🌊 The Reichenbach Falls
A fearful place in the Swiss Alps: a torrent plunging into a coal-black abyss above Meiringen. The narrow dead-end path along its ledge hosted the most famous struggle in detective fiction — and, for three years of readers, its grave.
“It is a fearful place. The torrent... plunges into a tremendous abyss.”
A grave chosen by an author
Conan Doyle, weary of his own creation, went looking for a sublime place to end him and found the Reichenbach: a great green sheet of water above Meiringen, plunging into a coal-black abyss that boils like a cauldron and throws up spray like the smoke from a burning house. The narrow path along its ledge is a dead end — the perfect stage for a final, fatal confrontation.
The most famous struggle in detective fiction
Lured away by a forged message about a dying Englishwoman, Watson leaves his friend alone on the path. Moriarty arrives; the two men grapple at the brink; and — so the world believes for three years — go over together into the torrent, the detective and his equal-and-opposite, locked in each other's arms.
A death the readers refused
The public mourned a fictional man in black armbands and besieged the author with letters until he relented. The falls thus became not an ending but a hinge — the point from which Holmes secretly walks away, to return in The Empty House. Today a plaque and a funicular mark the spot for the pilgrims who still come.
Who it touches
Where it appears
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 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.