The October edition of Red Herrings has landed on the doormat. Sadly David Stuart Davies has passed away. He was editor of Red Herrings for twenty years and was an internationally known Sherlock Holmes expert. In this edition I discovered that the man labelled the Napoleon of Crime by Sherlock Holmes, Professor James Moriarty, was inspired by Adam Worth.
Adam Worth was the son of a Jewish tailor, born in Germany but raised in Cambridge Massachusetts. He became an accomplished safecracker and criminal mastermind, attracting the attention of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. A measure of how successful a criminal Adam Worth was is that in 1869 he evaded the attention of the Pinkerton detectives by moving to London England under the name of Henry J Raymond, who had been the founder of the New York Times. He based himself in Piccadilly and had a steam yacht, race horses and a wide network of thieves and forgers. He masterminded crimes around the world. His crimes were bloodless we are told, so perhaps he had ethics of a sort.
There is an article on Ethics and the Crime Writer by Morgan Witzel in Red Herrings this month. He discusses the danger of crime writing in that it may desensitise the reader to violence and death, and perhaps even glorify it. He argues that by adding a level of moral and ethical purpose to our writing we can create stronger and more appealing narratives.
One of the points that John Suchet raised in his discussion with me at the Dartmouth Book Festival, was that ethics featured strongly in my books, particularly Called to Account. I do try to include a theme. Fire and Earth addressed the conflict between faith and reason. The church, supposedly the guardians of our ethics, our morals and rules of behaviour, seemed perfectly happy to burn scientists at the stake for arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The Suggested Assassin addresses mysogeny. It was written at the height of the Me Too movement. Called to Account concerns anti-semitism in particular, and racism in general. My work in progress, The Favourite Murder, deals with favouritism, particularly in the parent-child relationship. Talking of which, I will end this post here, and get back to writing it.