第 25 页

Colonel Moran. Holmes knows that he is in danger, and invites Watson to come with him on a trip to the Continent. Realizing that Watson needs to know more, Holmes begins to tell him about Moriarty.

The Napoleon of crime

With a stroke of genius, Conan Doyle explains why Moriarty has not appeared in earlier tales. “Ay, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” Holmes cries. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him.” Moriarty presides over a vast criminal network, pulling all the strings, and yet with the skill of a master chess player, he completely avoids being linked to it. He has such safeguards against being identified or having any crime proved against him that the police are never able to bring him to trial, even though hundreds of crimes—forgeries, robberies, and murders—have been committed at his bidding.

Watson and Holmes, played by David Burke (in his last appearance as Watson) and Jeremy Brett, are pictured here in the 1985 television adaptation of “The Final Problem.”

later a university professor, but his diabolical “hereditary tendencies” were ultimately destined to control him. Conan Doyle would use these same presuppositions to create Colonel Moran 10 years later, in “The Empty House.” For Moriarty, the inherited criminal tendency is particularly dangerous because it is allied to a brilliant brain. His high-domed forehead is a feature he shares with the similarly clever Holmes (and his brother Mycroft), but Moriarty is likened to a lizard or a snake, a sign of the evil behind his genius.

Conan Doyle based Moriarty on a real master criminal named Adam Worth (see p.29), whom he had heard about from William Pinkerton, the head of the American Pinkerton detective agency. At the time Conan Doyle was writing, Worth was languishing in a Belgian jail for a petty crime, where his true identity as the head of the world’s greatest organized crime network was unknown to local authorities. American-born Worth was indeed

THE FINAL PROBLEM 145

a criminal mastermind who ruled the roost in London, posing as a respectable art lover and racing man. The police could never pin anything on him and dubbed him “the Napoleon of crime.” In deference to Worth, Conan Doyle adopted this same nickname for Moriarty.

The dark side of Holmes

Adam Worth provided the bones for Moriarty, but Conan Doyle’s character is a complex figure. Moriarty is Holmes’s terrible mirror image—a distorted reflection of the great detective’s remarkable power. When Holmes describes Moriarty as “a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker,” he could easily be talking about himself. Holmes creates a chilling picture of how Moriarty operates. “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” This sounds remarkably similar to Watson’s description of Holmes in “The Cardboard Box” (pp.110–11): the detective “loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime.”

The dark alter ego, sometimes called doppelgänger, is a classic feature of Gothic fiction. It emerges in stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Moriarty is the Mr Hyde to Holmes’s Dr. Jekyll. And, just as Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same, so Holmes is much more intertwined with Moriarty than he would care to admit. In order to solve crimes, Holmes has to think like a criminal, and he becomes, ❯❯

Holmes and Watson board the Continental Express at Victoria Station, which runs in connection with the ferry to Paris. Moriarty rents a “special” train to follow them.

Holmes and Watson do all they can to escape Moriarty— traveling from England, through France, and into Switzerland. Moriarty finally catches up to them at the Reichenbach Falls, where the final, deadly encounter occurs.

London

Canterbury

Newhaven

Paris

Realizing

that Holmes and Watson have taken another route, Moriarty tracks them to Switzerland.

Route of Holmes and Watson

Route of Moriarty

Discovering that Moriarty is following them, Holmes and Watson change trains at Canterbury, and travel on to Brussels, then Strasbourg.

Brussels Moriarty is still on their tail, so they begin a week’s walk

through the Rhone Valley and over the Gemmi Pass, before reaching Meiringen.

Strasbourg

Meiringen

Reichenbach Falls

The site of the final showdown

between Holmes and Moriarty.

146 THE GREAT DETECTIVE

to some extent, tainted by the association. Indeed, as Holmes says to Watson of Moriarty, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”

Mortal combat

Holmes tells Watson of his struggle to bring Moriarty to justice as though they are two great warriors doing battle: “Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent. He cut deep, and yet I just undercut him.” Holmes always enjoys the thrill of the chase, and this is the most exciting chase of his career. He remarks that he could happily retire, feeling his great work is done, if he could only bring the genius Moriarty down. Like a top athlete, he wants to go out on a high after winning the greatest contest of his career.

