Professor Moriarty: Machiavellian Monster.
“My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”
― Sherlock Holmes
Is there a more iconic villain in all detective fiction than Professor James Moriarty the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes? In fact, I am sure he must be up there near the top in the list of all-time great villains and may even be at the top for many, and that includes me.
Yet, he hardly appears in the canon of Sherlock Holmes stories and was only created by Arthur Conan Doyle to kill off Holmes in Conan Doyle’s intended final story of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Talk about Alpha and Omega, the beginning of Moriarty is his end as well. Yet what Conan Doyle does give us in his portrait of this mathematical genius gone awry is so very tantalizing that it undoubtedly makes us want more. But we only get a bit more in retrospect.
When Holmes is brought back by public demand, Conan Doyle now recreates the ‘spider’ at the very center of a Machiavellian web of intrigue and crime. Moriarty is the hub through which most criminal enterprises of significance must pass what we call the ‘mastermind’ as Holmes explains to his trusted companion,
“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a…
