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Professor James Moriarty is a fictional character who is the best known antagonist of the detective Sherlock Holmes. Widely considered to be the first true example of a supervillain, Moriarty is a criminal mastermind, described by Holmes as the "Napoleon of Crime". (T. S. Eliot would later use the same phrase, in homage, to describe Macavity in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.) Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, lifted the phrase from a real Scotland Yard inspector who was referring to Adam Worth, a true-life (though non-violent) model for Moriarty.
Appearance in Doyle's Fiction
Professor Moriarty first appeared in Conan Doyle's tale The Final Problem, in which Holmes, on the verge of delivering a fatal blow to Moriarty's criminal organization, is forced to flee to the Continent to escape Moriarty's retribution. Moriarty follows, and the two apparently fall to their deaths whilst locked in mortal combat atop the Reichenbach Falls.
Moriarty plays a role in only one other of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories: The Valley of Fear, which was set before The Final Problem, but published afterwards. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes attempts to prevent Moriarty's agents from committing a murder. Moriarty does not meet Holmes, but sends him a note of commiseration at the end. In an episode where Moriarty is interviewed by a policeman, a painting is described as hanging on the wall; its title, "La Jeune a l'Agneau' is a witty pun upon the name of Thomas Agnew of the gallery Thomas Agnew and Sons, who had a famous painting stolen by Worth, but was unable to prove the fact.
Holmes mentions Moriarty reminiscently in five other stories: The Empty House, The Norwood Builder, The Missing Three-Quarter, The Illustrious Client, and His Last Bow.
Although Moriarty only appeared in two of the sixty Sherlock Holmes tales by Conan Doyle, Holmes' attitude to him in those two stories has gained him the popular impression of being Holmes' nemesis, and he has been frequently used in later stories by other authors, parodies, and in other media. In fact, to some casual fans, it is assumed that the real overall plot arc of the Holmes stories is the war that the detective wages with Moriarty, who oversees the crimes that Holmes foils.
In the Conan Doyle stories, narrated by Holmes's assistant Dr. Watson, Watson never meets Moriarty (only getting distant glimpses of him in "The Final Problem"), and relies upon Holmes to relate accounts of the detective's battle with the criminal. In stories by other writers, Watson has encountered Moriarty more often.
Conan Doyle himself is inconsistent on Watson's familiarity with Moriarty. In "The Final Problem", Watson tells Holmes he has never heard of Moriarty. But in The Valley of Fear, set earlier on, Watson already knows of him as 'the famous scientific criminal'.
Moriarty's weapon of choice was the "air-rifle", a unique weapon constructed for the Professor by a blind German mechanic, von Herder, and used by his employee Colonel Sebastian Moran.
Holmes described Moriarty as follows:
- He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him.
Holmes also states that Moriarty has written the book The Dynamics of an Asteroid, describing it as "a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it".
Doyle's original motive in creating Moriarty was evidently his intention to kill Holmes off. As is well known, "The Final Problem" was intended to be exactly what its name says, and Doyle sought to sweeten the pill a little bit by letting Holmes go in a blaze of glory, having rid the world of a criminal so powerful and dangerous that any further task would be trivial in comparison (Holmes says as much in the story itself). Moriarty only appeared in one book because, quite simply, having him constantly escape would discredit Holmes, and would be less satisfying. Valley of Fear corrects this problem.
Eventually, public pressure forced Doyle to bring Holmes back, but the literary subgenre of the supervillain was already irrevocably launched to influence countless later writers.
Simon Newcomb and other real world role models
In addition to the master criminal Adam Worth, there has been much speculation among astronomers and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts that Doyle based his fictional character Moriarty on the American astronomer Simon Newcomb. Newcomb was certainly a multi-talented genius, with a special mastery of mathematics, and he had become internationally famous in the years before Doyle began writing his stories. More pointedly, Newcomb had earned a reputation for spite and malice, apparently seeking to destroy the careers and reputations of rival scientists.
Professor Moriarty's reputed feats might also have been inspired by the accomplishments of real world mathematicians. If the names of the papers are reversed, they describe real mathematical events. Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote a famous paper on the dynamics of an asteroid in his early 20s, which certainly had a European vogue, and was appointed to a chair partly on the strength of this result. Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote about generalizations of the binomial theorem, and earned a reputation as a genius by writing articles that confounded the best extant mathematicians. Gauss's story was well known in Doyle's time, and Ramanujan's story unfolded at Oxford from early 1913 to mid 1914. The Valley of Fear, which contains the comment about math so abstruse that no-one could criticise it, was published in September 1914.
Des MacHale, in his George Boole : his life and work (1985, Boole Press) suggests that George Boole may have been a model for Moriarty.
The model which Conan Doyle himself mentions (through Sherlock Holmes) in "The Valley of Fear" is the London arch-criminal of the eighteenth century Jonathan Wild. He mentions this when seeking to compare Moriarty to a real-world character that Inspector Gregory might know, but it is in vain as Gregory is not so well read as Holmes.
Moriarty's family
The stories give a number of indications about the Professor's family, some seemingly contradictory.
In The Valley of Fear, Holmes says of him: "He is unmarried. His younger brother is a station master in the west of England." In The Final Problem, Watson refers to "the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother."
In neither story are we told the Professor's own first name; it is only in The Empty House that Holmes refers to Professor James Moriarty. In his play, William Gillette gives his Moriarty the Christian name "Robert".
The question of how many Moriarty brothers this makes, and which of them is called James, has provided much amusement for Sherlock Holmes fans in the years since the stories were first published.
