The Adventures of Moriarty: The Secret Life of Sherlock Holmes's Nemesis

The devil has all the best tunes . . .

From Hannibal Lecter to the Joker, from Captain Hook to Lord Voldemort, it is often the anti-hero who truly captures our imagination.

Even that inimitable and seemingly immortal fictional detective Sherlock Holmes would be a lesser figure without his nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, with whose life Holmes's own is inextricably linked. But, while Moriarty may be evoked in passing in a few stories, the master criminal - Holmes's "Napoleon of Crime" - actually appeared in only two of the original Holmes stories.

This imaginative collection of short stories, not all of them featuring Holmes or Watson, redresses that balance, bringing Moriarty to vivid new life, and not simply as an incarnation of pure evil. Subtle and compelling, these stories by well-known writers and rising stars, including Steve Cavanagh, David Stuart Davies, Jurgen Ehlers, Alison Joseph, Andrew Lane and Amy Myers, both fill gaps in the Conan Doyle canon and explore fascinating new possibilities.