The Return of Moriarty: Sherlock Holmes' Nemesis Lives Again

Professor Moriarty #1

by John Gardner

The novel that reintroduced the Napoleon of crime to the Victorian underworld—now back in print after almost forty years

 

Once again, the game is afoot . . .

 

What really happened in Switzerland between Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes in 1891? And why is Holmes, now in London at 221B Baker Street, curiously uncooperative with Scotland Yard’s inquiries? Furthermore, why has Moriarty planned a grand meeting with the international crime syndicate? These are the questions that make up the larger mystery of the sinister Professor Moriarty’s return.

 

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Ebooks, Detective

338 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 28, 1974

About the author

Before coming an author of fiction in the early 1960s, John Gardner was variously a stage magician, a Royal Marine officer and a journalist. In all, Gardner has fifty-four novels to his credit, including Maestro, which was the New York Times book of the year. He was also invited by Ian Fleming’s literary copyright holders to write a series of continuation James Bond novels, which proved to be so successful that instead of the contracted three books he went on to publish some fourteen titles, including Licence Renewed and Icebreaker.

Having lived in the Republic of Ireland, the United States and the UK, John Gardner sadly died in August of 2007 having just completed his third novel in the Moriarty trilogy, Conan Doyle’s eponymous villain of the Sherlock Holmes series.

Reviews

[Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of the sequel to this book, The Revenge of Moriarty, is actually a double review of both of the books in this series. That review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... .

[Donna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this and didn't like it. So I a few days later I started it again....and again I didn't like it. Same with the third time. I got to almost the halfway point...but I didn't want to go any further. Sadly, this is one of the very few books that is DNF for me. I just couldn't get into it.

[Margaret · Rating 2 out of 5]

An okay read. Not great. Not boring enough that I didn't finish it, but no exciting enough to make me want to read the others.

[Tony Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

3/6/1894, Prostitutes mutilated bodies were starting to turn up everywhere.
3/30/1894, 427 Park Lane. Ronald Adair was found shot in his head, & then his body was mutilated.
Strand house. Professor Moriarty called his team together: Colonel Sir Augustus Moran (C.B., gambler, former British Minister to Persia, Eton U, Oxford U, Indian Army), Lee Chow (Chinese), Pip Paget, Spear, Davis, & Hawkins.
4/5/1894, London, England. Professor James Moriarty (Machiavellian criminal mastermind, mathematics) was doing research on the Metropolitan PD procedures & the criminal underworld.
Professor Moriarty & Colonel & Sebastian Moran (James Chief of Staff) were having quite the discussion about Detective Sherlock Holmes (consultant) & Dr. John H. Watson.

Bill Jacobs & Bert Jacobs were cleared of the Maidenhead Manor robbery.
Judge/Sir Henry Hawkins had sentenced Charlie Peace to life imprisonment only to find out he had murdered Arthur Dyson at Banner Cross, Sheffield, England.
Michael “the Peg” Green & Peter Butler (aka Peter the Butler, Lord Peter) met & formed a group of professional criminals John Togger & Israel Krebitz.
Professor James Moriarty took Arthur Bowers & Norman De Frayse under his wing, but the older boys were corrupting them.

Colonel Sebastian Moran was arrested by Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard last night and committed for trial this morning for the murder of Ronald Adair of 427 Park Lane & the attempted murder of Detective Sherlock Holmes who was found dead in his cell at the Horsemonger Lane Jail.
63 King St. Inspector Angus McCready Crow (Metropolitan PD) spent a lot of his time on this case.
A few days later Jonge, Kurr, Murray, & 3 others were arrested in Rotterdam & transported back to London, England for trial.
Former Detectives: Druscovich, Meiklejohn, & Palmer were also on trial/sentenced for their crimes in the de Goncourt scandal.
4/18/1894, Inspector Crow is to wed Sylvia Mary Victoria Cowles (daughter).
4/21/1894, What became of Professor James Moriarty?
I do not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing free books from publishers & authors. Therefore, I am under no obligation to write a positive review, only an honest one.

I do not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing free books from publishers & authors. Therefore, I am under no obligation to write a positive review, only an honest one.

An awesome book cover, great font & writing style. A very professionally written 19th-Century crime thriller book. It was extremely easy for me to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no grammar/typo errors, nor any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great description list of unique characters, settings, facts etc. to keep track of. This could also make another great 19th-Century crime thriller movie, or better yet a mini TV series. There is no doubt in my mind this is an extremely easy rating of 5 stars.

