Characters / The Canon
Professor Moriarty
Professor of mathematics; Napoleon of crime
“He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.”
At a glance
The profile
James Moriarty held a mathematics chair on the strength of pure genius — his Dynamics of an Asteroid ascends, Holmes says, to such rarefied heights that no one could review it. Dark rumours cost him the chair; London gained an army coach, and crime gained a general. He plans; others act; nothing connects back. For years even Watson had never heard the name, which was precisely the point.
He appears in person in a single story and casts a shadow over the whole canon. The interview at Baker Street — two intellects finishing each other's threats — remains the finest villain scene Conan Doyle wrote, and the struggle above the Reichenbach fall gave detective fiction its archetype of the equal-and-opposite adversary. Every criminal mastermind since is his student.
In the canon
The Final Problem
1893
Moriarty's web closes; Holmes trades London for the Alps and, above the Reichenbach falls, the world loses its best and wisest man — for a while.
The Valley of Fear
1915
A ciphered warning arrives too late for the man at Birlstone Manor — but the body with the shotgun face is not what it seems, and Moriarty's shadow is on the case.
The Adventure of the Empty House
1903
Holmes returns from the dead with a wax bust in the window and Colonel Moran's air-gun in the dark — the great hiatus ends with a snap of handcuffs.