Moriarty Was Innocent
Sherlock Holmes’s arch nemesis, Moriarty, wasn’t the evil mastermind; Sherlock Holmes was.
Spoiler Alert: Sherlock Holmes dies at the end of the story The Final Problem. He dies fighting his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Moriarty was, according to Holmes, a “malefactor” and a “deep organizing power” behind crimes “of the most varying sorts—forgery cases, robberies, murders”. Holmes had “woven” his “net ’round” Moriarty and arranged for the police to arrest Moriarty along “with all the principal members of his gang” but it didn’t work out. The police “secured the whole gang” but Moriarty gave “them the slip”. To escape Moriarty’s vengeance, Holmes and his companion, Dr. John Watson, left England and traveled through Europe where they were eventually tracked down to “the little village of Meiringen” in Switzerland. There, at the outskirts of the village, at “the falls of Reichenbach” both Moriarty and Holmes dueled and fell to their deaths.
Except… (spoiler alert again) Holmes didn’t die. In The Empty House, he explains to Watson that, using his knowledge of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling”,¹ he “slipped through [Moriarty’s] grip” and Moriarty alone fell to his death.
It is my thesis here that Moriarty was not an evil mastermind but a wronged man about whom we know nothing. Additionally, I’ll argue that Sherlock Holmes, not Moriarty, was the “malefactor” described above.
Here’s how I’m going to argue this:
- Watson was fooled—like Scottie Ferguson in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller, Vertigo.
- Sherlock Holmes was both detective and kingpin—think Tyler Durden in the 1999 movie Fight Club (schizophrenia optional).
- Moriarty, a man wronged.
- Holmes, his motivations—why did he become a crime kingpin? why did he quit? how did he quit?
In this account, I’m going to take Dr. Watson’s narration as honest and Holmes’s as deserving skepticism. I can’t doubt everything. I’m not Descartes.
While the sloppy plot in The Final Problem was mainly because Arthur Conan Doyle, in his words, grew “weary” of Sherlock Holmes, my arguments in this post will remain purely within the realm of the Sherlock-Holmes-Universe. In fact, Conan Doyle held that Sherlock Holmes “tended” to “obscure” his “higher work” and kept his “position in literature” from being a “more commanding one”². See footnote 2 for more details.
All references are from Doyle’s original works.
Watson Fooled
Were it not for this one sentence (shown below) from The Final Problem, independently corroborating the existence of Mr. Moriarty, I’d argue that such a man didn’t actually exist but was a fiction³ invented by Sherlock Holmes. Hence, my amended argument is that though Moriarty the person did exist, he didn’t commit the crimes Holmes said he did. This is Watson showing us Mr. James Moriarty is real:
My hand has been forced…, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. [my emphasis]
Notice how the brothers Moriarty have the same first name? Since Watson and co do not inhabit the world of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors,⁴ this is evidence Holmes was the true evil mastermind. Or so I’ll argue and discuss at length later in this article.
(In truth, I think Arthur Conan Doyle just made a mistake because the stories The Final Solution (1893) and The Empty House (1903) were published a decade apart. But, if we wish to keep to a narrative that’s consistent and remains within the Sherlock Holmes canon, I believe mine is the best theory.)
Here’s the thing: in all stories, nobody has met Moriarty, nobody has seen him and nobody has heard him. The only person who claims to have met him is—you guessed it—Sherlock Holmes. We have exactly two descriptions of Moriarty’s appearance, one from Holmes, and one from Watson but they hardly count as corroborating one another. Imagine, say, the Great Pyramid of Giza described by one person in excruciating detail followed by another saying “it was triangular and made of stone” and you have a sense of Holmes and Watson respectively describing Moriarty. The below excerpts are from The Final Solution. Here’s Holmes:
[Moriarty] is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in this head…. His shoulders are rounded…, and his face protrudes forward.
When allegedly escaping Moriarty, Watson and Holmes board a train from England to “the Continent” (Europe). And just when the “train had… begun to move”, Holmes looks at the platform and says, “Ah, there is Moriarty himself”. Here’s Watson:
a tall man pushing his way furiously through the crowd, and waving his hand as if he desired to have the train stopped.
The description is so vague it could just have been a man angry about missing his train. Or, (my thesis), an actor hired by Holmes.
