NF (1998) The Napoleon of Crime

by Ben MacIntyre

  TWENTY-THREE

  Alias Moriarty

  In December 1893, just five months after Worth’s crimes were revealed, Professor James Moriarty, one of the most memorable antiheroes in literature, came into the world.

  The English reading public found the Pall Mall Gazette account of Worth’s crimes at once terrifying and irresistible. Here was a crook so skilled that he could move in high society undetected, who could travel the world as a man of substance while coordinating his criminal empire, yet always managed to slip “through the fingers of the police.” The notion had added piquancy at a time when the duality of man’s nature, thanks to Darwin, was a matter of hot debate. Just as the criminal lurked beneath the cloak of respectability, so too did the deliciously sinful, bestial side of human nature coexist with man’s finer, civilized instincts. Adam Worth, le Brigand International, was a creature straight out of Victorian fiction, and that, indeed, was where he was now headed. The Pall Mall Gazette had made Worth notorious; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make that notoriety eternal.

  There is no doubt that Conan Doyle based his portrait of Professor Moriarty, the evil genius and bitter foe of Sherlock Holmes, principally on the career of Adam Worth, although aspects of Moriarty’s character were doubtless drawn from various sources: his mathematical ability was apparently a reference to one of Doyle’s friends, Major General Drayson; some claim the criminal “abstract philosopher” is a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, based on the misreading of that philosopher as the architect of racist totalitarianism and thus the root of all evil. Conan Doyle’s choice of name for his arch-criminal is believed to refer to one George Moriarty, a crook who featured briefly in the London papers in 1874; the author himself specifically compares Moriarty to Jonathan Wilde, an eighteenth-century crook.

  But Adam Worth was Conan Doyle’s primary inspiration and Conan Doyle told others as much. “The original of Moriarty was Adam Worth, who stole the famous Gainsborough, in 1876, and hid it for a quarter century, but even that master criminal might have taken lessons from the Moriarty of Holmes and Watson, a figure of colossal resource and malevolence,” observed Vincent Starrett, one of the earliest and most reliable of Sherlock Holmes scholars. In a footnote Starrett adds: “This was revealed by Sir Arthur in conversation with Dr. Gray Chandler Briggs [a close friend of the author] some years ago.”

  Holmes’s depiction of Moriarty describes precisely Worth’s position at the height of his prowess in London during the 1880s. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him,” the detective tells his long-suffering sidekick. “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker.”

  When Sir Robert Anderson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, was asked “who, in his estimation, was the cleverest and most resourceful criminal he had ever met,” he employed nearly the same words. “ ‘Adam Worth!’ he rapped out, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘He was the Napoleon of the criminal world. None other could hold a candle to him.’ ”

  It is impossible to know whether Conan Doyle was echoing Anderson or the other way around, or neither: everyone who had achieved distinction in Victorian times became, by cliché, the Napoleon of Something. Certainly Conan Doyle knew and relied on Sir Robert Anderson for some of his background material, and the latter’s admiration for Worth’s criminal talents is well documented. “Fancy the long sustained excitement of planning and executing crimes like Raymond’s,” he once remarked. “In comparison with such sport, hunting wild game is sport for savages; salmon shooting and grouse shooting for lunatics and idiots.”

  The Moriarty described by Conan Doyle is physically very different from the man on whom he was modeled: “He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean shaven, pale, ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is for ever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion”—a far cry from the diminutive, mustachioed Worth. Moriarty is held responsible for “cases of the most varying sorts—forgery cases, robberies, murders.” Worth, as we know, was a master practitioner of the first two, but shunned violence.