Moriarty in pop culture
In Nicholas Meyer's 1976 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Professor Moriarty is portrayed as Holmes's childhood mathematics tutor, a whining little man with a guilty secret. He is incensed to hear that Holmes, apparently under the influence of cocaine, has depicted him as a criminal mastermind. Because of Holmes' worsening condition, and Moriarty's threats to tell the authorities about Holmes' addiction, Dr. Watson seeks the help of Sigmund Freud, who uncovers the truth behind Holmes' perception of "the Napoleon of Crime". This is one of many works to seize on the fact that Moriarty never actually shows his face in the Holmes canon.
Michael Kurland has written a series of novels in which Moriarty is the hero: his organisation of crime is the method by which he raises the money required for his experimental physics apparatus. In the first book of the series, The Infernal Device, he foils a plot against Queen Victoria, reluctantly allying with Sherlock Holmes.
A computer simulation of Professor Moriarty, played by actor Daniel Davis, appeared in the The Next Generation episodes "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle". For a bet, Data, posing as Holmes on the holodeck, proposes to solve a Holmes-style mystery, but when Geordi LaForge has the computer create a foe, he asks it to create a foe "capable of defeating Data". Due to this choice of phrasing, Moriarty, being more intelligent than Data, gains sentience and seizes control of the Starship Enterprise, but was convinced to return to the ship's databanks when he learned that he could not, at the present, leave the holodeck. Freed from holographic captivity in the latter episode, he again took over the Enterprise. Trapping Picard, Data and Lieutenant Barclay in a holographic duplicate of the ship, Moriarty blackmailed the crew into figuring out a way of allowing him to leave the ship with his mistress Countess Regina Bartholomew. However, the three trapped crewmembers programmed the holodeck inside the holodeck to create a holographic simulation of the outside world, leaving Moriarty and the Countess safely stored in a databank aboard the Enterprise.
A reference to this episode can also be found in the cartoon show Futurama, in the episode Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch, when Kif comments that their holodeck can sometimes malfunction and make the creations real. This includes Moriarty amongst fellow 'most evil people', Attila the Hun, Jack the Ripper and Evil Lincoln.
Moriarty was was played by George Zucco in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, in 1939. Moriarty appeared in two of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes films which were made at Universal Studios between 1942 and 1946, in each one played by a different actor: Lionel Atwill and Henry Daniell.
The 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes presented a character who was nemesis to schoolboy Sherlock Holmes. The man's name was Ehtar, and he was a vengeful Egyptian who sought justice for the lost lives of his small village, which was burned to the ground by the British Army some years before. He had amassed a secret army of followers among the riffraff of London society, had built a huge underground temple, and performed rituals to mummify five London maidens, to replace the mummies of five Egyptian princesses which had been, in his estimation, stolen from an archeological find in his village. It is revealed that Ehtar was the real identity of Holmes's trusted professor, Rathe, a man he considered to be one of his mentors. Ehtar shot and killed Holmes's love, driving Holmes into a killing rage. After their climactic sword duel on the frozen Thames, Holmes assumed that Ehtar had been swallowed between ice floes, never to be seen again. However, during the end credits, a man traveling by sleigh is followed, culminating in his arrival at an inn. After the credits, he signs the guest register as "Moriarty," and his face is shown -- Ehtar/Rathe. He was played by Anthony Higgins. The 1988 comedy Without a Clue, revolving around the premise that Holmes is an idiot and Watson is the real genius between them, featured Moriarty as the main villain. Played by Paul Freeman, Moriarty steals the printing plates for the five pound note from the Royal Mint and kidnaps printing supervisor Peter Giles to help him print his own counterfeit money, hiding out in the abandoned Orpheum Theater. This version of Moriarty is depicted as being very clever and dangerous, weaving a complicated plot to undermine the economy of England: he steals paper from a paper mill, burning the place to the ground to cover the theft, smuggling ink in from Germany, and hiring thieves to break into the Royal Gallery in order to throw Watson off the scent. When Watson and Holmes do take the case, Moriarty sends Sebastian Moran to kill them. However Moran fails and Moriarty is ultimately killed when a fire is started in his theater hideout that overheats the gas mains and causes them to explode during the film's climactic action sequence.
Moriarty appeared in Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: having survived his final encounter with Sherlock Holmes he went on to become the head of British Intelligence under the code-name "M" (a nod to the James Bond novels and films). He instigated the creation of the League as a covert ops unit with plausible deniability. Following his death in the midst of a gang war with Fu Manchu, he was succeeded as "M" by Mycroft Holmes. The film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also included Moriarty, but with a more supervillain-style take on the character. Based on the time-honored "disfigured villain under the mask" theme (such as the French characters Fantômas and the Phantom of the Opera, or the Marvel Comics character Dr Doom), Moriarty disguises himself with a silver mask and face paint, giving him the appearance of having been badly wounded in a fire of some kind. His identity was eventually exposed and, after a fight with Allan Quartermain, he was shot by Tom Sawyer when he tried to escape in a stolen submarine. He was played by Richard Roxburgh.
In the 1986 Disney animated film The Great Mouse Detective, the villain, Professor Ratigan, played the Moriarty role opposite Basil of Baker Street in the Holmes role. In the film's climax, Basil and Ratigan do battle on the top of Big Ben in an homage to the ending of "The Final Problem"; Unlike the story, however, only Ratigan dies when the two fall off the clocktower's roof.
The 1950s radio comedy the Goon show has as one of its principal characters, an incompetent 'Criminal Mastermind' named Count Jim Moriarty. It has been suggested that he is a parody of Professor Moriarty.
In the second season episode "No Reason" of House (TV series), House is shot by a man named Jack Moriarty. The television show contains many other similarities between its tititular character and the famous detective.
External links
- The Final Problem - in easy to read HTML format.
- The Valley of Fear - in easy to read HTML format.
- Sherlock Holmes Public Library
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