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By Root 746 0

to meet their savage hordes on the field of carnage, and see if I care. In India, some sergeants wear armor beneath the tunic because no soldier serving under them can be trusted with a clear shot at their backs. I’ve also run into confidential police informants, which is to say: grasses. Peaching on one’s fellow crims to escape gaol is guaranteed to get you despised on both sides of the law. Fact is: no bastard born earned as many, as various, and as determined enemies as Moriarty.

First off, other crooks hated him. Get your regular magsman or ponce on the subject of Professor Jimmy Bleedin’ Moriarty, and you’ll expand the old vocabulary by obscenities in several argots. Just being a bigger thief than the rest of them was enough to get their goats. What made it worse was villains were often forced to throw in with him on capers, taking all the risk while he snaffled the lion’s share of the loot. If they complained, he had them killed. That was my job, by the bye — so show some bloody respect or there’s a rope, a sack and a stretch of the Thames I could introduce you to. To hear them tell it, every cracksman in the land was just about to work out a fool-proof plan to lift the jewels from Princess Alexandra’s knickers or rifle the strong-boxes in the sub-basement of the Bank of England when Professor Moriarty happened by some fluke to think of it first. A few more tumblers of gin and their brilliant schemes would have been perfected — and they wouldn’t have to hand on most of the swag to some evil-eyed toff just for sitting at home and drawing diagrams. You might choose to believe these loquacious, larcenous fellahs. Me, I’ll come straight out and say they’re talking through a portion of their anatomy best employed passing wind or, in certain circumstances, concealing a robin’s egg diamond with a minimum of observable discomfort.

Then there were coppers. Moriarty made sure most of them had no earthly notion who he might be, so they didn’t hate him quite as personally as anyone who ever met him — but they sure as spitting hated the idea of him. By now, you’ve heard the twaddle … vast spider squatting in the centre of an enormous web of vice and villainy … Napoleon of Crime … Nero of Naughtiness… Thucydides of Theft, et cetera, et cetera. Detectives of all stripe loathed the unseen King of Krooks, and blubbed to their mummies whenever they had to flounder around after one of his coups. Scotland Yard baffled again, as if that were news. Hah!

One man above all hated Professor Moriarty, and was hated by him.

Throughout his dual career — imagine serpents representing maths and crookery, twining together like a wicked caduceus — the Prof was locked in deadly struggle for supremacy — nay, for survival — with a human creature he saw as his arch-enemy, his eternal opposite, his nemesis.

Sir Nevil Airey Stent.

I don’t know how it started. Stent and Moriarty were at each other’s throats well before I became Number Two Heap Big-ish Chief in the Consortium of Crime. Whenever the Stent issue was raised, Moriarty turned purple and hissed — and was in no condition to elucidate further. I do know they first met as master and pupil: Moriarty supervised young Nevil when the lad was cramming for an exam. Maybe the Prof scorned the promising mathematician’s first quadratic equation in front of the class. Maybe Stent gave him an apple with a worm in it. Upshot is: daggers drawn, eyes a-blaze, lifelong enmity.

Since this record might be of some academic interest, here are a few facts and dates I’ve looked up in back numbers of the Times.

1863 — boyish Nevil Stent, former pupil of James Moriarty, rocks the world of astronomy with his paper Diffractive Properties of an Object-Glass with Circular Aperture. Not a good title, to my mind — which runs more to the likes of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas or My Nine Nights in a Harem (both, as it happens, written by me — good luck finding the latter: most of the run was burned by order of the crown court and the few extant volumes tend to be found in the collection of the judge who made the ruling).