Last Saturday I wrote about Holmes and Moriarty (2024) by Gareth Rubin, and that got me thinking about Anthony Horowitz’s second novel in the Sherlock Holmes universe, Moriarty (2014), which I first read ten years ago.

The setup here is a good one, though I would be surprised if it was original in the world of the Holmes pastiche: picking up following the death of Holmes and Professor James Moriarty after they have plunged to their mutual destruction over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Holmes would, of course, return — there being nothing so rejuvenating as public pressure — but for now the Great Detective and his nemesis are dead…so what happens next?

It’s an intriguing concept, and one Horowitz is to be applauded for exploring so thoroughly. He envisions a world in which Moriarty may well have been the big cheese of the London crime scene, but what Moriarty equivalents might be found elsewhere? Here, the most virulent threat seems to be posed by the American gangster Clarence Deveraux, and it in pursuit of Devereaux and his crimes that Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives in Switzerland, having been hoping that Moriarty might have been his way to finally track down the elusive and reportedly agoraphobic American crime lord. Moriarty’s death, however, complicates matters somewhat. What else to do, then, but team up with Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard and try to catch the man together?

Horowitz is to be commended for many things in this book, but chief among them is the way he folds in the Holmes canon so easily. Athelney Jones is lifted from earlier encounters with the Great Detective in The Sign of Four (1890) and, having not come off well, has sought to remake himself in Holmes’s image, all keen insights and intelligent-after-the-fact deductions (“Are you a religious man?”). Elsewhere ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891) will be ingeniously repurposed to provide a key aspect of the plot, acknowledging the likelihood that many of the people Holmes had captured were likely career criminals who would, upon release from gaol, return to crime, the one thing they knew. But Horowitz also gets the small details right, such as Holmes not being a big deal to absolutely everyone the world over:

Until the world came knocking at his door, [the hotel’s proprietor] wasn’t even aware of his famous guest’s identity and his first response after the news of Holmes’s death had been revealed was to name a fondue after him.

Doyle’s resurrection of Holmes was done with about as much attention to detail as most of his writing about the great man — c.f. Watson’s moving bullet wound, Professor James Moriarty’s brother…James Moriarty, etc — and Horowitz is, in studying the canon so closely, also wise to the problems this leaves, like Colonel Sebastian Moran, the finest shot in the Seven Kingdoms, demoted to rock-thrower when Holmes proved triumphant over the Professor in combat (“Where is his gun? Has the greatest marksman in the world accidentally left it on the train?”).

The book, then, is two things: an attempt to consolidate the inconsistencies within the canon, and a full-flight romp as the identity of Devereaux and the actions of his various lieutenants become increasingly important to Jones and Chase. I had forgotten just quite how full of incident the book is: my chief memories were of the household slaughter that takes place in Highgate (incidentally, much earlier than I remembered…) and the ending, so it was pleasing to see just how many little adventures were crammed in to this. I remember being of the impression at the time that we were bound to get a series of Jones and Chase adventures from Horowitz in the Holmes and Watson mould, and rereading this I maintain that such an undertaking would have been wonderful. Of course, we’re getting a series detective from Horowitz now anyway, but, man, I hope he returns to Victorian England and the Holmes milieu before too long.

Not only is this superbly written…

We both circled the body, keeping our distance, for the blood and the shadows looked very much like one another…

…it also wears its research very lightly, taking us through the gamut of London’s many societal levels without ever once appearing to sit you down and lecture you on how much work has gone into making this live and breathe so fully. Knowing where this ended up, I was able to enjoy the subtle hints thrown the reader’s way — Horowitz isn’t quite playing fair, but that works in the Holmes universe since Doyle didn’t play fair either — while never losing sight of the breathlessness of bombs, murderous children, and domino-like falling of events that progress with an inevitability of design that makes so much more sense second time around.

His characters, too, are well-observed, even if you don’t get to spend much time with anyone except Jones and Chase. Jones in particular — aware of his past mistakes, clearly still under the pall of illness, striving desperately to live up to the standards set by the man who humiliated him — is a fascinating character it would have been wonderful to learn more about it future novels, but I can also understand why Horowitz didn’t pursue this series and applaud the decision made in ending this so definitively.

Both Jones’s experience at the hands of Holmes and the events of the last couple of chapters raise again the idea of history being written by the winners, highlighting again the intelligence of what Horowitz found as the space within the canon to expand into, giving new life and casting new light on events and people that might easily have been considered to warrant neither. I’m not sure whether this was seen as an official continuation of the Holmes canon, as Horowitz’s previous novel The House of Silk (2011) was, but the ideas are so brilliantly rounded out that I, for one, would love to see this author return to what he established and finish off a trilogy. And then maybe write another six novels in the universe while he’s at it.

We now know that in the ten years since this was published Horowitz has gone on to write not one but two series of detective novels which delight in playing fair with the reader, and it’s to be wondered how much this possible future was in his mind when he raises, through other characters, criticisms of Holmes that feel like a meta take on this style of mystery:

“I was always suspicious of his methods,” Forrester concurred. “He made it all sound easy enough and we took him at his word. But is it really possible to tell a man’s age from his handwriting? Or his height from the length of his stride? Much of what he said was unsound, unscientific and occasionally preposterous. We believed him because he got results, but it was not a sound platform for modern detective work.”

I’m not superbly versed in Holmes universe pastiches, but I had a memory of Moriarty being a very good one. That impression has been reinforced by this reread, to the extent that I think it might even be the best non-Doyle Holmes story I’ve so far encountered…possibly aided in the absence of Holmes stripping it of the need to play too slavishly to expectations. It knows its limits, keeps to its premise well, stays within the stylistic tramlines of the Victorian era, ends magnificently, and displays a very canny acumen with its characters and the beloved, almost hallowed ground on which it has the courage to tread. Pastiche writers would do well to study this, and if you’ve not read it I would suggest you’re missing out to a great degree.

If you’ve not read it, go and buy a copy…go and buy four copies, in fact, and maybe we’ll tempt Horowitz back for one more swing…