Thank you for the free author; Lume Books; BookZio; BookBub; Amazon Digital Services LLC.; book.
Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is another one I'm not sure where to begin. I really don't care much for these novels that tell you about the events and then insert dialogue in once and a while. Though I am assuming that much of the history of the Victorian era of the late 1890s was accurate. It did make up for the fact that I also am really bothered by authors who keep dipping into the future because they are telling the story in past tense. The constant, well one day fingerprints will solve all kinds of crimes, well Okay, but this is a time period where fingerprints did not, and I don't need all that extra information that really is unnecessary. It drags and increases a word count, and a 13-hour novel could be 10 with much better pacing. In the end those dips into the future didn’t improve the plot. I just don't like books like that. I don't know how you know they're books like that until you start to read them and maybe I should create a Did Not Finish pile, but I haven't yet. I also feel the book is misleading as being the return of Moriarty implies that we're going to have some kind of confrontation or at least a conversation moment with Sherlock Holmes. None of that exists in this text. We get Moriarty’s side of what happened at the waterfall and perhaps it's true, perhaps it's not. The narrator constantly tells us this may or may not be the same Moriarty that we dealt with Sherlock Holmes. He was criminal mastermind in this novel and ruled the seedy side of Victorian London, but it just did not compel me. The more I read the more I don't like these kinds of stories. I want to live these adventures instead of just a recap. In the end I would give it a solid 2.5 stars, only because I feel the author did intensive research to capture the time period, and they did align the story up with Sherlock Holmes but still this one just really doesn't do it for me.

[Stas Malyshev · Rating 2 out of 5]

20% of this book is good. 80% of it is, unfortunately, boring.

The basic premise, as it is obvious from the title, is that Moriarty is not dead. Which must be if not good, then at least exciting news. But starting from there, most of the book is a rather dull description of Moriarty's efforts to re-establish himself as the kingpin of the criminal world. Soviet "socialist realism" had a genre of "industry novel", which had whole books dedicated to meticulous descriptions of industrial processes and lives of workers, which were supposed to fascinate the readers by themselves. They didn't. Neither does this book, up until the later several chapters, where people that decided to stay on out of pure stubbornness are rewarded with a good short bit of real criminal drama with a nice pace and something exciting finally happening. Oh, btw, Sherlock Holmes, probably intimidated into silence by threats of Moriarty's copyright lawyers, is completely absent from this tale, replaced by Mr. Crow, of whom we learn basically two things - he's a competent cop (though we know it by the results, how he gets there is not extensively covered) and he's pretty good in bed (that part of his life is covered in almost same length as the former one, though thankfully sparing us the R-rated details). Otherwise, his personality is nothing but unremarkable.
I know this mediocre work has a sequel, and for the sake of its readers I hope it looks like the last couple of chapters and not as the rest of this book.

[Irwin Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if I'd call this a "good" book but it was certainly entertaining. I never thought I'd read a mashup of Sherlock Holmes and The Godfather. Though I thought the Godfather stuff got a little to on-the-nose at times, just in case you didn't pick up on the fact he's taking entire scenes from the Godfather he has characters come right out and call him the "Don" of his organization which is here known as "The Family". Where Vito Corleone would make you an offer you can't refuse, Moriarty will put a suggestion to you that you will find hard to spurn. Yes he actually says that and I admit I found it pretty funny.

At one point during another flashback, maybe the best part of the book, it kind of turns into Fritz Lang's "M" with Moriarty having to try to catch Jack The Ripper because the police presence in Whitechapel is interfering with criminal activities. It might not be the most original thing in the world to take plot elements from other books/films and insert them into a Sherlock Holmes pastiche but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't entertained.

The cover of the old paperback I bought said "The Napoleon Of Crime Presents Holmes And Watson With His Ultimate Challenge" but for better or worse Holmes and Watson have very little to do with this book. Moriarty returns to London and Holmes, due to a truce he was forced into at Reichenbach, refuses to get involved even though Moriarty isn't keeping up to his end of the truce. The only time he's really a character in the book is when Moriarty describes what happened at Reichenbach years earlier. Gardner creates a new character to go up against Moriarty, an Inspector Angus McCready Crow, who finds Holmes completely unhelpful and somewhat dishonest. That's all fine with me but the only problem was that because of that little blurb on the cover I kept expecting Holmes to be working behind the scenes, or possibly undercover as one of the characters who does factor into the story, which isn't the case. So I kept expecting some twist that never came which ended up being a twist to me.