Later, when Watson and Holmes are vacationing in the Alps (again, supposedly hiding from Moriarty) Holmes leads Watson “near the edge” of a waterfall that “plunge[d] into a tremendous abyss”.
Upon being led to this beautiful and conveniently dangerous location, a messenger from their hotel tells Watson about an “English lady” who, “absolutely refused to see a Swiss physician” but insisted “it would be a great consolation to her to see an English doctor”. As Watson himself puts it, it “was impossible to refuse the request of a fellow countrywoman dying in a strange land”. The perfect excuse to draw Watson away from what he considered his most important responsibility—protecting Holmes. Who but Holmes could invent a ruse guaranteed to make Watson withdraw?
Because, for all his alleged brilliance, Moriarty didn’t even know what Sherlock Holmes looked like. When they first met (according to Holmes), all Moriarty said was, “You have less frontal development that I should have expected”. When he knew nothing about Holmes, his enemy, how could he be expected to invent a story so perfect that it would make Watson leave?
Reichenbach Falls
If one wished to stage their death, Holmes of choice of the Reichenbach Falls was impeccable. Watson described it as a “three-foot path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop on the other” (see image below). Conveniently, a place with no means to detect a dead body. In his amateurish attempt to play detective Watson notices “[t]wo lines of footmarks… leading away from” the waterfall. Watson peered into the waterfall but it was by then dark and he “could only see here and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away down at the end of the shaft, the gleam of the broken water”. Indeed, as Watson himself puts it, “[w]ho was to tell us what had happened”?
At the waterfall, Watson finds three pages from Holmes’s notebook, addressed to him; “writing as firm and clear, as though it had been written in his study”. We are to believe that before his fatal tête-à-tête with Moriarty, Holmes had sufficient time to place these notes in a conspicuous place that Watson would find.
Holmes’s letter claims Moriarty called for their meeting at the waterfall. But that leaves unanswered how Watson was called away so perfectly. Furthermore, if Moriarty was going to pick a place, he would be expected to choose better defenses for himself, not give Holmes an even chance of survival. The entire setup is believable, however, if we allow that there was no Moriarty and Holmes wanted the perfect spot from which to stage his death and disappear.
Why did Holmes want to disappear? Before getting to his motivations, let’s consider the evidence of his criminality.
Sherlock Holmes, master criminal
Okay, so Watson was fooled. This is hardly surprising because in the stories Watson is always fooled. But it is now time to expand on Sherlock Holmes’s description of himself as “the specialist in crime”. We address this in two parts. First, I show Holmes’s capacity for crime and his criminal connections. Next, I show how out-of-character Holmes’s accusations of Moriarty are. Of course, since I cannot prove that Holmes was the criminal mastermind, I shall merely present facts that point in that direction. As the master detective himself says in The Noble Bachelor:
My whole examination serve[s] to turn my conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.⁵
A capacity for crime
As early as The Sign of the Four (only the second Sherlock Holmes story), Watson recognizes his friend’s potential for crime:
I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law, instead of exerting them in its defense.
At various other times we see that Sherlock Holmes has many connections to the underworld. In The Illustrious Client, for instance, Holmes claims to have an agent “in the huge criminal underworld of London” who “obtain[ed] information which often proved to be of vital importance”.
A good criminal is also a capable actor. In this department, Holmes was, according to Watson, extraordinary. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Watson describes his friend’s acting ability thusly:
It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.
In The Man With The Twisted Lip, Watson finds his friend hanging around in an opium den—a center for criminal activity—disguised as an “absorbed” “old man”, “very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees” a font of “doddering, loose-lipped senility”. Holmes admits to Watson that he’s at the den to “find an enemy” and he has “used it [the opium den]” in the past for his “own purposes”. Holmes also casually lets slip that the opium den’s crime boss “has sworn to have vengeance upon” him. As always, when it matters, Holmes is skimpy on why and Watson, a good reporter but not a good journalist, doesn’t enquire.
When I call an opium den a center for criminal activity, I’m not stereotyping. This is Holmes on the opium den:
We should be rich men if we had £1,000 for every poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It is the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside.
Left unspecified are who bear responsibility for the deaths of these “poor devils”. Watson only assumes the best of his friend.
Sherlock Holmes: crime boss
In The Final Problem, Holmes boasts that “there is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London so well as I do”. And, remember, this was a boast made while Moriarty was allegedly still alive, active, and unapprehended.
