Look, I have a bone to pick with Andy Weir. The man writes The Martian, becomes a science fiction icon, and then quietly drops a Sherlock Holmes pastiche told from the villain's perspective? And it's only seventy minutes long? That's the real crime here, Professor Moriarty.
Okay, rant aside — this collection of three short stories is genuinely fun, and discovering it felt like stumbling onto a hidden track on your favorite album. Weir flips the Conan Doyle formula on its head: instead of Holmes and Watson solving crimes for justice, we get Moriarty and his own loyal narrator-companion solving criminal puzzles for profit, power, and the sheer intellectual thrill of it. The structure mirrors the original stories so faithfully that you can almost hear the Victorian gaslight hissing in the background. Moriarty demonstrates his brilliance through the same deductive showmanship Holmes is famous for, except the conclusions tend to end with someone getting murdered rather than arrested.
The first story, 'The Adventure of the Dishonour Among Thieves,' sets up the dynamic between Moriarty and his chronicler in a way that immediately hooks you. There's a moment early on where the narrator meets Moriarty for the first time, and you can feel the gravity of the man — his intelligence radiating like heat off asphalt. Weir nails the voice of these characters, and the slow-dawning realization the narrator has about his own role in Moriarty's world is one of the more satisfying character beats in the collection.
Graeme Malcolm's narration is a major reason this works as well as it does. Every review I came across praised his performance, and having listened, I understand why. He reads with a clear, engaging tone that captures both the period style and Moriarty's cold intelligence without ever hamming it up. His character differentiation is subtle — he uses tone shifts rather than dramatic accent changes — but it's effective. You always know who's speaking. For a single-narrator production with no sound effects or music, the audio is clean and well-produced. Malcolm makes this feel like a proper fireside story, which is exactly the right energy for Holmesian fiction.
Now here's where my initial excitement gave way to something more measured. At just over an hour, these three tales don't have much room to breathe. Moriarty is brilliant and ruthless, yes, but he doesn't get developed much beyond those two traits. He's more of a concept than a fully fleshed person. The mysteries themselves, while enjoyable, are more predictable than the original Holmes stories they're mirroring. If you go in expecting the elaborate puzzle-box plotting of Conan Doyle at his best, you'll likely be underwhelmed. Some listeners have noted that the stories lean heavily on dialogue and discussion rather than action, and that tracks — these are cerebral, conversation-driven pieces.
The role-reversal concept is clever, but it's also the kind of idea that's more exciting in premise than in execution. Once you grasp the gimmick — bad guy does what good guy does, but for evil — there's not a lot of additional depth to mine across three stories. I found myself wishing Weir had pushed further, maybe given Moriarty a genuine moral dilemma or explored what makes a genius choose criminality over contribution. Instead, we get a very entertaining surface-level inversion that's satisfying without being revelatory.
That said, this is a perfect palate cleanser. I listened to it over lunch one day, and it was exactly the right length and tone for that context. It's also a solid bedtime listen — short enough to finish in one or two sessions, engaging enough to hold your attention, but not so intense that it keeps you up. At 1.2x speed it flows comfortably without losing any of Malcolm's performance quality.
Who should listen (and who should skip): If you're a Sherlockian, a pastiche enthusiast, or an Andy Weir completist curious about what happens when he writes outside his sci-fi lane, this is well worth your seventy minutes. Skip it if you need deep character development or complex mysteries — this is more clever than profound. The violence is present but not gratuitous; Moriarty is cold-blooded and the stories don't shy away from that, so keep that in mind if you're sensitive to that sort of thing.
Cliff Notes: This is a well-crafted, excellently narrated little collection that delivers exactly what it promises. It won't change your life, and at seventy minutes it barely has time to change your afternoon. Honestly, I've been thinking lately about what makes a short piece of writing actually stick with you — something I got unexpectedly philosophical about when I reviewed Point of It All: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors, which also made me reconsider whether length has anything to do with impact. But as a quick, clever diversion featuring one of fiction's greatest villains? It does the job with style.
