Smog-filled Victorian alleyways where villains lurk with glittering knives. Bleak heaths where giant devil dogs await the weary traveller. Blackmailers laughing at wide-eyed victims. All these have been my companions for half a year as I have felt my way through the landscapes of the world’s most famous detective: Sherlock Holmes. Because a few weeks ago, authorised to do so by the Conan Doyle estate, and in a haze of 4am self-doubt, I finished writing a new official Holmes novel, Holmes and Moriarty.
In recent years, only one other author, Anthony Horowitz, has been allowed to write a new authorised novel; so it’s been a riveting project – but a daunting one too.
Everyone wants a piece of Sherlock Holmes. Around the world there are those who grew up with Harry Potter, James Bond or Alice, but only Holmes has been absorbed and adapted by just about every society, either gently moulding or violently pummelling him into place.
The first major stage version, for instance, was on Broadway in 1899 by American actor William Gillette. That opened the floodgates to hugely popular French “gentleman burglar” Arsène Lupin battling Holmes in a copyright-infringing 1907 story.
Skip through a century of radio plays, card games and prog-rock operas, and 2024 features Sherlock in Russia on Russian TV, in which the hero, a native of St Petersburg, is in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, who has turned up on the streets of his home town; Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter for your Xbox games console; or Young Miss Holmes, one of the biggest-selling Japanese manga comic series.
The question I had to grapple with is where that leaves me. If every possible incarnation or setting has been attempted – and believe me, it has – there’s little point in trying to push the boundaries just for the sake of it. So no, I made a decision straight off the bat to stick with what has always grabbed Holmes’s public: intellectual mystery; characters with a hint of the Gothic romance about them; and the dangerous thought that your hero could turn into antihero at any moment.
That said, I also wanted to offer something that you don’t find in the Holmes canon. It took a lot of shut-away pondering to create a storyline in which Holmes and Professor Moriarty – a character who, incredibly, appears in person in only a single story – are forced to work together on a case. It provides room to explore both the fascinating criminal mastermind, and the sparks that fly as the two compete, collaborate, stab each other in the back and save one another from fatal peril.
Perhaps the reason these characters are so gripping is that they are, in fact, drawn from the real world. As Conan Doyle explained in his autobiography: “I was educated in a very severe and critical school of medical thought, especially coming under the influence of Dr Bell of Edinburgh who had the most remarkable powers of observation. He prided himself that when he looked at a patient he could tell not only their disease, but very often their occupation and place of residence.”
While, for his part, Professor Moriarty was based on the real-life Adam Worth, known as “the Napoleon of crime”.
There’s something a bit thrilling for an author about stealing part of your book from the world of flesh and blood, as if you might be caught doing it and arrested. That’s why one plot thread in Holmes and Moriarty is taken straight from a famous real murder mystery that could have groundshaking consequences for the British constitution if it’s ever solved. It’s far more extraordinary than anything I could have dreamed up, so I thieved it from history.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the stories is how they address controversial issues we think today that we invented: religious extremism in A Study in Scarlet; interracial marriage in The Adventure of the Yellow Face; the mafia in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons. (The Man with the Twisted Lip is a searing indictment of the low salaries paid to journalists, though I accept this may not be a universal concern.)
And yet we mustn’t feel a need to make a run at any hot topics just because – like Everest – they’re there. Indeed, my favourite story is The Adventure of the Creeping Man, a bonkers mashup of gothic horror and science fiction. The literary equivalent of a rugby club Christmas lunch, it’s often considered among the worst of Conan Doyle’s stories. I don’t care. I like it the most.
Oh, let’s go with what enthrals us. That’s why I’m taking my cue from when William Gillette telegrammed Conan Doyle to ask if he could marry Holmes off in his play. Conan Doyle, ever the liberal author, replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him.”
Holmes and Moriarty is published on 12 September
