Maxim Jakubowski is a London-based novelist and editor. He was born in the UK and educated in France. Following a career in book publishing, he opened the world-famous Murder One bookshop in London. He now writes full-time. He has edited many acclaimed crime collections, and over twenty bestselling erotic anthologies and books on erotic photography. His novels include It’s You That I Want to Kiss, Because She Thought She Loved Me and On Tenderness Express, all three collected and reprinted in the USA as Skin in Darkness. Other books include Life in the World of Women, The State of Montana, Kiss Me Sadly, Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, I Was Waiting for You, Ekaterina and the Night, American Casanova and his collected short stories Fools for Lust. He compiles two annual acclaimed series for the Mammoth list: Best New Erotica and Best British Crime. He is a winner of the Anthony and the Karel Awards, a frequent TV and radio broadcaster, a past crime columnist for the Guardian newspaper and Literary Director of London’s Crime Scene Festival. In recent years, he has authored under a pen-name a series of Sunday Times bestselling erotic romance novels which have sold over two million copies and been sold to 22 countries, and translated the acclaimed French novel Monsieur by Emma Becker.
Copyright © 2015 by Maxim Jakubowski for the selection and individual stories by respective contributors
First published in the United Kingdom by Robinson, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover image: iStock
Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0947-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0950-8
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction
Maxim Jakubowski
Moriarty and the Two-Body Problem
Alison Joseph
A Good Mind’s Fate
Alexandra Townsend
Everything Flows and Nothing Stays
John Soanes
A Scandalous Calculation
Catherine Lundoff
Dynamics of an Asteroid
Lavie Tidhar
The Importance of Porlock
Amy Myers
How the Professor Taught a Lesson to the Gnoles
Josh Reynolds
The Swimming Lesson
Priscilla Masters
The Malady of the Mind Doctor
Howard Halstead
Obsession
Russel D. McLean
The Box
Steve Cavanagh
Jacques the Giant Slayer
Vanessa de Sade
Rosenlaui
Conrad Williams
The Protégé
Kate Ellis
A Scandal in Arabia
Claude Lalumière
The Mystery of the Missing Child
Christine Poulson
The Case of the Choleric Cotton Broker
Martin Edwards
The Last of his Kind
Barbara Nadel
A Problem of Numbers
David N. Smith and Violet Addison
The Fulham Strangler
Keith Moray
The Adventure of the Lost Theorem
Julie Novakova
The Last Professor Moriarty Story
Andrew Lane
Quid Pro Quo
Ashley R. Lister
The Jamesian Conundrum
Jan Edwards
The Caribbean Treaty Affair
Jill Braden
The Copenhagen Compound
Thomas S. Roche
The Shape of the Skull
Anoushka Havinden
A Function of Probability
Mike Chinn
The Perfect Crime
G. H. Finn
As Falls Reichenbach, So Falls Reichenbach Falls
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
A Certain Notoriety
David Stuart Davies
Fade to Black
Michael Gregorio
The Skeleton of Contention
Rhys Hughes
The Fifth Browning
Jürgen Ehlers
The Modjeska Waltz
Rose Biggin
Moriarty’s Luck
L. C. Tyler
The Death of Moriarty
Peter Guttridge
Introduction
It is said that the devil has all the best lines and who are we to contradict this?
Heroes come, triumph against terrible adversity and eventually end up in the land of happy-ever-after, but you and I know that the baddies are more often the ones that stay in the mind. In books, movies, comics and, less seductively, also sometimes in real life.
Of course, we all remember James Bond’s exploits, but it’s the larger than life figures of Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Doctor No, Oddjob, Jaws and other representations of evil who come to mind. Think back: Hannibal Lecter, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Hyde on the dark side of Jekyll, Jack the Ripper, Fu Manchu, the Deaf Man in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct police procedurals, Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Tom Ripley – Patricia Highsmith’s chilling but suave killer and manipulator – Bill Sykes, Sauron, Patrick Bateman – the anti-hero of ‘American Psycho’ – Dracula, Voldermort, the list could prove endless.
I rest my case.
No one will object to my stating that Sherlock Holmes is the most legendary of fictional sleuths and still captures our imagination like no other through renewed interpretations, impersonations and tales still being spun well beyond Conan Doyle’s initial canon. But what would Sherlock be without his arch foe: Professor James Moriarty, a man whose fate and life is intimately entwined with his and who automatically comes to mind whenever we evoke the denizen of 221B Baker Street?
But unless you are a learned Holmes expert, did you know that Moriarty actually only appears in two Holmes stories? Respectively, ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ and ‘The Valley of Fear’.
Holmes, or rather his chronicler Doctor Watson, evokes Moriarty in passing in five other tales but the master criminal, whom Holmes described as ‘the Napoleon of Crime’ doesn’t in fact appear in the stories (‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’, ‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter’, ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’ and ‘His Last Bow’).
