in no way reminiscent of anything Doyle would do, leans into gaudy Victorian sensationalist fiction in the most outré of ways. Holmes frequently worked well when stirred in with elements of horror — ‘The Speckled Band’ (1892), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), ‘The Sussex Vampire’ (1924) — but Rubin, writing in a more desensitised age, is able to bring something decidedly more gruesome to the party, and, boy, does he have fun with it.

The two antagonists are, then, brought together by the halfway stage — via a semi-impossible locked room shooting — and an uneasy alliance forged in the light of an apparently world-threatening crisis:

“They will destroy you. They will destroy everything. All that you have. All that you think you will ever have. It will turn to dust in your hands, and you will die weeping by the roadside.”

Naturally, it would take something fairly spectacular to force these avowed foes together, but given Rubin’s rendering of Moriarty as someone who has a genius for forecasting the mathematical odds, part of me would have liked it to be something a little less common to bring them into sympathy. Like, of course they’ll team up if the whole world is at threat, where’s the intelligent calculation behind that? Moriarty knocking on Holmes’ door because he’s received delivery of a half-inch candle stub attached to a medieval knight’s helmet…that would intrigue me.

We see less of Moriarty’s behaviour, but there are some leavening moments, like when he instructs Moran to steal what sounds like a deeply awful painting from a crime scene because “I like it”, and some light touch is given to the comparative lack of humanity both Holmes and the professor bring to their respective untangling of knotty problems. Rubin is wise not to bang this drum too obviously, and to find the adversaries instead in little moments of shared bonhomie where their mutual antagonism is forgotten in favour of an undeniable mutual respect, much, of course, to the disgust of Moran who makes it clear that he does not like hanging around with “Holmes and his moll”.

For me, all the good work was undone when, about 50 pages from the end, the explanation for all that had gone before comes and…I…just…didn’t like it. Holmes is, for me, at his best when obscure crimes have canny solutions that lean into appreciable and familiar motives, and Rubin’s god in the machine feels both very apposite and, well, too vague and untrustworthy to be worth all the mayhem that has preceded us. It’s not Doyle in the least, it feels like it’s pushing Holmes out onto the fringes of almost The X-Files (1993-2002) territory and, for all the acuity displayed up to this point, I couldn’t help but wonder quite how Sherlock Holmes became associated with this idea in the author’s mind.

I’m aware, of course, that Holmes has been used, since the copyright expired, in a variety of ways that do not fit the canon: he’s taken on Cthulhu, Fu Manchu, Martians, Count Dracula, and Hitler — not all at the same time — and fan fiction exists which sees the World’s Greatest Detective pair up with or against some of the more unlikely figures form pop culture’s long, grubby history. The difference is that none of those have — to my knowledge, at least — been given so much as a passing wave by the Conan Doyle estate…so why does this get not just a pass but a quote to put on the front flap and a variety of graphics to help promote in on various book-buying websites?

And so, I leave Holmes and Moriarty conflicted, with a sense of deflation of what might have been, which is never a nice way to exit a book. Rubin’s writing is delightful, the way he makes what should be dusty old characters feel fresh and invigorating is remarkable, and his delineation between his twin narrators — teasing out their similarities while never leaving no doubt as to their differences — shows no small amount of insight and skill. But for me, the motive for all this is a real misstep, and upends all this great work in the closing stages, not least in recycling a character previously deployed perfectly who then exhibits behaviour of the sort that utterly contradicts what we know about them. Mileage will vary, of course, but, man, this was a real comedown after the heights Rubin scales early on.