The crucial moment of the battle is now approaching, Holmes tells Watson. On the forthcoming Monday, the police will be able to move in and round up Moriarty’s entire criminal network, provided he can stay out of Moriarty’s clutches until then—since he will provide the key evidence that will convict Moriarty.

…you are now playing a double- handed game with me against the cleverest rogue and the most powerful syndicate of criminals in London.

Sherlock Holmes

However, the “Napoleon of crime” is thrilled by the challenge, too. With his customary chilling bravado, Moriarty has visited Holmes at 221B Baker Street that very morning, to get a good look at his adversary and to give him one last chance to back down. “If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me,” Moriarty warned him, “rest assured that I shall do as much to you.”

Holmes is not to be cowed, in spite of several attempts being made on his life throughout the day. He gives Watson strict instructions to

The Reichenbach Falls

Situated in the Swiss Bernese Oberland region, the Reichenbach Falls were well known long before Conan Doyle’s time. Dropping a total of 820 ft (250 m) in a series of torrents, the waterfalls are among the most spectacular in Europe. They were painted by the English Romanticist J. M. W. Turner in the early 1800s, but it is their role in “The Final Problem” for which they are best known today. Tens of thousands of Holmes fans trek to the site every year to see where Moriarty met his doom. There is a

meet him at Victoria Station the following morning, being careful not to be followed, and then leaves by climbing over the back garden wall.

The chase begins

Watson follows Holmes’s instructions precisely, taking a brougham cab to the station that he later discovers was driven by a disguised Mycroft Holmes. As he settles into the first-class carriage reserved for himself and Holmes, he is irritated to find himself joined by an elderly Italian priest. The reader may be one step ahead of the doctor here—the priest is, of course, Holmes in disguise. Unmasked, Holmes informs Watson that members of Moriarty’s gang had set fire to his rooms in 221B the previous evening, but that little damage was done. As the train pulls out of the station, Moriarty appears on the platform, angrily trying to stop the train. Watson breathes a sigh of relief when the train speeds away, but Holmes knows that Moriarty won’t be stopped so easily. He guesses that he will likely rent a “special” (one-car) train to pursue them. But he has a plan: they will give him the slip by getting off the train at

funicular railroad to take them there from the nearby town of Meiringen, where there is also a Holmes museum. Many fans dress as characters from the Holmes stories and reenact the struggle, even sending dummy bodies plunging into the depths. On the cliff face is a plaque marking the spot of the great struggle between Holmes and Moriarty. The path on which the pair wrestled was then right beside the falls, but over the years it has crumbled away, and today it ends around 330 ft (100 m) short of the falls.

THE FINAL PROBLEM 147

Holmes’s deerstalker tumbles into the gorge as he and Moriarty struggle on the edge of its precipice, in this illustration by Sidney Paget originally published in The Strand Magazine.

Canterbury and detouring to Newhaven. The ploy works, and they see Moriarty’s train roaring by as they hide behind a stack of luggage on a platform at Canterbury Station.

After reaching Strasbourg via Brussels, they learn that the police have arrested Moriarty’s gang, but Moriarty has escaped. Holmes knows his enemy will now be set on revenge. Holmes and Watson decide to continue traveling, hoping to stay one step ahead of their pursuer. After a week’s walking in the Alps, they arrive in the Swiss town of Meiringen. At the advice of the hotel landlord, Peter Steiler, they make a trip to the spectacular Reichenbach Falls, where “the torrent… plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house.” As they leave the waterfalls, a boy approaches Watson with a letter, ostensibly from Steiler, asking him to return and tend to an English woman who is dying of tuberculosis. Holmes realizes at once that it is a hoax, but says nothing, clearly feeling the time has come for his final combat with Moriarty.

The final moment

When Watson reaches the hotel, he finds that there is no sick woman awaiting his attentions. Realizing the trick, he rushes back to the Reichenbach Falls, but he finds only Holmes’s Alpine-stock (walking stick), leaning against the rock. Two sets of footprints lead to a precipice above a deep chasm into which the water plunges, and there are no returning footprints.

The plowed-up soil and torn branches and ferns at the edge of the path show that there has been a fight beside the chasm.

