Moriarty lives. Next, there is the “Moriarty lives” school: In “The Holmes-Moriarty Duel,” Eustace Portugal makes an elaborate case that Holmes died at the falls and Moriarty took his place. Kenneth Clark Reeler, in “Well Then, About That Chasm . . . ,” suggests that Moriarty was never in the falls but lived to confront Holmes later in The Valley of Fear, which Reeler dates post-hiatus. In “A Game at Which Two Can Play: A Reichenbach Rumination,” Auberon Redfearn concludes that Moriarty escaped death because his black cloak (Watson notices only a “black figure,” but a black cape or cloak is standard garb for villains) acted as a parachute until it caught on a branch and Moran was able to rescue him. Roger Mortimore, in “Lying Detective,” proposes that Holmes killed the wrong man at the Reichenbach Falls and that Moriarty took on a new identity—Colonel Sebastian Moran. Jason Rouby reveals, in “A Confidential Communication,” that Holmes let Moriarty go and that Moriarty subsequently achieved moral rehabilitation and, assuming the name J. Edgar Hoover, pursued a career in law enforcement in the United States. C. Arnold Johnson, in “An East Wind,” concludes that Moriarty returned to London as Fu Manchu, while William Leonard (“Re: Vampires”) suggests that Moriarty was in fact Count Dracula and thus survived the falls. Robert Pasley, in “The Return of Moriarty,” and Rev. Wayne Wall (“The Satanic Motif in Moriarty”) argue that Moriarty was the Devil incarnate and thus could not be killed.
Holmes is guilty. There is a widespread school of “Holmes planned it all.” The idea is first suggested by Walter P. Armstrong, Jr. (“The Truth About Sherlock Holmes”), who proposes that neither Holmes nor Watson was fooled by Moriarty’s note and that Holmes had anticipated a confrontation and took comfort in his knowledge of Baritsu. A similar view is expressed by W. S. Bristowe in “The Truth About Moriarty,” and by Gordon R. Speck, in “Holmes, Heroics, Hiatus: A Man to Match Swiss Mountains.”
Albert and Myrna Silverstein, in “Concerning the Extraordinary Events at the Reichenbach Falls,” express the darker view that principally because Holmes could not obtain sufficient evidence to convict Moriarty, he enticed Moriarty to follow him to the falls for the express purpose of killing him. In “The Supreme Struggle,” Nicholas Utechin writes, “The fifty-six years old ex-Professor, army coach and ruined arch-criminal probably never even saw his assailant [Sherlock Holmes] before he was sent spinning to an instant death in the gorge below.”
Holmes killed the wrong man. In “The Unknown Moriarty,” Larry Waggoner argues that it was only a relative, a cousin or brother, of Moriarty who was thrown into the cauldron. Marvin Grasse, in “Who Killed Holmes?,” suggests that Watson and Mycroft dumped Holmes himself into the Reichenbach Falls, while Tony Medawar argues, in “The Final Solution,” that Watson did it alone after Moriarty failed. Page Heldenbrand, in the heretical “The Duplicity of Sherlock Holmes,” concludes that Holmes had a tryst at the falls with Irene Adler and that she fell into the falls, perhaps committing suicide!
Faith of the fundamentalists. Finally, there is the fundamentalist school, which accepts that Holmes indeed died at the falls. Anthony Boucher, in “Was the Later Holmes an Imposter?,” suggests that after Holmes’s death, Mycroft replaced him with his cousin “Sherrinford.” In perhaps the earliest published theory, Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, in his seminal “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” contends that the entire post-Reichenbach Canon was made up by Watson, to supplement his income.
1“The Final Problem” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1893, in the Strand Magazine (New York) Christmas Number 1893, and in a number of American newspapers in late November and early December 1893.
2Christopher Morley, in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship, the first annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, writes: “Devoted readers have rarely had such a shock as the opening words of this story when it first appeared . . .”
3Note that Professor Moriarty’s Christian name is never given in “The Final Problem,” although in “The Empty House” Holmes calls the professor James Moriarty, curiously the same name as his brother’s. See Volume II, “The Empty House,” note 62.
4Reuter’s Telegram Company was founded in London in October 1851 by a young German bank clerk named Paul Julius Reuters. Two years earlier, Reuters had used both telegraphy and carrier pigeons to transmit stockmarket quotations between Brussels and Aachen, Germany. His newest endeavour eschewed the pigeons, taking advantage of the new London-Calais cable to run stock prices between London and Paris. Soon the Reuter’s Telegram Company, which became known as Reuters, had expanded in leaps and bounds, relaying general and breaking news across England and all over Europe. By 1865, Reuters’s reputation and proficiency were such that it was the first European news organisation to break the story of President Lincoln’s assassination. Little wonder that it was one of the few places to report on Holmes and Moriarty.
5As Bert Coules, head scriptwriter for the BBC’s most recent Sherlock Holmes radio series, points out, regardless of how “extremely condensed” the accounts were, the reporting of the death of a figure as famous as Holmes should have raised a massive public outcry. Yet until now, there was none, leading one to wonder whether those other accounts somehow came to the conclusion that Holmes was still alive. Coules theorises that perhaps Watson engineered some sort of media cover-up regarding Holmes’s death; after all, “the tone of the opening and closing of the piece is certainly in keeping with the initial breaking of devastating news, rather than the amplifying of already-known facts.”
6To which three cases Watson refers is unclear. See Chronological Table.
