Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty,
published late last year, is nothing like his first Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk. That’s a very good
thing.
Published with a lot of hoopla in 2012, The House of Silk sold 450,000 copies in 35 countries. The Huffington
Post called it “firmly rooted in the style of Doyle.” I disagree. Although the
story was set in the Victoria era and narrated by Dr. Watson, it was much
longer than the canonical Holmes novels and structured much differently – the
plot involved two cases that converged.
More subjectively, The
House of Silk just didn’t feel like the real thing.
In Moriarty, Horowitz sets
himself a different task and succeeds brilliantly. This is not faux Conan
Doyle. Neither Holmes nor Watson is a character, except by frequent reference.
Instead of Watson, Horowitz gives us a totally new narrative voice:
“So that you know whose company you keep, let me tell you
that my name is Frederick Chase, that I am a senior investigator with the
Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York and that I was in Europe for the first –
and possibly the last – time in my life.”
The story takes case immediately after the Reichenbach Falls
incident. The narrator meets Inspector Athelney Jones in Meiringen,
Switzerland, over a body battered by the Falls – and not that of Sherlock
Holmes. Professor Moriarty, Jones is told, had been forging an alliance with
his American counterpart, one Clarence Deveraux.
The task becomes to bring down Deveraux, who is working out
of the American legation under another name.
Athelney Jones had little personality in The Sign of Four, so Horowitz was free
to give him one. Jones has a wife, a six-year-old daughter, and an obsession to
become as good a detective as Sherlock Holmes. He almost makes it.
In one delightful scene, a conference at Scotland Yard,
seemingly every inspector in the canon shows up. Lestrade and Gregson are
there, of course, but so are Alec MacDonald, Bradstreet, Lanner, Gregory, Hopkins,
Patterson, and others. I’d forgotten Patterson, even though my mother was a
Patterson. He was in charging of rounding up the Moriarty gang.
The criminal John Clay and his pal Archie from “The
Red-Headed League” make a return appearance, up to the same old tricks. So does
the square-toed boot. Have you ever noticed how often Holmes in the Canon identifies
a boot print because has a square toe? (And each time he says it’s unusual.
Just think about that.)
If all of this evokes the world of Sherlock Holmes – and it
does – there is also much in Moriarty that
is fresh and entertaining. Deveraux is a wonderfully creepy villain who kills
with little remorse and yet refuses to eat meat because he empathizes with
animals. He also suffers from agoraphobia, a weakness turned against him in the
end.
The structure of the novel is fascinating. A plot turn worthy
of Agatha Christie stuns the reader (at least this one) on
page 257, at the end of a chapter. (It’s been a challenge avoiding spoilers in
this review.) The story then stops like a freeze-frame in a movie for one chapter
while everything that went before is explained in a new light. Then the story
resumes in the final chapter, unfreezing the action, and rushes to a
conclusion. It’s virtuoso performance by Anthony Horowitz that I will long
remember.
If you shared my negative opinion The House of Silk, don’t let that keep you from this book. And if
you liked it, you may like this one even better.
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