The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty: 37 Short Stories About the Secret Life of Sherlock Holmes’s Nemesis

Few stories in this Sherlockian anthology do full justice to its intriguing concept of elevating the ur-criminal mastermind to a central role. Bizarre events are common (e.g., transplanting a dog’s eyes into a human), and purple prose mars too many tales, such as Lavie Tidhar’s “Dynamics of an Asteroid,” which inserts Moriarty into H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds: after the professor’s banker, no less than Ebenezer Scrooge himself, is tortured by the aliens, Moriarty screams, “Step away from my banker’s body, you Marsian [sic] bodysnatcher!” Still, there are some impressive entries. Martin Edwards is successful at pitting Mycroft against the Napoleon of crime in “The Case of the Choleric Cotton Broker”; Keith Moray plausibly speculates in “The Fulham Strangler” that Moriarty would have had a mole inside the Baker Street Irregulars; and G.H. Finn’s “The Perfect Crime” cleverly supports its title. This volume serves to highlight the difficulties of fleshing out Moriarty, who’s more of a shadowy concept than a three-dimensional character. [em](Aug.) [/em]