The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  *So successful was Moriarty’s trail of misdirection that some have even confused Adam Worth with James Moriarty himself: See Ben MacIntyre’s excellent and knowledgeable book The Napoleon of Crime (HarperCollins, 1997).

  †This was not the first time that Moriarty had substituted a forgery for a real work of art. Readers of The Revenge of Moriarty will recall that the Professor owned the great da Vinci Mona Lisa by this same subterfuge.

  *The common picture of Professor Moriarty is, of course, that of the tall, thin, elderly man with dark sunken eyes and the forbidding visage, plus that strange reptilian tic of moving his head from side to side, not the lithe, agile younger man he really was—the academic’s younger brother; more of that anon.

  *There is something quite strange about this information concerning the Gainsborough painting. It is only mentioned as a talisman late in the Journals. Earlier we are left to imagine that his great talisman is a painting of a young, virginal girl reputed to have been painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. I cannot account for this discrepancy.

  *It may be of interest in passing that Moriarty’s choice of lodging for his closest lieutenants is significant. In Baedeker’s guide to London for 1900 there is a specific warning that reads, “The stranger is cautioned against going to any unrecommended house near Leicester Square, as there are several houses of doubtful reputation in this locality.”

  *There is a note at the end of The Revenge of Moriarty that suggests that Sal Hodges had only recently given birth to Moriarty’s son, Arthur James Moriarty (baptized in 1897). It is more likely that this baptism record is yet another of the Professor’s clues to mislead the unwary through bending of facts, for young Moriarty was undoubtedly a boy of at least eleven or twelve years of age in 1900.

  *Sir George Cathcart was killed in the action, and the 68th DLI displayed their collective gallantry by throwing off their grey greatcoats and fighting in their scarlet jackets, the only regiment to fight in scarlet that day.

  *For more on Wilhelm Schleifstein, Berlin’s criminal leader and organizer, see The Return of Moriarty. In 1894 Moriarty made an alliance with several of the European heads of crime, including the powerful Schleifstein.

  *By 1900 almost all the 91,000 streetlights in London had been switched from the old gaslights to the new electric system.

  *”All Sir Garnet” became a popular expression in Victorian times. It is taken from Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley, First Viscount Wolseley (1833–1913), who was famous for his military efficiency. It means all is in hand.

  *There is mention in the Journals that Moriarty was forced to leave Liverpool at one time. He did not go straight to London, and the inference is that he had come under suspicion—probably concerning a bank robbery. It is clear that he was in the West Country for a time and eventually resurfaced in London. The period seems to be covered as “lost years,” and the minutiae are suitably lacking in colour.

  *The description referred to is of course Sherlock Holmes’s famous word picture, documented by Dr. Watson in The Final Problem: “He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a wide curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale and ascetic looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever oscillating from side to side in a curious reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his puckered eyes.”

  *Because they charmed doors open.

  *By which he meant protection.

  *Where she was playing Prince Heliotrope opposite her sister in Cinderella.

  *To twig is to comprehend, so twiggez-vous, do you understand? Twiggez-nous? Nous twiggon? etc. From early in the nineteenth century. Used by Kipling in Stalky & Co. The popular song was by George le Brunn and Richard Morton.

  *At this point it may be convenient to remind readers of English currency at that time, for it had nothing to do with the decimal logic of other countries. One shilling was made up of twelve pence; a penny could be cut in half with a halfpenny (a ha’penny) or quartered with a farthing, and the shilling could be halved with a silver sixpence; prices could end in three farthings (a small silver coin, a thrupp’ny bit), so 1s113/4d would be spoken of as “one and eleven three.” There were twenty shillings to the pound sterling; and £100 was, by the end of the nineteenth century, roughly the equivalent of £1,000 in today’s spending power. The pound coin was gold and known as a sovereign, while silver coins were the crown (five shillings); the half-crown (two shillings and sixpence); the shilling; and the florin (two shillings). The double florin (four shillings) was still in circulation, though rarely seen, and the Bank of England issued notes of 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 pounds. Colloquial English rendered the pound as a quid, the shilling as a bob, and the threepenny bit as a Joey. The penny was represented by a d for denarius, a Roman coin.

