2 Interestingly, both Peer and “Madmen” may have been different drafts written by Watson, and each manuscript may contain large elements of the truth, despite the replacement of the Jungle Lord in Peer by Mowgli in “Madmen.” Dennis E. Power has reconciled the two manuscripts in “Jungle Brothers, or, Secrets of the Jungle Lords,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005.
3 In fact, the Ape-Man’s ire had significantly cooled by the late 1990s, enough to allow Farmer to write an authorized entry in the series of semi-biographical novels covering his adventures. Farmer’s The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel was published by Del Rey Books in 1999.
4 It appeared in the aforementioned collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others.
5 “O’Brien And Obrenov,” Adventure, V. 115, N. 5, March 1946; Pearls from Peoria, Paul Spiteri, ed., Subterranean Press, 2006.
Coming Soon
MORIARTY
THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES
KIM NEWMAN
A VOLUME IN VERMILLION
I
I BLAME THAT RAT-WEASEL STAMFORD, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can’t afford to mix up your accents grave and your accents acute. Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the gravitational pull as he would have said, of Professor James Moriarty.
In 1880, your humble narrator was a vigorous, if scarred forty. I should make a proper introduction of myself: Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, late of a school which wouldn’t let in an oik like you and a regiment which would as soon sack Newcastle as take Ali Masjid. I had an unrivalled bag of big cats and a fund of stories about blasting the roaring pests. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and faced a surge of sword-waving Pathans howling for British blood, potting them like grouse in season. Nothing gladdens a proper Englishman’s heart — this one, at least — like the sight of a foreigner’s head flying into a dozen bloody bits. I’d dangled by single-handed grip from an icy ledge in the upper Himalayas, with something huge and indistinct and furry stamping on my freezing fingers. I’d bent like an oak in a hurricane as Sir Augustus, the hated pater, spouted paragraphs of bile in my face, which boiled down to the proverbial ‘cut off without a penny’ business. Stuck to it too, the mean old swine. The family loot went to a society for providing Christian undergarments to the Ashanti, a bequest which had the delightful side-effect of reducing my unmarriageable sisters to boarding-house penury.
I’d taken a dagger in the lower back from a harlot in Hyderabad and a pistol-ball in the knee from the Okhrana in Nijni-Novgorod. More to the point, I had recently been raked across the chest by the mad, wily old she-tiger the hill-heathens called ‘Kali’s Kitten’.
None of that was preparation for Moriarty!
I had crawled into a drain after the tiger, whose wounds turned out to be less severe than I’d thought. Tough old hell-cat! KK got playful with jaws and paws, crunching down my pith helmet like one of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, delicately shredding my shirt with razor-claws, digging into the skin and drawing casually across my chest. Three bloody stripes. Sure I would die in that stinking tunnel, I was determined not to die alone. I got my Webley side-arm unholstered and shot the hell-bitch through the heart. To make sure, I emptied all six chambers. After that chit in Hyderabad dirked me, I broke her nose for her. KK looked almost as aghast and infuriated at being killed. I wondered if girl and tigress were related. I had the cat’s rank dying breath in my face and her weight on me in that stifling hole. One more for the trophy wall, I thought. Cat dead, Moran not: hurrah and victory!
But KK nearly murdered me after all. The stripes went septic. Good thing there’s no earthly use for the male nipple, because I found myself down to just the one. Lots of grey stuff came out of me. So I was packed off back to England for proper doctoring. It occurred to me that a concerted effort had been made to boot me out of the sub-continent. I could think of a dozen reasons for that, and a dozen clods in stiff collars who’d be happier with me out of the picture. Maiden ladies who thought tigers ought to be patted on the head and given treats. And the husbands, fathers and sweethearts of non-maiden ladies. Not to mention the First Bangalore Pioneers, who didn’t care to be reminded of their habit of cowering in ditches while Bloody Basher did three-fourths of their fighting for them.
Still, mustn’t hold a grudge, what? Sods, the lot of them. And that’s just the whites. As for the natives... well, let’s not get started on them, shall we? We’d be here ’til next Tuesday.
For me, a long sea-cruise is normally an opportunity. There are always bored fellow-passengers and underworked officers knocking around with fat note-cases in their luggage. It’s most satisfying to sit on deck playing solitaire until some booby suggests a few rounds of cards and, why just to make it spicier, perhaps some trifling, sixpence-a-trick element of wager. Give me two months on any ocean in the world, and I can fleece everyone aboard from the captain’s lady to the bosun’s second-best bum-boy, and leave each mark convinced that the ship is a nest of utter cheats with only Basher as the other honest hand in the game.
Usually, I embark sans sou and stroll down the gang-plank at the destination pockets a-jingle with the accumulated fortune of my fellow voyagers. I get a warm feeling from ambling through the docks, listening to clots explaining to the eager sorts who’ve turned up to greet them that, sadly, the moolah which would have saved the guano-grubbing business or bought the Bibles for the mission or paid for the wedding has gone astray on the high seas. This time, tragic to report, I was off sick, practically in quarantine. My nimble fingers were away from the pasteboards, employed mostly in scratching around the bandages while trying hard not to scratch the bandages themselves.
So, the upshot: Basher in London, out of funds. And the word was abroad. I was politely informed by a chinless receptionist at Claridge’s that my usual suite of rooms was engaged and that, unfortunately, no alternative was available this being a busy wet February and all. If I hadn’t pawned my horsewhip, it would have got some use. If there’s any breed I despise more than natives, it’s people who work in bloody hotels. Thieves, the lot of them, or, what’s worse, sneaks and snitches. They talk among themselves, so it was no use trotting down the street and trying somewhere else.
I was on the point of wondering if I shouldn’t risk the Bagatelle Club, where — frankly — you’re not playing with amateurs. There’s the peril of wasting a whole evening shuffling and betting with other sharps who a) can’t be rooked so easily and b) are liable to be as cash-poor as oneself. Otherwise, it was a matter of beetling up and down Piccadilly all afternoon in the hope of spotting a ten-bob note in the gutter, or — if it came to it — dragging Farmer Giles into a side-street, splitting his head and lifting his poke. A come-down after Kali’s Kitten, but needs must...
‘It’s “Basher” Moran, isn’t it?’ drawled someone, prompting me to raise my sights from the gutter. ‘Still shooting anything that draws breath?’
‘Archibald Stamford, Esquire. Still practising auntie’s signature?’