Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (2 page)
Read Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles Online
Authors: Kim Newman
‘I want to know if there’s money in this,’ said Dame Philomela. ‘And how quickly I can get it.’
‘I’ll have to take this away and have it looked at. Besides analysing the text, tests can be done on the paper and ink to get an estimate of the age.’
‘I should cocoa,’ snorted Dame Philomela. ‘This stays here. You can read it in the next room. Then tell me what I’ve got. And how much it’s worth.’
I took the typescript out of the tin, and riffled through it. It was a book-length manuscript, with numbered pages, divided into chapters. There was no title page, or author credit.
On the first few pages, someone had carefully inked out a recurring name and written in ‘Mahoney’ above the black patches. Then, the same hand scribbled ‘sod it, can’t be bothered!’ in the margin, and gave up on the pretence of concealing identity.
The name someone had thought briefly to hide was Moriarty.
‘Professor Moriarty?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Dame Philomela said. ‘I dare say you’ve heard of
him.’
‘A client of Box Brothers?’
‘One of the originals. So was Moran.’
‘He left a safety-deposit box?’
‘Yes. Inside was a pornographic deck of Edwardian playing cards I’ve put on eBay, a string of pearls I’m keeping for my old age, and this. Now, do you want to read it or not?’
I did. I have. And, with minimal editorial alteration, this is it.
Dame Philomela didn’t and doesn’t care if it’s an authentic memoir, though she was keen to establish that if it’s fake, it’s at least an old fake. No living author will come forward to claim royalties.
Tests were done. I confidently assert that this is the work of Colonel Sebastian Moran. Vocabulary and syntax are consistent with his published books,
Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas
(1881) and
Three Months in the Jungle
(1884)... though his tone in these memoirs is considerably less guarded. He incidentally settles a long-standing academic dispute by identifying himself as the anonymous author of
My Nine Nights in a Harem
(1879)
[6]
. The undated longhand pages were written between 1880 and 1910. Different paper and inks indicate the author worked intermittently, writing separate chapters over twenty years. It is probable sections were drafted in Prince Town Prison, where Moran was resident for some time after 1894.
Internal evidence suggests Moran intended to publish, perhaps inspired by the commercial success of others whose memoirs – many overlapping events he recounts – had already appeared. Of course, those authors did not confess to capital crimes in print, an issue which might have given Moran second thoughts. He was considering publication as late as 1923–4, when the typescript was made. We cannot definitively identify the person or persons who typed his manuscript for him
[7]
, but can be sure it was not Moran – though the annotations are in his handwriting.
Without a research project which Dame Philomela, who is now serving a seven-year sentence in Askham Grange open prison, is unwilling to fund, a full assessment of the veracity of Moran’s memoirs is impossible. Given that the author characterises himself as a cheat, a liar, a villain and a murderer, we are entitled to ask whether he was as dishonest in autobiography as he was in everything else. However, it seems he felt – perhaps later in life – a compulsion to make an accurate record. Few in his time thought Sebastian Moran anything but a rogue, but his famous associate saw straight away that he was what we might now diagnose as an adrenalin junkie. When age kept him from more active pursuits, perhaps writing a book which could lead to him being hanged was a substitute for the thrill of hunting tigers or breaking laws. However, he was in healthy middle age when he began writing up the crimes of Professor Moriarty – and was in fact busy helping commit them. Where dates, names and places that can be checked are given, Moran is a reliable historian – more so than some of his less crooked contemporaries.
On the text: I have made few corrections to Moran’s spelling or syntax, except for consistency. He did go to Eton, after all. Some contemporaries took him for a fool, but he was an educated, well-read, intelligent man and articulate when he chose to be. The manuscript is overrun with hyphens and dashes which are pruned to some extent in the typescript, and have been pruned further by me. Moran held to nineteenth-century conventions (‘cow-boy’, ‘gas-light’, ‘were-wolf’) which would distract the modern eye. I have resisted a temptation to cut digressions or offhand references which raise tantalising matters upon which no further information is available. A thorough search of the vaults of Box Brothers has turned up no other Moran manuscripts – so we’re unlikely to find out more about the ‘Mystery of the Essex Werewolf’ or the ‘Affair of the Mountaineer’s Bum’.
Perhaps surprisingly, given his candour, Moran exercised a degree of self-censorship. Make no mistake, the Victorians could be as foul-mouthed as we are. Moran won an Army–Navy swearing contest held in Bombay in 1875, outlasting ‘the vilest bosun in the Fleet’ by a full half-hour of obscene profanity without repetition or hesitation, but with a great deal of deviation. However, in his manuscript, he blots out swear words. Some pages look like heavily redacted CIA intelligence reports. The typescript is clearer, but still tactful (‘c--t’, ‘f--k’, etc.). Where necessary, I have kept that archaism.