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Return of Moriarty is a fascinating flip-side to the familiar Sherlock Holmes mythos of gaslight, late 19th century England. This book has both Holmes and his archnemesis Moriarty in this story taking place a few years after the famous confrontation at Reichenbach Falls. The “reality” of the meeting where both men were believed killed was surprising and intriguing. I really liked that portion, but The Return of Moriarty, first of a trilogy, has much more to offer than that surprise.

Colonel Moran has always been an intriguing figure to me in the Holmes canon, but I was not expecting to see Moran willingly return the reins of the criminal empire right back to Moriarty upon the mastermind’s return. I was not expecting the threat to Moriarty’s empire that was building momentum in his absence or the traitor in his midst. I was not expecting the obsessive nature of Moriarty’s boldest act toward the end of this novel or the intricate planning in which he was building an international criminal alliance with an emphasis on anarchy. In the balance between action and intrigue, The Return of Moriarty weighs heavily on the side of intrigue seasoned with betrayal.

The emphasis in the book is on human relationships illuminated by descriptions of plans, dreams, and narratives of how they can go wrong (and right, of course). For me, it could only have been better if some of the action scenes had been extended. Sometimes, it felt like the fruition of and, sometimes, frustration of these plans were anticlimactic. So, I’d have to say that while The Return of Moriarty is four (4) stars for me, it would probably rest at three (3) stars for those more used to Gardner’s (John Edmund Gardner, the British writer who penned several Bond novels, not the American writer) more action-oriented thrillers.

[Randy Stapilus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The publishers couldn't help running the words "Sherlock Holmes" in the biggest type on the front cover. Don't be fooled: This really isn't a Holmes novel - he appears only briefly in a few widely scattered scattered and mostly flashback scenes - but it's very much set in Conan Doyle's Holmes universe. The story is really an overview of the world of arch-villain James Moriarty, filling in pieces of his background and spending considerable time on the people in his orbit; it's almost an ensemble story with Moriarty at its center. The atmosphere and period feel are excellent, and the story, which covers only about a three-week stretch after Moriarty returns to London (three years after departure) after his Reichenbach Falls confrontation with Holmes. Plenty happens during that time, though, and it makes for a solidly enjoyable read.

[John Mccormick · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Gardner takes over from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and breathes new life into the infamous Professor Moriarty in this book. Holmes arch nemesis seemingly survived the Reichenbach Falls and returns to London to find his organized crime empire in some disarray, left in the not so capable hands of Colonel Moran, with rival gangs encroaching on his territory. Set during the month of April 1894 this as you would expect of this Author is a clever descriptive witty well written story, atmospheric with a real sense of time and place. Holmes barely features Moriarty is the villainous star of the show, whilst there is a similar feel to the original there is a more violent gritty side to the story, but nonetheless entertaining all the same.
Recommended.

[Carson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I lap up everything Holmes and James Bond-related I can get my hands on, so the prospect of Gardner Holmes novels (after having read all of his oft-mediocre 007 novels) was somewhat intriguing.

Obviously, having been named after Moriarty, you never expect too much Holmes - so there's that. Minimal mention and appearance.

The book is devoted to the ruse and disguises and brief history and the network of Moriarty in his various forms, mostly consisting of criminals and prostitutes. I cannot say I ever really found much passion for the characters nor was I enraptured with Moriarty's plot or the book's.

The climax turned this from a "1" star to a "2". 2 out of 5.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy reading many of the Holmes' pastiches and viewing the story from Moriarity's perspective sounded interesting. It was not bad but wasn't as interesting as I had hoped. As other reviewers have mentioned, the so-called truce formulated at Reichenbach Falls did not ring true. Having Sherlock aware that Moriarity was back to his old tricks and doing nothing about it (not even warning law enforcement) is a betrayal of Conan Doyle's detective. I was looking forward to a battle of wits and instead got the story of a 19th century mob boss. I am not a fan of books or movies that make folk heroes out of criminals and this book has too much of that for me to recommend it.