  Conan Doyle next wrote about the evil professor in The Valley of Fear, a novel-length tale which was serialized in The Strand Magazine starting in September 1914. By this time, Worth’s criminal network and involvement in the Gainsborough theft had been fully established and widely reported, and it is more apparent than ever that Conan Doyle’s portrayal of Moriarty is firmly based on Worth, for he leaves numerous clues behind. The writer, like every other educated Victorian, had clearly followed the story of the theft of Gainsborough’s Duchess over the years. In 1891 he referred to the Duchess of Devonshire fashion in A Case of Identity, while The Red Headed League, published the same year, describes a robbery remarkably similar to Worth’s celebrated break-in at Boston’s Boylston Bank fifteen years earlier. But in The Valley of Fear (1914) there is, so to speak, physical evidence linking Worth to Moriarty. At the start of that tale, Holmes interrogates Inspector McDonald of Scotland Yard, who has interviewed Professor Moriarty and found him to be, despite Holmes’s warnings, “a very respectable, learned and talented sort of man.” To prove how misguided is that impression, Holmes asks the policeman whether, during his conversation with Moriarty, he observed a picture hanging on the wall of the professor’s study.

  “Yes, I saw the picture—a young woman with her head on her hands keeking at you sideways.”

  Holmes, in a didactic mood, explains that the painting is by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the eighteenth-century French painter, adding “the trivial fact that in the year 1865 a picture by Greuze, entitled ‘La Jeune Fille à l’agneau,’ fetched not less than four thousand pounds—at the Portalis sale.”

  McDonald still does not get the point, so Holmes elaborates. “It shows him [Moriarty] to be a very wealthy man. How did he acquire wealth? He is unmarried … His chair is worth seven hundred a year. And he owns a Greuze? … Surely the inference is plain.”

  “You mean he has a great income, and that he must earn it in an illegal fashion?”

  “Exactly.”

  The other logical possibility, left hanging in the air, is that Moriarty, an art connoisseur as well as a felon, has simply stolen the Greuze.

  In the original manuscript, Conan Doyle reported that Greuze’s La Jeune Fille à l’agneau sold for “one million and two hundred thousand francs—more than forty thousand pounds.” He was surely thinking of the record-breaking sale of The Duchess of Devonshire when he alludes to such an astronomical figure. There is one more, irresistible clue: the title of the imaginary painting itself. Jeune Fille à l’agneau means “Young girl with lamb,” but the reader is actually being offered one of Conan Doyle’s most delicious puns. Would McDonald, for all his “good Aberdeen upbringing,” have known the meaning of the word “agneau”? Probably not. He might, in fact, translate the title “The Young Woman from Agneau,” and the young woman from Agnew’s was none other than the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, stolen from Agnew’s art gallery in 1876. Conan Doyle adored wordplay and must have expected that at least some of his readers would spot this elaborate in-joke.

  The Agnew/Agneau pun was current at the time. The origin of Conan Doyle’s punning title, Jeune Fille à l’agneau, and his choice of Greuze rather than Gainsborough as the artist, seems to lie in a piece of satirical writing which appeared in The World in April 1877, less than a year after the original theft. “It is said that Messrs. L’Agneau [Agnew’s], the great picture dealers of Paris, purchased at the Hotel Drouot a magnificent portrait by Greuze for the prodigious sum of £10,500,” the anonymous satirist wrote, before going on to relate an alleged feud between “the head of the house of Agneau [Sir William Agnew] and “the Marquis of Stude
ly” [Lord Dudley]. The painting is duly stolen but will shortly be “miraculously discovered in America” by Messrs. L’Agneau, the writer predicts, in a truly dreadful piece of writing that might have been summed up in three words: Agnew stole it.

  There is one more convincing link tying the person of Adam Worth to that of the fictional Professor Moriarty: William Pinkerton. The great American detective met the celebrated English author just once, during a transatlantic crossing, and, not surprisingly, found they had much in common. The precise date of the encounter is unknown, although one source cites, without corroboration, that it took place “shortly after the turn of the century.” During the voyage, the sociable American regaled his companion with tales of the Pinkertons’ exploits.

  We know for a fact that Pinkerton inspired Conan Doyle with the extraordinary story of the Molly Maguires, the terrorist underground organization which emerged in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s and which was successfully infiltrated and brought to justice by the Pinkertons’ agent, James McParland. It is entirely possible that, in the course of the voyage, William Pinkerton also expatiated on the character of Adam Worth, about whom he knew more than any man alive and whom Conan Doyle had already written about as Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem.”

