THE MANY FACES OF MORIARTY

By 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was a worldwide literary sensation. But he was also a man dogged by an unlikely enemy, and that enemy’s name was Sherlock Holmes. Frankenstein-like, the fictional detective haunted his creator, tormenting him, and would not leave him alone. For it must be said that Conan Doyle was a man of high literary aspirations, with a yearning to write books of both “serious” literature and psychical research. But the demand for new Holmes stories prevented him from realising this ambition. Speaking of this period in his career, Conan Doyle observed in an interview for Tit-Bits in December 1900 that “My low work was obscuring my higher.”

- Tom Mead

His resentment for his creation festered for a long while before he made his decision. At the time, there seemed to be only one way out: Sherlock Holmes had to die. But the sleuth had a stubborn habit of surviving assassination attempts, and a wiliness and ingenuity which bordered on superhuman. That is why Arthur Conan Doyle needed to create a criminal so fiendish, so diabolically clever, that even Holmes would succumb. The result was a villain like no other: Professor James Moriarty.

Professor Moriarty makes only one physical appearance in the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, and even then he is only a shadowy presence, scarcely tangible to the narrator, Watson. Moriarty is briefly described as a scientist and a theologian with “extraordinary mental powers” who lapsed into criminality on account of “a criminal strain” in his blood. But he is brought to life by the florid praise which Holmes lavishes on him: “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.”

The story “The Adventure of the Final Problem” was published in December of 1893 and caused a worldwide outcry. The story famously concludes with Holmes and Moriarty engaging in mortal combat atop the Reichenbach Falls, before the pair tumble to their deaths in the water below. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the legions of Holmes admirers were horrified by Conan Doyle’s decision to kill off his creation. John Dickson Carr’s magisterial biography,