Doctor Watson, even when narrating, never meets Moriarty (only getting distant glimpses of him in ‘The Final Problem’), and relies upon Holmes to relate accounts of the detective’s feud with the criminal. Conan Doyle is inconsistent on Watson’s familiarity with Moriarty. In ‘The Final Problem’, Watson tells Holmes he has never heard of Moriarty, while in ‘The Valley of Fear’, set earlier on, Watson already knows of him as ‘th
e famous scientific criminal’.
On such thin foundations was a legend born!
And scores of readers starved of further stories about Moriarty (and by extension Sherlock Holmes) have incessantly called out for more and writers have obliged. Prominent amongst these have been Michael Kurland, the much-missed John Gardner, and Anthony Horowitz, all of whose novels featuring the master criminal have provided a renewed light and insights into his nefarious, if clever activities.
Which is where this collection comes in.
Aware of the fascination Moriarty casts, I thought the time had come for our criminal mastermind to have an anthology of his own, and the submissions came flooding in, enough to fill several volumes of our size! So many admirers of crime out there!
The short stories I had the privilege of assembling prove so wondrously imaginative and challenging. Not all feature Holmes or Watson, and not all see Moriarty as the pure incarnation of evil we had previously assumed he represented, and the twists and adventures on offer are often a thing of beauty. The variations on display are both subtle and far-fetching, filling the gaps in the Doyle canon or opening up whole new cans of worms, which I found as delightful as they were challenging.
Inside these pages you will find well-known crime writers, and lesser stars too, as well as courageous interlopers from other popular fiction fields such as science fiction and fantasy and even erotica (albeit with their libido switched off for the occasion), all seduced by the attraction of Professor James Moriarty’s criminal mind.
Never has evil been so fascinating and its fruit so exciting.
The game’s afoot yet again.
Relish!
Maxim Jakubowski
Moriarty and the Two-Body Problem
Alison Joseph
It seems rather odd now, looking back, that I didn’t see the shape of things. Given that, as a mathematician, seeing the shape of things is what I do, finding order instead of chaos, a pattern where once was randomness. As Professor Moriarty might have said – but, no, I must start at the beginning.
They were happy times. It was a small college in London, and I was embarking on my research under the supervision of Professor James Moriarty. My father, a pharmacist in Norwich, couldn’t understand what had made me leave the security of Cambridge to end up in London, working with someone no one had heard of. But I’m working on Gauss, I tried to tell my parents. Carl Friedrich Gauss, who charted the path of the comet Ceres where everyone else had failed. I knew that Professor Moriarty had been feted in his day for his influential work on the dynamics of an asteroid. And now here he was, tucked away in London, in a small room in St Dunstan’s College, still knowing more about Gauss’s calculations than anyone other than Gauss himself.
‘I can’t imagine why you’ve come to me, young man,’ were his first words when I introduced myself. ‘Once, long ago, I might have had some influence, but we’re in the twentieth century now. My work no longer carries any weight. Where once my name struck fear into my enemies, why now, no one has heard of me at all.’ Then, with a brief, thin smile he said, ‘I have no enemies now.’ His gaze had somehow gone beyond me, into the distance, into the past.
Above him hung a portrait, and my eyes were drawn to it. It was clearly the Professor himself, as a younger man. Even now one could see the similarities. He looked more distinguished, older, of course, but the grey hair was still thick, the same domed forehead, the same rather stiff, upright posture. Next to it there was a charming painting of a boy, sitting at a table upon which lay various mathematical instruments. Moriarty’s gaze followed mine.
‘Le Petit Mathématicien,’ he said.
‘French? I said.
‘Greuze,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘It’s a copy. I do have an original Greuze, but in the past certain people made rather, shall we say, unfortunate judgements about me for having such a valuable thing, so I keep it to myself. Now, young man, tell me why you’re so keen to allow an old has-been any kind of influence over your work.’
I began to describe my work. I talked about orbits within solar systems, the measurement of the angle between two planes, and the measurement of the arc intercepted between the poles of the curves, and, as I talked, I noticed how his expression carried a blankness, almost a sneer. I wondered whether perhaps my parents were right, and that staying in the confines of Emmanuel with a tutor I knew well might have been a more rational decision.
But what my parents didn’t yet know was that I had encountered Angela, a lovely librarian who worked in the university and lived with her widowed father in Harrow; and I had resolved that, if staying in London gave me the chance to see more of her, then London it would be. What they also didn’t know was that I had taken a part-time job in a printers’ warehouse in Holborn just to keep a roof over my head. I occupied two small rooms near Chancery Lane, where at night I would lie in bed listening to the rain dripping from the broken guttering and the shouts of unruly law students in the streets below.
