Monday, February 20 .....

It’s not often I find a book which grabs me by the throat and impresses me as much as Moriarty - The Hound of the D’Urbervilles by Kim Newman. The eBook website I use is being inundated by the Romance genre (if I see another cover showing a burly and half-naked Lord of the Glen, I’ll vomit). Sadly, I just skip through the list and tend to watch out for authors I know and it’s rare that I open an unknown title to see if I’ll like it.

I noticed Moriarty – The Hound of the D’Urbervilles today and, as there was nothing else of interest, apart from a Bolitho novel by Alexander Kent, I downloaded it to have a look. I was trapped immediately by the pithy writing and the clever references to Sherlock Holmes. There has been a bit of a push recently to write modern novels featuring Sherlock Holmes; the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King are the best of these. But I haven’t seen anyone focusing on Professor Moriarty until now.

Kim Newman entitles the parts of his book with names which refer to Conan Doyle stories. So, Newman’s A Volume in Vermillion obviously refers to Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Newman’s A Shambles in Belgravia makes you think of A Scandal in Bohemia, and The Problem of the Final Adventure refers to The Adventure of the Final Problem. Clever!

The writing is also clever and I was delighted to come across the phrase ‘cosplay protest’. When we took Madeleine to Japan in 2005, we visited Harajuku where every weekend local teenagers come together dressed in the most outlandish costumes (costume play = cosplay). Clearly a cosplay protest is when the protesters dress in costumes; in this case, they wore convict outfits with broad arrows.

I read a lot of books but I become bogged down sometimes when the language is simplistic or stilted and I have to turn to Reginald Hill or Colin Dexter, authors who treat the reader as if he has some level of intelligence. Kim Newman falls into this category.

I looked him up on the internet and he is certainly something of an oddball. He always wore a long cloak at University and belonged to something called the Sheep Worrying Theatre Company. I’m not keen on the name. It sounds a bit like a tasteless New Zealand joke and reminds me of the British Ukulele Orchestra which is touring Australia at the moment and promises its audience a ‘plucking good time’. Typical English smutty humour!