Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (57 page)

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.

Thanks as ever to people who helped out with emotional support, random kindness and odd bits of information or inspiration: Pete Atkins, Eugene Byrne, Susan Byrne, Meg Davis, Pat Cadigan, David Cross, Alex Dunn, Val and Les Edwards, Jo Fletcher, Christopher Fowler, Christopher Frayling, Neil Gaiman (who has also written a Moran-as-narrator story – and came up with the ‘Professor Moriarty retires to Essex to keep wasps’ joke), Mark Gatiss (who parallels the ‘consulting criminal’ premise, but added a
Jim’ll Fix It
joke I wish I’d thought of), John Courtenay Grimwood, Maxim Jakubowski, Rodney Jones, Stephen Jones, Yung Kha, Jean-Marc Lofficier, Tim and Donna Lucas, Paul McAuley, Maura McHugh (who maintains my website at
johnnyalucard.com
), Helen Mullane, Sara and Rita Paço, Sarah Pinborough, Chris Roberson, Russell Schechter, Dean Skilton, Brian Smedley, Tom Tunney, Stephen Volk and the members of the ‘Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula books’ Facebook group.

Kim Newman, Islington, 2011

AVAILABLE NOW:

It is 1888 and Queen Victoria has remarried, taking as her new consort Vlad Tepes, the Wallachian Prince infamously known as Count Dracula. His polluted bloodline spreads through London as its citizens increasingly choose to become vampires.

In the grim backstreets of Whitechapel, a killer known as ‘Silver Knife’ is cutting down vampire girls. The eternally young vampire Geneviève Dieudonné and Charles Beauregard of the Diogenes Club are drawn together as they both hunt the sadistic killer, bringing them every close to Britain’s most bloodthirsty ruler yet.

Anno Dracula
is a rich and panoramic tale, combining horror, politics, mystery and romance to create a unique and compelling alternate history. Peppering his story with familiar characters from history and fiction, Kim Newman explores the darkest depths of a reinvented Victorian London.

“Politics, horror and romance are woven together in this brilliantly imagined and realised novel. Newman’s prose is a delight, his attention to detail spellbinding.” –
Time Out

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COMING SOON:

1918 and Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war of the great powers in Europe is also a war between the living and the dead. As ever the Diogenes Club is at the heart of British Intelligence and Charles Beauregard and his protegé Edwin Winthrop go head-to-head with the lethal vampire flying machine that is the Bloody Red Baron...

A brand-new edition, with additional unpublished novella, of the critically acclaimed bestselling sequel to
Anno Dracula.

“...stunning follow-up to his inventive alternate-world fantasy,
Anno Dracula...”
—
Publisher’s Weekly

“Gripping... superbly researched... Newman’s rich novel rises above genre... A superior sequel to
Anno Dracula,
itself a benchmark for vampire fiction.” —
Kirkus Reviews

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Rome 1959 and Count Dracula is about to marry the Moldavian Princess Asa Vajda. Journalist Kate Reed flies into the city to visit the ailing Charles Beauregard and his vampire companion Genevieve. She finds herself caught up in the mystery of the Crimson Executioner who is bloodily dispatching vampire elders in the city. She is on his trail, as is the undead British secret agent Bond.

A brand-new edition, with additional unpublished novella, of the popular third instalment of the
Anno Dracula
series.

“Newman’s latest monster mash is the third in a series of fiendishly clever novels... Like the blood gelato lapped by the undead demimonde, this novel is a rich and fulfilling confection.” —
Publisher’s Weekly

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1976 and Kate Reed is on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s
Dracula.
She helps a young vampire boy, Ion Popescu, who leaves Transylvania for America. In the States, Popescu becomes Johnny Pop and attaches himself to Andy Warhol, inventing a new drug which confers vampire powers on its users...

A brand-new
Anno Dracula
novel taking the series to Andy Warhol’s New York and Orson Welles’ Hollywood. This long-awaited new book should not be missed.

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GUY ADAMS

A body is found crushed to death in the London snow. There are no footprints anywhere near it. It is almost as if the man was killed by the air itself. This is the first in a series of attacks that sees a handful of London’s most prominent occultists murdered. While pursuing the case, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson find themselves traveling to Scotland to meet with the one person they have been told can help: Aleister Crowley.

As dark powers encircle them, Holmes’ rationalist beliefs begin to be questioned. The unbelievable and unholy are on their trail as they gather a group of the most accomplished occult minds in the country: Doctor John Silence, the so-called “Psychic Doctor”; supernatural investigator Thomas Carnacki; runic expert and demonologist, Julian Karswell...

But will they be enough? As the century draws to a close it seems London is ready to fall and the infernal abyss is growing wide enough to swallow us all.