Michael Kurland - Victorian Villainy

When some years ago I was given the opportunity to write stories set in the world of Sherlock Holmes, I chose Professor James Clovis Moriarty as the protagonist of my tales largely because, although the world knew his name, no one knew anything about him, as there was not yet anything to know. Surprisingly, considering his notoriety among fictional criminals, he is mentioned in only seven of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty-one Sherlock Holmes stories, figures in the plots of only two, and appears onstage in none of them. We know that Holmes thinks he is “the Napoleon of Crime…the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in [London]” but we are never told why or how except in the vaguest terms.

I was not presumptuous enough to use Holmes himself (although he does appear in my stories), but with just a little twist I could take the nebulous, insubstantial Professor Moriarty and give him flesh and bones. My thesis is that he was a criminal-no getting around that-but that he was more like a Robin Hood, a Raffles, or a Simon Templar than a Napoleon of crime. Why then did Holmes describe him as “the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld…”? Because, I choose to believe, Holmes had what the French call an idee fixe on the subject of Moriarty. The professor was the only man Holmes had ever met, with the exception of his brother Mycroft, who was smarter than he was, and it maddened him to the point of unreason. He could never catch Moriarty in any of his imagined schemes, which only reinforced his conviction that the professor was, indeed, an evil genius. I have explored this theory in, so far, five novels (The Infernal Device, Death By Gaslight, The Great Game, The Empress of India, and the soon-to-be-released, Who Thinks Evil), and in these four stories.

(The middle name of “Clovis,” incidently is my addition, to differentiate Professor James Moriarty from his brother Colonel James Moriarty, who is mentioned in one of Sir Arthur’s stories.)

My name is Professor James Clovis Moriarty, Ph. D., F.R.A.S. You may have heard of me. I have been the author of a number of well-regarded scientific monographs and journal articles over the past few decades, including a treatise on the Binomial Theorem, and a monograph titled “The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” which was well received in scientific circles both in Great Britain and on the continent. My recent paper in the British Astronomical Journal, “Observations on the July, 1889 Eclipse of Mercury with Some Speculations Concerning the Effect of Gravity on Light Waves,” has occasioned some comment among those few who could understand its implications.

But I fear that if you know my name, it is, in all probability, not through any of my published scientific papers. Further, my current, shall I say, notoriety, was not of my own doing and most assuredly not by my choice. I am by nature a retiring, some would have it secretive, person.

Over the past few years narratives from the memoirs of a certain Dr. John Watson concerning that jackanapes who calls himself a “consulting detective,” Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have been appearing in the Strand magazine and elsewhere with increasing frequency, and have attained a, to my mind, most unwarranted popularity. Students of the “higher criticism,” as those insufferable pedants who devote their lives to picking over minuscule details of Dr. Watson’s stories call their ridiculous avocation, have analyzed Watson’s rather pedestrian prose with the avid attention gourmands pay to mounds of goose-liver pate. They extract hidden meanings from every word, and extrapolate facts not in evidence from every paragraph. Which leads them unfailingly to conclusions even more specious than those in which Holmes himself indulges.

Entirely too much of this misdirected musing concerns me and my relationship with the self-anointed master detective. Amateur detection enthusiasts have wasted much time and energy in speculation as to how Sherlock Holmes and I first met, and just what caused the usually unflappable Holmes to describe me as “the Napoleon of crime” without supplying the slightest evidence to support this blatant canard.

I propose to tell that story now, both to satisfy this misplaced curiosity and to put an end to the various speculations which have appeared in certain privately-circulated monographs. To set the record straight: Holmes and I are not related; I have not had improper relations with any of his female relatives; I did not steal his childhood inamorata away from him. Neither did he, to the best of my knowledge, perform any of these services for me or anyone in my family.

In any case, I assure you that I will no longer take such accusations lightly. Privately distributed though these monographs may be, their authors will have to answer for them in a court of law if this continues.

Shortly before that ridiculous episode at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes had the temerity to describe me to his befuddled amanuensis as “organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” (By which he meant London, of course). What crimes I had supposedly committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics, and none were offered. The good doctor took Holmes’s unsupported word for this unsupportable insult. Had Holmes not chosen to disappear for three years after his foul accusation, I most assuredly would have had him in the dock for slander.

And then, when Holmes returned from his extended vacation, during which time he did not have the kindness, the decency, to pass on one word that would let his dear companion know that he was not dead, he gave an account of our “struggle” at the falls that any child of nine would have recognized as a complete work of fiction-but it fooled Watson.

The truth about the Reichenbach incident-but no, that is not for this narrative. Just permit me a brief pause, the merest aside in this chronicle before I go on, so that I may draw your attention to some of the details of that story that should have alerted the merest tyro to the fact that he was being diddled-but that Watson swallowed whole.

In the narrative that he published under the name “The Final Problem,” Watson relates that Holmes appeared in his consulting room one day in April of 1891 and told him that he was being threatened by Professor Moriarty-myself-and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected to be attacked again, probably by a man using an air-rifle. If that were so, was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and thus place him, also, in deadly peril?

At that meeting Holmes declares that in three days he will be able to place “the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang,” in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason. But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. Well now! If this were so, would not Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the hotel of his choosing-or in the Yard itself-to keep him safe for the next three days? But Holmes says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?

Holmes then arranges for Watson to join him in this supposedly hasty flight. They meet at Victoria Station the next morning, where Watson has trouble recognizing Holmes, who has disguised himself as a “venerable Italian priest,” presumably to fool pursuers. This assumes that Holmes’s enemies can recognize the great detective, but have no idea what his good friend Dr. Watson, who wears no disguise, who indeed is congenitally incapable of disguise, looks like.