Lord of the Lurkers and Dollymops

MORIARTY

By John Gardner

Harcourt. 298 pp. $24

The English writer John Gardner, who died last year at the age of 80, served in the Royal Marines during World War II, spent seven years as a Church of England priest, and then decided he'd rather write spy novels. He began with comic novels about a coward named Boysie Oakes who is somehow recruited into a British intelligence agency. Thanks to the success of the Oakes series, Gardner was chosen to carry on the James Bond franchise after Ian Fleming's death. He wrote 14 Bond novels, two more than Fleming himself. In all, Gardner wrote more than 40 novels, including three about Sherlock Holmes's nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, whom Holmes called "the Napoleon of crime." The first two Moriarty books were published in the 1970s. The third, "Moriarty," long delayed by a dispute with his publisher, now finally appears.

Late in the 19th century, things became too hot for Moriarty in London, as a result of his plotting to kill the Prince of Wales, so he spent several years in Europe and the United States trying to organize an international crime syndicate. When Moriarty returned to London in 1900, he faced several challenges. His criminal organization included hundreds of lowlifes of every variety: "the lurkers, demanders, and punishers, the street men, the patterers, the magsmen, the dodgers, whizzers, dips, nightwalkers, dollymops, gonifs, and those who specialized: the petermen, confidence sharks, fences, assassins and jewelers." He finds, however, that more than a hundred of these minions have been stolen away by a rival crime lord, Sir Jack Idell, known as Idle Jack. Moreover, Moriarty becomes convinced that one of his top lieutenants has betrayed him. Most of the novel concerns Moriarty's efforts to identify the traitor and to kill Idle Jack before Idle Jack kills him. Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in passing but does not figure in the story.

How evil is Moriarty? Well, he performs a Black Mass so horrid that the author will not describe it, and we see him personally murder two men, one of them his own brother. He orders many other murders to be carried out by ruthless killers in his employ. Perhaps the most notable is a Chinese assassin named Lee Chow, often called, in the politically incorrect style of the period, "the evil Chinee." Lee Chow is justly feared for a specialty called the "cheek trick," which involves cutting "the cheeks from a man or woman, leaving the victim appallingly disfigured and unable to use their mouths as normal persons."

However, Moriarty, known for "the tall stooping walk, the sunken mesmeristic eyes, and the reptilian movement of the head," isn't all bad. He loves Beethoven and Shakespeare, and he is faithful to Sal Hodges, who oversees his brothels and is the mother of his young son, Arthur, who is away studying at the Rugby School. As proof that there's a spark of goodness in the crime lord, Gardner tells us that unlike Idle Jack, Moriarty refuses to deal in child prostitution. This recalls the refusal of a later crime boss, Vito Corleone, to deal in drugs. At one high point in the novel, when Moriarty encounters a teenage daughter he's never known he had, "he took her in his arms and looked into her eyes and saw himself there, deep and devious, cunning as a cat, lovely as the first rose of summer, deadly as a lethal weapon." Ah, the joys of fatherhood!

Reading "Moriarty," I was reminded of an exchange with my own daughter when she was about 10 and overheard me telling a certain joke at a dinner party. She asked later if I was going to put the joke in the novel I was writing. When I confessed that I might, my daughter replied, "But Daddy, what if decent people read your book?" That's often a problem for writers, and I'm not sure what decent people will make of "Moriarty." There must have been some upstanding citizens in London in 1900, but they are rarely glimpsed here. Rather, the reader is plunged headlong into a cesspool of crime, cruelty, revenge and violence. However, if you accept the novel on those terms -- if you do not expect redeeming social value -- it's often fun.

What I enjoyed most was encountering a wealth of colorful slang and turns of phrase that, as far as I know, has since been lost. (Some, but not all, of these terms are defined in the glossary.) Here, for example, is a description of a drunken woman: "Really in need of a quack by noon. Half seas over she'd be. Too drunk to see a hole in a ladder." A crook protesting that he's no fool: "Think I was brought up by candlelight? Born on a Wednesday looking both ways to Sunday?" A "Hampstead donkey," we learn, is a body louse, and a "Dutch nightingale" is a frog. A priest is a "God botherer," a girl of easy virtue is "the village stargazer," and a more permanent female companion is a "bed warmer." Be it noted, too, that when the bullet-heads and brigands in this book have an "Irish toothache," it's not a dentist they're in need of.