When speaking of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes cannot but describe his “nemesis” in terms of glowing admiration. In the passage cited below, note the lack of names and use only of pronoun, “he”.
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 philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. 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. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed — the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught — never so much as suspected.
Allow me to repeat that last sentence, “the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected”.
In The Valley of Fear, Holmes further gives away his hand. Consider this conversation with Watson:
You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?”
“The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—”
“My blushes, Watson!” Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
“I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.”
Notice that Watson is utterly oblivious to the connection but Holmes, in his guilt, assumes it’s high praise that Watson was about to deliver.
Or consider again, at the end of the novel Sherlock Holmes advises his client Mr. Jack Douglas to leave England so he may escape the evil clutches of Prof. Moriarty. Douglas duly boards a ship to South Africa but it’s in vain as he dies during his journey. Douglas’s death is relayed to Holmes via a telegram from Mrs. Douglas saying, “Jack has been lost overboard in gale off St. Helena. No one knows how accident occurred.” Holmes is unsurprised, and says, “no doubt it [his death by gale] was well stage-managed” and that Mr. Douglas was “surely” “murdered”.
As usual, Holmes lays blame upon Mr. Moriarty, describes the crime as being “from London” because he can “tell an old master by the sweep of his brush”.
Holmes, by virtue of having “solved” the crime is absolved of all blame. And, coincidentally, conveniently, and concurrently all people that were a threat to “Moriarty’s” organization are no longer cause for concern either. Talk about a win-win scenario.
Earlier in the novel Holmes explains “for what motive” Jack Douglas had to die. It’s the standard mafia explanation: the organization expends an “absurd extravagance of energy” into “crushing the nut” to set an example for others. Here’s Holmes:
I may tell you that Moriarty rules with a rod of iron over his people. His discipline is tremendous. There is only one punishment in his code. It is death…. [Douglas’s] punishment followed, and would be known to all—if only to put the fear of death into them.
Replace “Moriarty” with “Holmes” and it’s a perfect fit.
When discussing the criminality of Moriarty, Holmes’s rhetoric reduces to that of a conspiracy theorist. All crime is indicative of Moriarty’s guilt and a lack of evidence, rather than weakening the case, is presented as strengthening it.
“You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?” said [Sherlock Holmes].
“Never,” [said Watson].
“Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” he cried. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime.” [my emphasis]
Remember, we are discussing Sherlock Holmes. A man who, at all other times, was “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen” (A Scandal in Bohemia); who advises that “detection is…an exact science, and should be treated in [a] cold and unemotional manner” (The Sign of the Four); and points out—correctly, imo—that “[i]t is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data [as] it biases the judgment”. Except, it seems, where it comes to Moriarty. Could it be because Holmes knows more than he lets on?
I believe Holmes speaks this way so he can boast about his genius while concurrently avoid implicating himself. We know, from the stories, that Holmes isn’t a modest person and occasionally likes to boast about his feats. Boasting about his criminal dimension while not implicating himself is consistent with what we know about him.
Schizophrenia optional
This is Holmes’s relay of an alleged conversation with Moriarty.
‘All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,’ said he.
‘Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,’ I replied.
Moriarty, a man wronged
Why Moriarty, though? Who was he? Why did the great detective Sherlock Holmes choose him as proxy for his criminal enterprise?
James?
In The Final Problem, Watson claims he’s responding to “recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother”, Prof. Moriarty. In The Empty House, Sherlock Holmes names his adversary, Professor James Moriarty. Given that Watson was responding to public letters, it’s safe to say that Watson got the name right and Holmes got it wrong.
Clearly, Holmes forgot the first name of his fake nemesis. There’s no other possible explanation. This is the same Sherlock Holmes whose “index of biographies” includes gems like “Matthews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross”. If he remembers a knocked out tooth, it’s inconceivable that he’d forget the name of a man with whom he had a fight to the death.
We don’t know exactly what Col. Moriarty said in his “letters” “defend[ing] the memory of his brother” but, speculating, I’d say that the colonel defended his brother as an innocent man who’d had no part in Holmes’s allegations. Nothing in The Final Problem actually proves the case against Prof. Moriarty.
Who was Moriarty?