I had reached a point in my paper where I describe the calculations for the two points on a sphere that correspond to any given point of the curved line upon a curved surface.
‘Hah!’ Moriarty’s exclamation interrupted my musings. ‘This is all very interesting to me.’ The flickering sneer had gone, replaced by an intense, dark gaze. ‘It’s not often people ask for me by name these days,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair, glancing upwards at the portrait on the wall. ‘Mathematics,’ he said. ‘The purest of the sciences. Gauss charted the path of the asteroid, not by looking outwards at the skies, but by looking inwards at the numbers. That’s what we mathematicians do. We find the glory of the heavens in the pure, abstract truths of calculation.’ He turned to look at me again. ‘The workings of numbers,’ he said. ‘So much more reliable than the workings of the human heart. I shall be happy to tutor you.’
And so began our collaboration.
Moriarty was not a warm person. There was something hidden about him, a coolness, a distance. But his brilliance was indisputable. He was often occupied with his own writings, a reworking of his early work on the binomial theorem. ‘Mere footnotes to Plato,’ he said to me once with a wry smile. ‘The balance between positive and negative, almost Manichean in its dualism.’ Sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mr Gifford, I’m an old man. It’s 1921. We have a new mathematics, we have general relativity, we have Hilbert and his unsolved problems. Worse than that, we have the legacy of this terrible war, the world turned upside down …’ An air of weariness would cross his face, and his eyes would appear hooded, almost blank. But then something in my calculations would awaken his interest again, and we’d be off, and I would once again be impressed at the quickness of his mind, and his deep love of his subject.
It was a friendly department. The tutors’ common room was oakpanelled and convivial, full of smoke and conversation. There was a fellow who had joined at the same time as me, a young Oxford chap named Roland Sadler, working on quadratic forms, and we used to share a pot of tea together most afternoons. I noticed that Moriarty was rather left alone. One of the tutors, when I said I was working with him, simply said, ‘Poor you.’ ‘Ah,’ someone else chipped in, ‘the arch nemesis, or so he likes to think,’ and there was laughter, not altogether kind. I was glad that the Professor wasn’t there to hear.
The head of the department was a Scotsman, Dr Angus McCrae. Amongst the other tutors was a new star, a woman named Dr Eveline Brennan. She had made her name at Girton, and had worked with the famous Isabel Maddison, teaching at Trinity College Dublin before joining our department. Some of the men were wary of her, but I liked her directness, her disregard for the social niceties. She called herself a New Woman, and rumour had it that she had studied martial arts with the suffragette Edith Garrud. She also was alone in being kind about Moriarty. ‘It’s thanks to him I got this position here,’ she confided in me once. ‘He said he admired my work on c- and p
-discriminants.’
One can always see a pattern in retrospect, of course. But, at the time, to a mere observer, the unfortunate events unfolded in a succession that appeared to be entirely random. It all started in such a peculiar way. It was a sunny Monday morning, and we were variously engaged with our teaching, enjoying the sense of spring in the air, when there was a terrible noise from the quad. We ran to the windows to see two men fighting, right in the middle of the neat lawn. Real punches were being thrown, and we could see that one man was getting the worst of it, with a nasty cut across his jaw.
We ran down to the quad, Eveline ahead of us all. ‘Stop that now,’ she was shouting.
‘It’s the college porter,’ someone was saying. ‘Old Seamus.’
‘Who’s the other chap?’
‘No idea.’
‘Stop.’ It was Eveline’s voice ringing out. ‘Stop that. Stop that now.’
Her words had an extraordinary effect. The punches stopped. The strange man was standing, panting, staring at her, his fists clenched at his side. He had a shock of black hair, a cheap ragged jacket. Seamus the porter began to crawl away, one hand across his bleeding jaw.
Still the man’s dark eyes were fixed on Eveline. Then he spoke. ‘I came to find you,’ he said. ‘I’d heard you were here. But I didn’t dare to believe it.’
She was standing, illumined in the May sunlight, upright in her long black skirt, her starched white blouse. She spoke to him quietly, but, as I was nearby, I heard what she said. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said. Then she turned and strode away into the college, without looking back.
Roland had gone to help poor Seamus. The rest of us stood, awkwardly. The brawling man had slipped away. People began to drift back to their teaching. I was aware of someone standing at the windows above, and I looked up. Moriarty was staring down at the scene. I could see him, framed by the window of his room. And I could see that he was smiling.
That evening I went to meet Angela at the library. We would often go to a little Italian restaurant and I would buy her dinner, even if it meant eating nothing but toast for the rest of the week. This evening she insisted on paying for her own dinner. ‘You’re a New Woman,’ I teased her. ‘Like Eveline. You’ll be learning ju-jitsu soon too.’ Angela laughed in her sweet, shy way, her brown eyes half hidden behind her dark curls. I almost asked her to marry me there and then.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 1