Professor Moriarty
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Professor James Moriarty is a fictional character who is the best known antagonist (and nemesis) 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.
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[edit] 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. During this story, Moriarty is something of a Mafia Godfather; he protects nearly all of the criminals of England in exchange for their obedience and a share in their profits. Holmes, by his own account, was originally led to Moriarty by the suggestion that many of the crimes he perceived were not the spontaneous work of random criminals, but the machinations of a vast and subtle criminal ring.
Moriarty plays a direct 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" translated to "The young one has the lamb" is a witty pun upon the name of Thomas Agnew of the gallery Thomas Agnew and Sons, who had a famous painting stolen by Adam Worth, but was unable to prove the fact.
Holmes mentions Moriarty reminiscently in five other stories: The Empty House (the immediate sequel to The Final Problem), The Norwood Builder, The Missing Three-Quarter, The Illustrious Client, and His Last Bow. More obliquely, a 1908 mystery by Doyle, The Lost Special, features a criminal genius who could be Moriarty (and a detective who could be Holmes), although neither is mentioned by name.
Although Moriarty only appeared in two of the sixty Sherlock Holmes tales by Conan Doyle, Holmes's attitude to him in those two stories has gained him the popular impression of being Holmes's nemesis, and he has been frequently used in later stories by other authors, parodies, and in other media. In fact, among casual Holmes fans it is commonly 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.[citation needed]
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. It closely resembled a cane, allowing for easy concealment, was capable of firing revolver bullets and made very little noise when fired, making it ideal for sniping; the weapon became infamous for being Moriarty's favorite tool.
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.But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London..."
—Holmes, "The Final Problem"
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; 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 (as Holmes says 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 changes this.
Eventually, public pressure forced Doyle to bring Holmes back, but the literary sub-genre of the supervillain was already irrevocably launched to influence countless later writers.
A point of interest is that the "high, domed forehead" was seen as the sign of a prodigious intellect during Conan Doyle's time. In giving Moriarty this trait, which had already appeared in both Sherlock Holmes and the detective's brother Mycroft, Conan Doyle may have intended to portray Moriarty as a man having an intellect equal or greater than that of Holmes– thus as the only man capable of defeating him. An alternative theory that has been proposed, based on the physical similarities, is that Holmes and Moriarty were the same person. [1]
[edit] Simon Newcomb and other real world role models
In addition to the master criminal Adam Worth, there has been much speculation[2] 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[3] 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 Cambridge from early 1913 to mid 1914;[4] The Valley of Fear, which contains the comment about maths 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 Alec MacDonald might know, but it is in vain as MacDonald is not so well read as Holmes.
Finally, Conan Doyle is known to have used his former school, Stonyhurst College, as inspiration for details of the Holmes series; among his contempories at the school were two boys named Moriarty.[5]
[edit] 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.
[edit] Moriarty in popular culture
[edit] Depictions
[edit] Film
- George Zucco appeared as Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
- Vincent D'Onofrio appeared as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock (2002 film).
- Lionel Atwill appeared as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.
- Henry Daniell appeared as Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green.
- Paul Freeman appeared as Professor Moriarty in the 1988 comedy Without a Clue, revolving around the premise that Holmes is a fictional creation of Watson's, and Watson is the real crime solving genius.
- In Young Sherlock Holmes Anthony Higgins plays Holmes' schoolmaster, Rathe, who turns out to be an evil mastermind. After the end credits, there's a brief scene in which Rathe enters an inn and signs the ledger as Moriarty.
- Richard Roxburgh portrayed a villain named the Fantom, whose true identity was that of Professor James Moriarty, in the 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
- In the Disney animated film The Great Mouse Detective, the character Professor Ratigan (the archnemesis of Basil of Baker Street, the Holmes-esque hero of the film ) is an obvious parallel and tribute to the character of Moriarty, even sharing his alleged first name.
[edit] Television
- A computer simulation of Professor Moriarty, played by actor Daniel Davis, appeared in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle". For a bet, Data, posing as Holmes on the holodeck, proposed to solve a Holmes-style mystery, but when Geordi La Forge asked the computer to create a foe, he requested one "capable of defeating Data" (as opposed to Holmes). The computer gave Moriarty self-awareness and the ability to manipulate the holodeck's controls. In doing so, Moriarty seized control of the Enterprise, but was convinced to release control and be stored in the ship's memory when he learned that he could not leave the holodeck. Freed from the ship's memory 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 crew members programmed the holodeck on the false holographic Enterprise to create a holographic simulation of the outside world, leaving Moriarty and the Countess unwittingly stored in a memory module with enough content to keep the couple amused for some time.