[Mark S · Rating 5 out of 5]

The scene around Sherlock Holmes from A New Perspective. Challenging read the begin with given vernacular used but very satisfying. I recommend this series and I'm going to buy another book from this author. I really enjoyed it.

The scene around Sherlock Holmes from A New Perspective. Challenging read the begin with given vernacular used but very satisfying. I recommend this series and I'm going to buy another book from this author. I really enjoyed it.

[Michael Cleary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book and look forward to another in the series. I thought the characters were well developed and the plot well thought out. The book held my interest throughout and it was not difficult to keep track of all of the various characters involved. As a bonus, it was nice to read an e-book that for a change was not plagued with constant misspellings and/or grammatical errors. This inclusion of a glossary for unfamiliar terms is also a plus.

[Michael Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Gardner was a well-reviewed writer. But the book fell short for me.

Perhaps I expected more Holmes. He's alluded to a couple of times, but does not play a role in the book.

So, the writing and plot (the real seedy underbelly of Victorian London) are fine, but I expected a different storyline.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

1894 It would seem that Professor Moriarty like Sherlock Holmes has returned from the dead. Ready to take over his organisation again, an organisation he had left to Colonel Moran to run. But will it be easy to take power back, what obstacles will occur and what plans does he have for the future.
An interesting and enjoyable well-written historical mystery

[Richard Domann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holmes plus

Oftentimes knowing the villain is less than pleasing and more than we want to know. Not in this case the professor is still a very bad guy and we hope Crow gets the better of him...not sure Sherlock would let go so easily though...maybe a behind the scenes aide to Crow.

[Allen Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moriarty's POV But No Sherlock Holmes (to speak of)...
An interesting book that expanded the Holmes/Moriarty universe at the expense of Sherlock Holmes. Nonetheless, an enjoyable book that was essentially true to the tone and spirit of the Holmes' tales by Arthur Conan Doyle. A worthwhile read in that it fleshes out the villainous Moriarty and members of his gang.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

This just... wasn't very good. Also, for those interested, Sherlock Holmes barely appears (he's in one short scene) and doesnt do anything if significance. Honestly, half the book felt like the author was just composing a rather dull ode to how cool and evil his take on Moriarty is. It felt like a kinda grody male power fantasy, honestly.

[Tim Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole story

Excellent writing about a somewhat mysterious person, supposedly the equal of Holmes. At least in ego, great imagery and locations explained. Looking forward to 'having more Crow'.

[Victoria Cuffel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most Satisfactory

Although this book was originally published decades ago, it is a timeless good read, scoring high in plot, suspense, style of writing, use of Victorian criminal argot.

[John Worthington · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is all about Professor Moriarty and is well written. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more of the chess game between Sherlock and Moriarty. In fact, the book demonstrates how much of a criminal Moriarty is. This is a series worth reading.

[AVANTI KUMAR · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the opening section is slyly humorous, the actual narrative is long-winded (for me). I found myself skimming quite a few sections. Well written fan fiction and I expected better. Three stars for the style though.

[Gloria J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book more than I thought I would. Parts of it were exciting. The writing was a little heavy handed but once I got used to it, the reading went faster. This book was a successful continuation of the Moriarty story.

[S. Nemo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve always loved Moriarty more than Holmes, so this is feeding my obsession! Even though I’m a bit sad about Moran. I’m in love with the book and it was a special pleasure to always be ahead of what was going to happen, as it satisfied my inner Professor. If you love Moriarty, you should read it.

[Wm. Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful Holmesian novel centered on the template of all sworn nemiseses-Professor Moriarty. The brief, but illuminating, look into his beginning was a surprise and the overalll story was fun escapism.

[gareth moores · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant

Really loved this book full of characters & a good story,think it would be a good film to make or a tv series surprised that nobody has done it yet look forward to reading rest of series

[Miss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially I wasn't sure about this book and didn't like the way it pretended it was real events and kept referencing Sherlock Holmes stories. However once it got it on with it's own story I enjoyed it.

[Claire Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not poorly written, but reminded me very much of The Godfather novel. Too much comparison to modern crime families. Wasn't a bad read but as far as Sherlock knock offs go, not my favorite.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sparkling and clever novel filled with excitement and fascinating characters. At the end Holmes and Moriarty face off, each disguised as the other.