I have chosen not to include several passages which would prove offensive or stultifying to modern readers. Some material (dealing with race, sex or politics) exists in manuscript but not typescript, suggesting Moran himself had second thoughts. As a sometime pornographer, Moran’s accounts of sexual encounters run to dozens of detailed, unedifying pages; he writes about big-game hunting, horse-racing and card games in an identical manner. Where not directly germane to the narrative, I have trimmed paragraphs on these subjects. They are only of academic interest and this academic wasn’t especially interested –
Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas
has been out of print for over a hundred years for good reason. If Moran had been only a tiger hunter and libertine, he would be forgotten. As he admits, if he is remembered at all, it is because he was Moriarty’s lieutenant. In this edition of his memoirs, I have concentrated on that association, sparing the reader aspects of his life and times which now make Moran seem more appalling a human being than his inclinations towards larceny, duplicity and homicide.
Professor Christina Temple, BA, MA, PhD, FRHistS.
School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy,
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck College, London.
February 2011.
ONTENTS
Chapter One: A Volume in Vermilion
Chapter Two: A Shambles in Belgravia
Chapter Three: The Red Planet League
Chapter Four: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles
Chapter Five: The Adventure of the Six Maledictions
Chapter Six: The Greek Invertebrate
Chapter Seven: The Problem of the Final Adventure
HAPTER
O
NE:
A V
OLUME IN
V
ERMILION
I blame that rat-weasel Stamford, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can’t afford to mix up your accents
grave
and your accents
acute.
Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the
gravitational pull
as he would have said, of Professor James Moriarty.
In 1880, your humble narrator was a vigorous, if scarred, forty. I should make a proper introduction of myself: Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, late of a school which wouldn’t let in an oik like you and a regiment which would as soon sack Newcastle as take Ali Masjid. I had an unrivalled bag of big cats and a fund of stories about blasting the roaring pests. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and faced a surge of sword-waving Pathans howling for British blood, potting them like grouse in season. Nothing gladdens a proper Englishman’s heart – this one, at least – like the sight of a foreigner’s head flying into a dozen bloody bits. I’d dangled by a single-handed grip from an icy ledge in the upper Himalayas, with something huge and indistinct and furry stamping on my freezing fingers. I’d bent like an oak in a hurricane as Sir Augustus, the hated pater, spouted paragraphs of bile in my face, which boiled down to the proverbial ‘cut off without a penny’ business. Stuck to it too, the mean old swine. The family loot went to a society for providing Christian undergarments to the Ashanti, a bequest which had the delightful side effect of reducing my unmarriageable sisters to boarding-house penury.
I’d taken a dagger in the lower back from a harlot in Hyderabad and a pistol-ball in the knee from the Okhrana in Nijni-Novgorod. More to the point, I had recently been raked across the chest by the mad, wily old shetiger the hill-heathens called ‘Kali’s Kitten’.
None of that was preparation for Moriarty!
I had crawled into a drain after the tiger, whose wounds turned out to be less severe than I’d thought. Tough old hellcat! KK got playful with jaws and paws, crunching down my pith helmet like one of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, delicately shredding my shirt with razor claws, digging into the skin and drawing casually across my chest. Three bloody stripes. Sure I would die in that stinking tunnel, I was determined not to die alone. I got my Webley side arm unholstered and shot the hell-bitch through the heart. To make sure, I emptied all six chambers. After that chit in Hyderabad dirked me, I broke her nose for her. KK looked almost as aghast and infuriated at being killed. I wondered if girl and tigress were related. I had the cat’s rank dying breath in my face and her weight on me in that stifling hole. One more for the trophy wall, I thought. Cat dead, Moran not: hurrah and victory!
But KK nearly murdered me after all. The stripes went septic. Good thing there’s no earthly use for the male nipple, because I found myself down to just the one. Lots of grey stuff came out of me. So I was packed off back to England for proper doctoring.
It occurred to me that a concerted effort had been made to boot me out of the subcontinent. I could think of a dozen reasons for that, and a dozen clods in stiff collars who’d be happier with me out of the picture. Maiden ladies who thought tigers ought to be patted on the head and given treats. And the husbands, fathers and sweethearts of non-maiden ladies. Not to mention the 1st Bangalore Pioneers, who didn’t care to be reminded of their habit of cowering in ditches while Bloody Basher did three-fourths of their fighting for them.