- The Darkwing Duck TV series (1991-1993) featured a mole-themed villain named Professor Moliarty, an obvious parody/homage.
- In No Reason, an episode of House, Dr House is shot by a man named Jack Moriarty. The television show contains many other similarities between its titular character and the famous detective.
- In the television series Lost, villain Benjamin Linus, played by Michael Emerson, uses the alias "Dean Moriarty" in Episode 4.09 entitled "The Shape of Things to Come" although that is more likely a reference to the character by Jack Kerouac.
[edit] Non-canon literature
- In Neil Gaiman's Hugo Award winning short story "A Study in Emerald", the Moriarty and Holmes of an alternate history reverse roles. Moriarty (who, though never named as such in the story, is identified as the author of Dynamics of an Asteroid) is hired to investigate a murder. The murder has apparently been carried out by Sherlock Holmes (who signs his name Rache, an allusion to Doyle's first novella starring Holmes and Watson, A Study in Scarlet, in which the word Rache — German for revenge — is found written above the body of a murder victim) and Dr. Watson. The story is narrated by Colonel Sebastian Moran, given the rank of Major (Ret.) by Gaiman.
- In a 2006 comic book story featuring Lee Falk's The Phantom, the 19th Phantom has to fight Professor Moriarty. The climax of the story features the Phantom and Moriarty falling down a waterfall in the Bangalla jungles. At the end of the story, Moriarty is shown to be alive, as he returns to London to find "a detective named Sherlock Holmes".
- 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. The novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was made into a 1976 film and starred Lord Laurence Olivier as Professor Moriarty.
- 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.
- John Gardner has written two novels featuring the arch-villain, The Return of Moriarty, in which the Professor, like Holmes, is shown to have survived the meeting at the Reichenbach, and The Revenge of Moriarty. In these two novels, Moriarty is depicted as a Victorian-era Al Capone or Don Corleone, single-handedly controlling London's organized crime structure. Originally planned as a trilogy, the third book, The Revolt of Moriarty, has never been published, but there have been indications, since Gardner's death on 7 August 2007, that it may appear posthumously.[citation needed]
- 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 supposed death (indicated, but not clearly portrayed, as he "falls" into the sky, due to the anti-gravity mineral, Cavorite) in the midst of a gang war with The Doctor, 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. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, it is suggested that Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty (from On the Road) is his great-grandson, and the rivalry between the two criminals is continued by the fact that The Doctor's great-grandson is Kerouac's other creation, Doctor Sachs.
- A similar character appeared in the Solar Pons series, which was a pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The Moriarty figure was Baron Knoll, a German spy and a socialite who appeared in only two stories (much like Moriarty).
[edit] Other media
- The PC game Eagle Eye Mysteries features a character named Mark Moriarty - he is a high school student who is at the heart of many of the mysteries the player has to solve. In one mystery, on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, he actually mentions that he has the same name as Holmes' nemesis.
- The 1950s radio comedy the Goon show had, as one of its principal characters, an incompetent 'Criminal Mastermind' named Count Jim Moriarty.
- Benjamin Linus uses the alias 'Professor Moriarty' in the Lost episode 'The Shape of Things to Come'.
- Moriarty was also seen in the PC game Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, in which Moriarty has survived the falls of Reichenbach and is in weak condition in a mental hospital.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title track of the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society includes the line "God save Fu Manchu, Moriarty, and Dracula".
- The arch-villain in the Canadian television programme, The Adventures of Shirley Holmes is a teenage criminal mastermind named Molly Hardy.
[edit] References
- ^ The Guardian - Holmes was Moriarty
- ^ Schaefer, B. E., 1993, Sherlock Holmes and some astronomical connections, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, vol.103, no.1, p.30-34. For a summary of this point, see this New Scientist Article, also from 1993.
- ^ Donald Teets, Karen Whitehead, 1999, The Discovery of Ceres: How Gauss Became Famous, Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 83-93
- ^ See, for example, the book by Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity
- ^ Arthur Conan Doyle
Professor Moriarty is referenced in the Futurama episode "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch".
[edit] See also
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[edit] External links
- Professor Moriarty article at Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki
- The Final Problem - in easy to read HTML format.
- The Valley of Fear - in easy to read HTML format.
- Sherlock Holmes Public Library