  *It is, of course, still maintained by many aficionados of the Sherlock Holmes tales that the professor’s youngest brother ended his days as a railway stationmaster in the West Country. Undoubtedly he did hold such a job for a time, but we have no hint of how or when he left to further his criminal activities.

  *A favourite word of nineteenth-century pornographers, meaning the penis of man or beast. Favoured because of its supposed Greek connections: Greek πηγη, a spring or fountain.

  *This weapon had been presented to Moriarty by Wilhelm Schleifstein, the head of organized crime in Berlin at the time of the attempted grand alliance of the continental criminal families with Moriarty’s own London organization in the spring of 1894 (see The Return of Moriarty). The Borchardt automatic was the precursor of the famous Luger pistol. Hugo Borchardt had successfully invented the design as early as 1890 while living in America, but no manufacturer in the United States showed any interest. Finally, Borchardt took the design—virtually the same as the later Luger—to Germany, where Ludwig Loewe put it into production in 1893. It was one of the first automatic pistols to be sold commercially in large numbers, being loaded by a magazine in the butt and automatically recocked by the gasses from the explosive charge of the cartridge.

  *At this point in history, gay had three meanings: gay as in light-hearted and carefree; gay as in a colourful pattern; and gay as in sexually promiscuous. Eventually (in the 1970s, via U.S. tramp speech) this word was hijacked by the homosexual community and nowadays it is used, almost exclusively, to indicate a homosexual or lesbian. As a rule, in 1900 a gay lady was a prostitute.

  *Now the site of the Old Bailey.

  *Where the Odeon Cinema is today.

  *For full details of this plot, see The Return of Moriarty.

  *Unthinkable and inappropriate today, but in 1900 blackface was perfectly acceptable.

  *Among those who appeared at one time or another with Fred Karno were Stan Laurel and Charles Chaplin. Fred Karno’s name, of course, lived on in the World War I soldiers’ song “We Are Fred Karno’s Army,” sung to the tune of “The Church is One Foundation,” finally immortalized in Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War.

  †All but forgotten now, Martin Chapender was a huge draw in London at the turn of the century who played in Maskelyn’s show at the Egyptian Hall. If he had lived, he would have been one of the legends of magic today. Alas, he died a year or two later.

  *Once more, something that would be vaguely repellent today, but at the turn of the century she was a top liner.

  *There is some argument about this spell or curse. Many hold that it comes down from gypsy lore, but it has, in some places, slipped into the lore of the playground, where it still comes to light occasionally (in remote areas) as a children’s counting mantra, in the “One-ery, two-ery, ick-ery, Ann” mode. Yet it seems to have had a more sinister meaning to Moriarty, who quotes it no less than three times in the manuscript of his journals.

  *Somebody familiar with the modern expression “coppers’ nark” will wish to complain about my spelling—something my splendid English teacher, the fa
mous J. M. Cohen, did constantly. However, in the nineteenth century it appears that nark was spelled knark.

  *In the early 1890s, Fanny Jones had come to London to make her fortune. She had been a servant to a good family in Warwickshire, somewhere near Kenilworth, and had excellent references that were passed on to Sir Richard and Lady Bray, who had a fine London house in Park Lane. Within days of starting to work for the Brays, Fanny ran foul of their butler, a Mr. Halling, who tried to force himself on her. Finally constant refusal brought Halling to report her, using vile lies and calumnies concerning her morals. Lady Bray had her thrown out without even listening to Fanny’s side of the argument. She met, and fell in love with, Pip Paget in 1894 and became one of the women kitchen workers and cooks at the old Limehouse headquarters. Albert Spear was responsible for seeing that the butler, Halling, was “dealt with.” The detailed story can be found in The Return of Moriarty.

  *Coals. Rhyming slang: coals and coke = broke.

  *In 1860 when Bertie, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), was doing military service with the Grenadier Guards in the Curragh, just outside Dublin, his young brother’s subalterns introduced a young woman, Nellie Clifden, into the prince’s bed, after a farewell party. She had, according to Stanley Weintraub (see Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert, The Free Press, New York, 1997), “a talent to amuse.” And she undoubtedly amused the Prince of Wales considerably, and for some time.