Watson sees something gleaming from the top of a boulder, and finds Holmes’s silver cigarette case. As he picks it up, out flutters a note from Holmes, which Moriarty had allowed him to write before their battle. The note reveals that Holmes is prepared to die in order to rid the world of Moriarty. The detective has written that “no possible conclusion to [my career] could be more congenial to me than this.” The note ends by asking Watson to inform the police that the papers that will convict Moriarty’s gang are with his brother Mycroft for safekeeping.

When Watson and the police search the scene, they find unmistakable signs that the two men tussled on the brink, then fell, presumably to their deaths. Watson thinks it is all over, and he has lost the man “I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known”—but of course he is wrong. For Watson, Holmes does return in “The Empty House,” which reveals he did not perish at Reichenbach after all. The public, however, had to wait nearly a decade before he was seen again in The Hound of the Baskervilles (pp.152–61)—set before his apparent death—and in the meantime fans had to live with the devastating belief that the great detective was no more. ■

A LEGEN

RETURN

D

S

150 A LEGEND RETURNS

Conan Doyle

travels to Egypt

and publishes

The Stark Munro Letters, a fictionalized autobiography. Conan Doyle’s

Round the Fire Stories begin appearing in The Strand Magazine.

1895 MAY 1897 JUN 1898 1900 FEB 1896 JUN 1897 NOV 1899 MAR 1900

Conan Doyle publishes Uncle Bernac—another historical novel set in the Napoleonic wars. Bram Stoker publishes Dracula.

Conan Doyle

unsuccessfully runs as a parliamentary candidate for Edinburgh.

Conan Doyle Queen The play Sherlock Conan Doyle publishes The Victoria Holmes, starring publishes The Exploits of celebrates her William Gillette, Green Flag and

Event in

Brigadier Diamond opens in New York. Other Stories of

the lives

Gerard. Jubilee War and Sport

of Holmes and Watson at age 78. as a collection.

IN THIS CHAPTER

NOVEL

The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902

COLLECTION

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905

The Empty House The Norwood Builder The Dancing Men The Solitary Cyclist The Priory School Black Peter Charles Augustus Milverton The Six Napoleons The Three Students The Golden Pince-Nez The Missing Three-Quarter The Abbey Grange The Second Stain

B

ram Stoker, author of Dracula and a distant cousin of Conan Doyle, was the business manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre when Sherlock Holmes, or The Strange Case of Miss Faulkner moved there from New York in 1901. The play, which had been approved by Conan Doyle, was based largely on the existing novels and short stories, but gave Holmes an unlikely love interest in the eponymous “Miss Faulkner.”

From stage to page

The play was a sellout, and its success was enough to convince Conan Doyle that there was still a public appetite for the detective. So, while the play was still on, he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles. When the novel began its serialization in The Strand Magazine in August 1901, lines of people extended from newsstands across the country. The story sees Holmes back at the height of his powers, solving the mystery of a “giant hound” in western England. It is a curious fact that while the Holmes in this tale remains resolutely worldly, rejecting out of hand the idea that the grisly dog is supernatural, in these same years Conan Doyle was evidently reflecting on matters of faith—his semiautobiographical novel, The Stark Munro Letters, documents his rejection of Roman Catholicism and foreshadows his later interest in spiritualism. At this time, he was also writing his patriotic histories of the Boer War, based partly on the period he had spent in an army hospital unit in South Africa (where Sir Henry Baskerville made his money). He was knighted for this

INTRODUCTION 151

The stories later collected as The Queen Victoria Conan Doyle publishes

Return of Sherlock

dies at age 81; The War in South Holmes retires to Holmes begin to Edward VII Africa: Its Cause the South Downs (see “The appear in The becomes king. and Conduct. Lion’s Mane,” pp.278–83). Strand Magazine.

JAN 1901 JAN 1902 1903 SEP 1905 AUG 1901 AUG 1902 MAR 1905

Conan Doyle’s The Hound Conan Doyle Conan Doyle publishes

of the Baskervilles is given a The Return of

is serialized in The Strand knighthood for Sherlock Holmes.

Magazine. It is published as his writings on

a novel the following year. the Boer War.