  That shipboard conversation with Pinkerton set Conan Doyle on a new scent, and when he came to write The Valley of Fear in 1914 he relied heavily, and without attribution, on an account of McParland’s adventures written by Allan Pinkerton. The Molly Maguires and the Detectives was first published in 1877 and then released in an enlarged edition in 1886. The second half of The Valley of Fear is, in the words of one scholar, “almost a paraphrase of the actual story” told by Allan Pinkerton in prose and William Pinkerton in conversation. But the first half of the novella, in which Professor Moriarty is reintroduced, appears to have sprung from a similar source. Here again, Conan Doyle did not have to rely simply on his memory of the transatlantic conversation with Pinkerton. For in January 1904 the Pinkertons had published a pamphlet Adam Worth—alias “Little Adam,” written principally by William Pinkerton, which told the story of the art-loving criminal mastermind in detail.

  Conan Doyle certainly appropriated the story of James McParland, and in part that of Adam Worth as well, for his own literary purposes. It was a dangerous tactic and one that laid him open to charges of plagiarism. One person was in no doubt on the matter. William Pinkerton “raised the roof when he saw the book,” according to his general manager, Ralph Dudley. “At first he talked of bringing suit against Doyle but then dropped that after he had cooled off. What made him angry was the fact that even if Doyle was fictionalizing the story, he didn’t have the courtesy to ask his permission to use a confidential discussion for his work. They had been good friends before but from that day on their relationship was strained. Mr. Doyle sent several notes trying to soothe things over and while W.A.P. sent him courteous replies he never regarded Mr. Doyle with the same warmth.”

  Pinkerton was overreacting. Conan Doyle did not base his story simply on their “confidential discussion,” but also on other, published sources. Like every writer of fiction, Conan Doyle used real characters, in this case McParland and Worth, but he endowed them with their own unique fictional flavor. More likely, Pinkerton was simply piqued that his own literary effort and that of his father were being overshadowed by Conan Doyle’s best-selling works. Pinkerton spent his life dealing with con men and robbers, but the spat over the sources for The Valley of Fear must have brought home to him another eternal verity: if there is no honor among thieves, there is precious little among authors either.

  As late as 1924, Conan Doyle still appears to have been pondering the life and crimes of Adam Worth. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” published by Collier’s Weekly in 1924 and in The Strand Magazine the following spring, describes another master criminal à la Worth. He has a new alias: Adelbert Gruner, the Austrian baron and criminal cad. In an argument more ingenious than persuasive, it has been suggested that the names are linked. “The Worth family name in the homeland was spelled W-I-R-T-H … pronounced VIRT. It was simply a matter for Watson to change the German-American ADAM VIRT into the Austrian Adelbert. Watson also noted that the German WIRTH is pronounced much the same as the French VERT, which means green. So Watson tacked on the last name of Gruner, which also means green, not in French, but in German.” This may be an example of what happens when one spends too long staring at a page of Conan Doyle, but the tale of Adelbert Gruner does bear some marked similarities to the Worth saga. Holmes’s reference to “Charlie Peace,” a “great criminal” and “violin virtuoso,” would seem to recall Piano Charley Bullard. The “very dangerous villain” turned underworld informer, Shinwell Johnson, who provides Holmes with information on Gruner, may well be a “portmanteau” of the names Max Shinburn and the Bidwell brothers, former habitués of the American Bar in Paris. And certainly the description of Shinwell Johnson as a turncoat and “agent in the huge criminal underworld” reminds one of Shinburn’s treatment of Worth in Louvain jail. Kitty Winter, Gruner’s former lover, who conspires with Holmes to expose the wicked seducer, may well be another fictionalized version of Kitty Flynn, “a slim, flame-like woman with a pale, intense face, youthful, and yet so worked with sin and sorrow that one read the terrible years which had left their leprous mark upon her.”

  Adelbert Gruner, the dandy, is uncommonly similar to Adam Worth, right down to his “lucent top hat, his dark frock coat, indeed, every detail, from the pearl tie pin in the black satin cravat to the lavender spats over the varnished shoes.” Gruner is possibly even “more dangerous than the late Professor Moriarty,” Holmes avers, with his seductive talents and veneer of culture. “He has expensive tastes. He is a horse fancier … He collects books and pictures. He is a man with a considerable artistic side to his nature.”

