Hi everybody, it’s been a while! But we’re back with a new episode and we are very excited about it!

Some quick housekeeping: with the way that Real Life keeps conspiring against us, we are going to try for one episode a month — and if we’re lucky, maybe we can get out two!

This episode, we focused on the relationship between James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. Even in the canon alone, there’s a lot to delve into, and of course fan theories abound across the Internet, adaptations, and scholarly essays (aka meta).

Canon discussion

• The whole Holmes vs. Moriarty thing appeals to our love of the epic and mythic. (Which only gets more mythical when Holmes returns from the dead.) This is probably a big part of why Moriarty is so popular in adaptations, fanworks, etc.
• Moriarty is a plot device to kill Holmes. Specifically, it takes Sherlock Holmes to kill Sherlock Holmes, after Arthur Conan Doyle has built Holmes up into somebody who is very difficult to beat.
  • It takes Sherlock Holmes to make Sherlock Holmes run away.
  •The stress of going up against Moriarty’s organization might have led to Holmes’s 1887 breakdown in REIG (Martin Fido, Sherlock: The facts and fiction behind the world’s greatest detective).
• In FINA, Sherlock Holmes is very willing to die. He’s generally kind of self-destructive anyway, but this is that tendency at his worst.
  • Moriarty genuinely scares him.
• FINA making sense or not making sense:
  • Holmes and Moriarty are both human beings. They have emotions, and they’re brilliant thinkers but even their emotions can get the better of them and they can do stupid things.
  • It makes no sense for Holmes to take Watson with him to Europe and actively put his life in danger, but Holmes is convinced he is going to die and wants to spend his last few days with his best friend.
  • Moriarty goes after Holmes because he’s full of rage and he wants Holmes dead. His pride has been terrifically wounded.
  • They’re both self-destructive.
• Moriarty is also Holmes’s dark mirror, and that includes having a best friend (Moran is an evil Watson).
  • A really good Holmes & Moriarty duo match each other. Examples include Jeremy Brett and Eric Porter, Robert Downey Jr. and Jared Harris, Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott, Basil Rathbone and Henry Daniell, Ben Kingsley as Watson and Paul Freeman in Without a Clue, and even Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and Daniel Davis in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • “He loved to lie in the very center of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime.” CARD, Watson speaking of Holmes! Compare this to Holmes speaking of Moriarty in FINA: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”
  • In the BBC radio version of FINA with Clive Merrison, Holmes talks about how similar he and Moriarty are, and it’s true that they are very similar, but with a very big difference between them: Holmes cares about justice, mercy, and compassion. If he didn’t, he’d be doing something else to ward off boredom — he might even be a criminal himself. But caring about doing what’s right is a very big difference between the two men (and Holmes doesn’t have the most trustworthy perspective of himself anyway).
• Full scope of Moriarty’s organization: does Holmes really know the full scope of it?
  • Holmes knows about Moran, even knows how much he’s paid, but Moran isn’t caught up in the arrests or the court proceedings that followed, or else EMPT wouldn’t have happened.
  • How do you get involved in everything illegal in London with an organization that’s small enough to be rounded up?
• “Seven Devils” by Florence+the Machine is oddly appropriate (“see I’ve come to burn your kingdom down”). 
• Technically and weirdly enough, Holmes and Moriarty are business rivals. Holmes does a lot of law-breaking to solve problems for private individuals, which one imagines Moriarty has also been doing for a long time.
  • Just a couple of years earlier, and the King of Bohemia would probably have gone to Moriarty instead of Holmes.
  • Holmes isn’t just dismantling Moriarty’s empire, he’s stealing his business!
• “Dear me, Mr. Holmes, dear me.” No serious thoughts, just chills!
• How the heck is FINA their first meeting, when Holmes and Moriarty have been going at this for years?! Holmes has even made it into Moriarty’s office more than once.
• As per NORW, Holmes misses Moriarty. He will continue to bring him years later, in 1902 in ILLU and in 1914 in LAST. (And also in MISS, year unknown.)
  • Moriarty maybe doesn’t oversaturate Sherlockian pop-culture as much as we might think — the Professor is clearly on Holmes’s mind for a long time after his death.

Fanon theories

• Moriarty is Holmes’s teacher (examples: Young Sherlock Holmes aka Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear in the UK, The Crack in the Lens, Sherlock Holmes: Year One).
• Tied up with the above but not always: Moriarty is Holmes’s former mentor (examples: Young Sherlock Holmes, the Michael Kurland books).
• Moriarty is not a criminal (examples: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, the Michael Kurland books sort of).
• Moriarty isn’t real (examples: The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, played with in BBC Sherlock).
• Mycroft is Moriarty or in league with him, predicated on the idea that Mycroft’s apparent blunders in GREE are done deliberately and maliciously, covered in the essay “M” by Pasquale Accardo for the BSJ (examples: The Veiled Detective, played with in BBC Sherlock).
• Moriarty is behind the Red-Headed League (example: Granada, of course!).
• Moriarty wants Holmes to join him (examples: “The Empty House” with Clive Merrison, A Study in Regret).

Audience theories

• Part of Holmes’s crisis of the soul on the Great Hiatus (Lhassa, Mecca) could be guilt over killing Moriarty. Proposed by Timothy Miller in his blog post, Moriarty’s Ghost. 

A final word

Our next episode will focus on the second most dangerous man in London, Colonel Sebastian Moran! Stay tuned, and please subscribe and leave us a comment!

Bibliography

Canon discussion

Fido, Martin. Sherlock: The facts and fiction behind the world’s greatest detective. Metro Books New York, 2015.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes: with an introduction from Robert Ryan. Simon & Schuster UK, 2012. Kindle Edition.
Coules, Bert. “The Final Problem.” BBC Radio, 1992.

Fanon

Young Sherlock Holmes. Paramount Pictures, 1985.
Cysper, Darlene. The Crack in the Lens. Foolscap & Quill, 2013.
Beatty, Scott. Sherlock Holmes: Year One. Dynamite Entertainment, 2011.
Kurland, Michael. The Infernal Device, Death by Gaslight, The Great Game, The Empress of India, Who Thinks Evil. Minotaur Books. Titan Books.
Meyer, Nicholas. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. E. P. Dutton, 1974.
Paul, Jeremy. The Secret of Sherlock Holmes. 1988.
Thompson, Stephen. “The Reichenbach Fall.” BBC, 2012.
Accardo, Pasquale. “M,” The Baker Street Journal. The BSI Press, 2007.
Davies, David Stuart. Titan Books, 2004.
Moffat, Steven. “A Study in Pink.” BBC, 2010.
Klinger, Leslie S. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes & the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
Coules, Bert. “The Empty House.” BBC Radio, 1993.
Daines, Claire. Children of Reichenbach: A Study in Regret. MX Publishing, 2013.