 | Professor Moriarty: Encyclopedia II - Professor Moriarty - Appearance in Doyle's Fiction
Professor Moriarty - Appearance in Doyle's Fiction
Professor Moriarty first appeared in Arthur Conan Doyle's tale The Final Problem, in which Holmes, on the verge of delivering a fatal blow to Moriarty's criminal organisation, 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, who had 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".
Other related archives1986, A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, Adam Worth, Alan Moore, Arthur Conan Doyle, Big Ben, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Colonel Sebastian Moran, Count Jim Moriarty, Daniel Davis, Disney, Dr. Watson, Elementary, Dear Data, Fantômas, Fu Manchu, Futurama, Goon show, His Last Bow, James Bond, Jean-Luc Picard, Kif gets knocked up a notch, M, Macavity, Michael Kurland, Mycroft Holmes, Napoleon, Nicholas Meyer, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Reichenbach Falls, Sherlock Holmes, Ship in a Bottle, Sigmund Freud, Simon Newcomb, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Starship Enterprise, T. S. Eliot, The Dynamics of an Asteroid, The Empty House, The Final Problem, The Great Mouse Detective, The Illustrious Client, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Missing Three-Quarter, The Norwood Builder, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Valley of Fear, Young Sherlock Holmes, chair, climax, cocaine, covert ops, fictional character, mathematics, plausible deniability, supervillain
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Appearance in Doyle's Fiction", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