  Again this recalls Worth, while Holmes’s description of Gruner as a man “who collects women, and takes pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies,” is even more strongly reminiscent of the man who, quite literally, “collected” at least one woman for his own private exhibition. Reflecting the duality Victorians saw in all great criminals, Gruner is a “beast-man,” a gentleman on the surface, a monster beneath it, and, like Worth, “a real aristocrat of crime.”

  Worth aspired to Victorian respectability and criminal greatness, but Conan Doyle gave him something more enduring: a literary persona that has spawned myriad imitators, a name that is a byword for criminal cunning, and a game where blindfolded children cosh each other with rolled-up newspapers, having first tried to locate their opponent’s head by shouting, “Are you there, Moriarty?”

  Adam Worth’s impact on popular culture did not end there. In 1939, T. S. Eliot published his delightful Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, not the least memorable of whom is Macavity, the Mystery Cat.

  Compare T. S. Eliot’s description of the feline felon with Conan Doyle’s description of Moriarty, and it is evident where the poet found his inspiration: Here, metamorphosed into feline form, is Adam Worth himself. Conan Doyle took his inspiration from Worth’s life, and T. S. Eliot took his from Conan Doyle. To complete the trail, the composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber based Cats, one of the most popular musicals of all time, on T. S. Eliot’s Practical Cats. Kitty ended up posthumously in Hollywood and Adam Worth made it, via two more aliases, all the way to Broadway.

  Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

  There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

  He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:

  At whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!

  And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known

  (I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)

  Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time

  Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

  TWENTY-F
OUR

  Atonement

  The Belgian prison authorities finally released Worth in 1897, two years early, for “good behavior,” which was another way of saying that he had endured without evident rebellion five long years of prison beatings and barbaric medical treatment, and the taunts, the depression, and the stupefying boredom of imprisonment. Worth had become a docile prisoner, growing more tractable as his body weakened and his spirit began to gutter. There was no one at the gates of the Prison de Louvain to greet the emerging felon, now fifty-three years old. Bullard and Kitty were dead, his wife was as good as dead, quite mad in an English insane asylum; his children knew little or nothing of his situation. Even the journalists who had peppered him with questions about the Gainsborough portrait had temporarily abandoned the chase for new quarry. Professor Moriarty was a household name, but his own name, or names, were all but forgotten by the world. Even if there had been a reception party when he staggered into liberty, it is doubtful that many would have recognized the swaggering, blustering crook of 1892 in this emaciated, shattered old man with the watery eyes and the drooping mustaches. The attentions of the ham-fisted prison doctor had left him with damaged nasal membranes, prey to cascading and unpredictable nosebleeds. At night he would wake in a feverish, screeching sweat, furiously hacking blood from his lungs as the budding symptoms of tuberculosis took hold. The bouts of “nervous prostration” that had struck him in the early part of his imprisonment had gradually lapsed into depressed resignation, for a vital part of Worth had died in his Belgian jail cell. Pinkerton later described him as “broken in health and financially a wreck,” but something more vital had been destroyed than his body, wealth, or self-invented reputation. In prison Worth had discovered remorse: not for his crimes, for which he felt nothing but a residual pride, but for those whose lives he had damaged or destroyed. His young wife was beyond help. The two daughters of Kitty Flynn, which he believed to be his own, were now rich society belles who did not need and would certainly not have welcomed the attentions of an aging criminal. But his two younger children, a boy of nine and a girl of six, who lived with John Worth in Brooklyn, were another matter. John Worth had proved a dismal crook but was scarcely more successful as an honest man, and the family lived in crushing poverty and domestic disharmony. In spite of Worth’s generosity over the years, or perhaps because of it, John’s wife, a fiercely religious and domineering woman, had little but contempt for her felonious brother-in-law, and nothing but scorn for her fatuous husband. In his years behind bars Worth had come to a decision: he would reclaim his children and provide for them, by hook or by crook, fair means or foul.