Spin-offs of major novels featuring either the hero or secondary characters are nothing new. Rarely approaching the level of the host books but still being somehow fun, they were generally a guilty pleasure back then and remain so today.

John Gardner was at this game for years, having banged out a lengthy run of post-Ian Fleming James Bond novels. He was an unabashed hack, a pen for hire with no loftier ambition than to earn and to entertain. Good for him. Moriarty is the final part of a series he wrote set in the world of that other great lynchpin of British crime, Sherlock Holmes. Written in the 70s, it lay unreleased for 30 years but luckily for genre fans, legal disputes tend to melt away after death.Professor Moriarty was Holmes’ great nemesis, the European master criminal last seen tumbling into the Reichenbach Falls entwined  in a death grip with the great detective. Several years later, Sherlock Holmes was rather improbably brought back to life as Conan-Doyle bowed to extreme fan pressure. There was no such clamour for the return of Moriarty but Gardner’s was a neat idea nonetheless. Gardner’s winning plot device has the evil professor return to London from  exile to find his criminal empire under threat not from Holmes but from rival gangs. How he recovers this empire is the stuff of Moriarty.

And good fun it is to. There is plenty of Victorian London in crime fiction today, much of it drowning in period detail. While there is some window dressing, this entry into the genre is not really concerned with any deep portrayal of a different time but uses period detail simply to add colour to a rattling good story.  If I were to quibble I would say the story relies too heavily on introducing characters in order to get rid of them soon after, leaving a sense of less than total involvement. But for the most part this is a jolly romp and will pass the time on a foreign beach quite adequately.

There is a real pleasure in seeing a practised artisan at work. You know they will never paint the Sistine Chapel, but the edging round the cornice work sure looks great. Gardner was a hack and Moriarty is the work of a hack. That is genuine praise for a job well done.

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