Here’s what we know about Prof. Moriarty. “At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem…[o]n the strength of [which] he won the Mathematical Chair at one of [England’s] smaller universities.” Unfortunately for Moriarty, a promising mathematician, with “a most brilliant career before him”, his career ended due to (unsubstantiated and unproven) “[d]ark rumours [that] gathered round him in the university town,” as a consequence of which he was “compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an army coach”. That is all we know.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that Moriarty was involved in any sort of crime. In The Valley of Fear, Holmes further gives the game away by admitting there’s no evidence against Moriarty.
[I]n calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law — and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations — that’s the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year’s pension as a solatium for his wounded character.
Why Moriarty?
There exists the ever persistent myth that expertise in one domain automatically confers expertise in other, unrelated domains. And since mathematics, that most abstract of fields, is so difficult, a genius mathematician could easily be a genius criminal, or so the myth goes. I don’t think Sherlock Holmes himself made this error but I claim he used the pervasive belief to divert suspicion towards, “ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity”. And indeed, who better than a man living in class conscious 19th century England, who’s been dismissed from the high and prestigious “Mathematical Chair” down to a lowly and ignominious “army coach”? (Honestly, I have no clue what an “army coach” does but obviously it isn’t as prestigious as a University Chair based on the simple fact that I’ve heard of the latter occupation but not the former.)
Whither evidence?
I’ll end this section with Inspector Alec MacDonald, Scotland Yard, whose “practical Scotch intelligence” leads him to ask Holmes a most pertinent question:
You’ve got us side-tracked with your interesting anecdotes, Mr. Holmes. What really counts is your remark that there is some connection between the professor and the crime.
Was there a connection? The answer, rather unsurprisingly, was no.
Why did Holmes turn to crime?
We will never know the full reasons behind why Sherlock Holmes turned to a life of crime nor why he left it behind but we have some hints. I believe Holmes turned to crime to escape his drug addiction and, once he’d kicked the habit, ended his criminal enterprise too. In other words, it’s the age old story: boy does drugs, boy does crime to quit drugs; boy quits drugs, boy quits crime.
In The Sign of the Four, Watson witnesses Holmes inject himself “three times a day for many months” and describes his friend’s “sinewy forearm” as being “all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks”. Holmes acknowledges that the influence of drugs “is physically a bad one” but he cannot stop because his “mind…rebels at stagnation”. Holmes also says “can dispense… with artificial stimulants” provided he has work.
Unfortunately, there isn’t as much crime as Holmes would like. He complains to Watson in A Study in Scarlet that:
There are no crimes and no criminals in these days.… No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.
If we do not read about his drug addiction in the later stories it’s because, I claim, he found himself a new hobby—crime. Holmes, in many ways, is like those people who play chess games by themselves because they do not find worthy opponents.
How did Holmes quit crime?
After he supposedly fell off the waterfall, Holmes was away from England for three years. Where was he those three years? In The Empty House he tells us he “travelled for two years in Tibet… visiting Lhassa and spen[t] some days with the head Llama,” “passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca”, and a few other excursions before finally setting back to his crime solving ways by working on the “Park Lane Mystery” in the south of France.
The connections should be obvious. Tibet, the head Llama, Persia, Mecca… Holmes found religion. Or at least explored them as a means towards finding some balance in his life.
The end
So what does one retire to after a life as both the world’s “only unofficial detective” and “the Napoleon of crime”? In the case of Sherlock Holmes, he chose to live “the life of a hermit” keeping bees. He wrote a book titled “Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen”.
It’s only fitting that I end this post with Holmes’s own words from The Final Problem. The ambiguity is all him.
Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.
Footnotes
¹ Baritsu is not Japanese, it’s most probably a typo of an English martial art, Bartitsu.
² Here’s the full excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle’s autobiography, Memories and Adventures, 1924
At last, after I had done two series of them [Holmes short story collections] I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore as a sign of my resolution I determined to end the life of my hero. The idea was in my mind when I went with my wife for a short holiday in Switzerland, in the course of which we saw there the wonderful falls of Reichenbach, a terrible place, and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him.
³ In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, the character Algernon invents an imaginary character named “Bunbury” so he can get out of commitments. He says “I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.” Conan Doyle was a huge fan of Wilde’s play (until Wilde was outed as a homosexual).
⁴ “Reft of his brother, but retain’d his name” — The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare.
⁵ Thoreau’s analogy wasn’t immediately obvious to me. On the off chance that you didn’t get it either, finding a trout in milk apparently indicates that the milkman diluted the milk with water from a river and inadvertently caught fish.
