The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty by Ben Macintyre HarperCollins 320pp, £18 in UK
If the Devil has the best tunes, then Adam Worth's life had enough criminal jingles to keep Hades tap dancing for decades. Virtually a demon incarnate to Victorian PC Plods on both sides of the Atlantic, he was - despite the Napoleonic tag later applied at one remove by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - more like a bourgeois Robin Hood, albeit with strictly domestic theories on the redistribution of wealth. He robbed the rich because it was a better career option than skinning the poor, looked after his merrie men loyally and, while sharing a Dublin born Maid Marion in a menage a trois with one of them, behaved as a pillar of the society off whose fat he lived.
It was as much demi-monde as dinner at the Savoy, which adds to the fascination of Ben Macintyre's well-researched trawl through the life of a man who has slipped to the margins of history. Worth, as at home on the margins of society as he was at its heart - and adept at keeping them apart - dominated the international crime scene of the mid to late-Victorian era with a breathtaking mixture of intelligence and audacity. Bank robbery, forgery, jewel theft, fraud, art theft and bribery supported his other life as a wealthy, elegant American gentleman in Europe.
This Robin Hood who believed charity began - and remained - at home was born somewhere in eastern Germany in 1844. At five his Jewish parents took him to Massachusetts; thirteen years later he was reported dead at the battle of Bull Run in the American Civil War. He put his death to good use, eventually rising again to become a person of some consequence in the New York underworld. And though Macintyre likes to portray him as being at war with respectable society, he was a predator dependent on his prey, not a Robin Hood revolutionary.
From early on his work was distinguished by a rejection of violence, an insistence on meticulous, often highly original planning of robberies and frauds, and careful team selection. His generally abstemious approach to living also included, on occasion, a fastidious reluctance to soil his hands in the front line of the activities he directed. A WASP banker could scarcely have asked for more in a future son-in-law.
But Worth's interest was in banks, not bankers. He pulled off a daring coup in 1869, robbing a Boston bank of almost $1 million. It put him in the big league, gave him the incentive and wherewithal to assume a respectable identity and cemented his friendship with an accomplice, Piano Charley Bullard.
They went to Liverpool together the following year, where they met Maid Marion behind the bar at the Washington Hotel. She was Katherine Louise Flynn, a 17year-old Dubliner, beautiful, smart and ambitious, who, after dithering between the smitten pair, opted to marry Piano Charley and share her favours with both.
Eventually, she was to have two children by Worth, but that was after the trio had moved to Paris, where he gathered a talented gang of thieves, forgers and fraudsters about him. With Piano Charley and Kitty he also set up the splendid American Bar, a watering hole and illegal gambling den which was an instant success in a city ravaged by the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war.
It was too good to last. The US Pinkerton Detective Agency, which knew of his role in the Boston bank party, had the bar under scrutiny from the start and, when William Pinkerton arrived and boldly ordered a drink there in 1873, the writing was on the establishment's wall.
Worth took heed, sold out after police scrutiny intensified and opted for London. There the boulevardier became a gentleman about-town, at the centre of a web of crime that extended over the Continent to Turkey and even South Africa. Neither Pinkerton's men nor Scotland Yard could pin him down. And, with Piano Charley perennially suffering from brewer's (or distiller's) droop, Kitty Flynn was the focus of Worth's domestic life while he dazzled the capital's aristocracy.
Her only rival was spectacularly bizarre. In 1876 Worth stole Gainsborough's famous 1787 portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. A celebrated source of scandal in her day, she would have recognised a kindred soul in Kitty, so perhaps it was no surprise that Worth managed to hold on to the duchess for the next twenty-five years.
The players in the domestic threesome also fared variously; Kitty divorced Piano Charley and married well in New York, dying respectably and wealthy at 41 in her bed. Worth's life was eventually to come adrift at every level, but how it did is absolutely engrossing and riven with ironies (not least of which is that a grandson of himself and Kitty, Juan Trippe - dubbed by Gore Vidal "the robber baron of the airways" - created the once powerful Pan American Airways). The greatest irony, however, was the relationship between Worth and Pinkerton that grew out of their slowly evolving, wary mutual respect.
To discover this you'll have to read the book. It's full of a sense that the era was, in the fight between the law and the criminals, the last fling of an age of innocence before technology took over; telegraphs and telephones were already making it harder for lawbreakers, while fingerprinting would make it even more difficult in the future. And though the global village was a couple of generations away, the advent of the car and the plane was to bring new threats as well as opportunities.
On an individual level, Macintyre has done some hugely impressive work to track down the details. It's these that grip - the building blocks of incident and exploit that make up Worth's extraordinary life, rather than the man himself, who remains a shadowy figure, essentially pedestrian in what, one suspects, were his real interests. Perhaps that's why Macintyre can't resist the temptation to gild the criminal lily with some unconvincing speculation about his motives and his hoarding of the Gainsborough for so long.
But gilt there was, finally. Although neither Pinkerton nor the papers that melodramatically covered his exploits conferred immortality on him, it did come secondhand. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used him as a key model for the evil Professor Moriarty - "the Napoleon of crime", as Sherlock Holmes assured his sidekick Watson - who would duel with Holmes to the death. The Devil does have the best tunes, after all.
Ray Comiskey is an Irish Times staff journalist