7The first known example of an air gun, which used compressed air to propel bullets, was a single-shot model made by Güter of Nuremberg circa 1530. Considerably cleaner and quieter than guns using powder, air guns were used primarily to hunt game. Upper-class gentlemen in Victorian society were also known to carry .40- to .50-calibre air guns by concealing them in specially designed walking canes. One might imagine Holmes’s nemesis using a gun of this type; but not only does Holmes not reveal what sort of air gun he feared, he also never mentions them again. “If Holmes is afraid of airguns, as he tells Watson he is,” Bert Coules puzzles, “why don’t these weapons figure at all in the rest of the story?” The omission remains unexplained until “The Empty House,” when we learn that the chief lieutenant of Professor Moriarty carried one.
8“[S]urely this endangers Watson even more,” comments Dante M. Torrese, in “Some Musings on ‘The Final Problem,’ ” “by giving Moriarty’s men the impression that Holmes does remain for the night.”
9Professor Moriarty also appears in The Valley of Fear, which is generally regarded as occurring before “The Final Problem” (see Chronological Table). If such a date for The Valley of Fear is accepted, then Watson’s remarks here must be seen as a pose, or, in the view of John Dardess, “merely literary license, necessary for the properly dramatic introduction of Moriarty to the public . . .”
10Ian McQueen observes that “within less than ten years, since joining up with Watson, Holmes had advanced in fortune from being a man who had to share lodgings for reasons of expense to having achieved sufficient means to live as he pleased without worrying about money at all.” See the Appendix, “I stand to win a little on this next race . . .” to “Silver Blaze” for one possible explanation.
11By contrast, when Dr. Watson wrote the preface to His Last Bow in 1917, he reported that Holmes divided his time between philosophy and agriculture. Of course, it is possible that Holmes’s chemical research and agricultural pursuits might have overlapped or that Watson used the word “philosophy” in its older sense of “the study of natural phenomena.”
12In mathematics, the theorem devised by Sir Isaac Newton in 1676 (and proved by Jakob Bernoulli in a posthumous 1713 publication) expressing, among other things, the expansion of a binomial—for example, (a + b), raised to any power, such as (a + b)n. Where n=2, (a+b)n=a2 + 2ab + b2.
13A private t
utor for entrance or promotional examinations for the officer corps.
14Moriarty’s reference to the Victorian science of phrenology is intended to insult Holmes. “Phrenologists were always weighing the brains of deceased murderers and madmen,” Thomas M. McDade writes, “and comparing them in size with those of statesmen and writers, usually favourably to the latter.”
Franz Joseph Gall, the “father” of phrenology, and his successors believed not just that the size of the brain dictated mental capacity (see “The Blue Carbuncle,” note 12), but that personality traits such as self-esteem, wit, and a faculty for music or math were determined by thirty-five “organs” comprising the brain. A person’s characteristics could thus be discerned by observing which parts of his or her skull seemed relatively large or small. Phrenology may have remained the province of scientific and intellectual debate had it not been for the American brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler, who founded the American Phrenological Journal in 1838 and began conducting “head readings,” lectures, and courses in New York and England (Lorenzo opened the Fowler Institute in London in 1863). Older phrenologists regarded the avowedly practical Fowlers as hucksters, but the public took eagerly to this new “science”—with decidedly mixed results. The esteemed British journalist and abolitionist Harriet Martineau, in her 1877 Autobiography, expressed her reservations at the phenomenon by recounting how, after a phrenologist read the head of one Sydney Smith and proclaimed him a born naturalist, Mr. Smith, in wonderment, replied, “I don’t know a fish from a bird”; and also how her own reading determined that she “could never accomplish any thing, through my remarkable deficiency in both physical and moral courage.” Ambrose Bierce, in his satiric The Devil’s Dictionary (1911; first published as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906), summed up his own skepticism by defining phrenology, in part, as “The science of picking the pocket through the scalp.” Madeleine Stern suggests, in The Game’s a Head, that Holmes himself may well have studied with Lorenzo Fowler in London and points out many fields of interest common to the two scholars. Perhaps at the behest of Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle had a phrenological analysis made by the Institute in 1896.
That Moriarty calls attention to Holmes’s lack of “frontal development” is a calculated slap in the face, for two of the major frontal organs were said to represent “comparism” (abstract thinking) and “causality” (the ability to determine cause and effect). The insult becomes even more pointed after consultation with George Combe’s influential A System of Phrenology (Fifth Ed., 1853), which described the “causality” organ by declaring, “It has long been a matter of general observation, that men possessing a profound and comprehensive intellect, such as Socrates, Bacon, and Galileo, have the upper part of the forehead greatly developed.”
15David Merrell makes the startling suggestion that Holmes actually pulled the trigger, immediately killing Moriarty, and that the rest of his tale is a “cover-up,” indulged in by brother Mycroft, for the purpose of preserving his reputation.
16For Holmes to tip his hand so patently seems an uncharacteristic blunder or, as D. Martin Dakin puts it, “an incredible act of folly . . . just an invitation to [Moriarty] to make his escape, and probably give warning to all his associates too.” More likely, Dakin believes, is that Holmes actually said something like “After your arrest,” and that Watson put the day in his notes after the fact.
17The enclosure for the prisoner in a criminal court.
18A London bazaar, located in the Strand.
19Mortimer Street, which runs parallel to Oxford Street, is strangely not in the neighbourhood of either of Watson’s known medical practices, in Kensington and in the Paddington district.
20Eustace Portugal contends that Moriarty deliberately missed the train, in order to lull Holmes into a false sense of security.
21The close-fitting, long-sleeved, ankle-length cassock was worn by Catholic and Anglican clergy either as an ordinary, walking-around garment or as an undergarment beneath liturgical vestments. (These days, it is generally used only in the latter capacity.) Holmes’s black cassock was standard for a common priest, whereas cardinals’ cassocks are scarlet (and occasionally purple), and the pope’s, white. Of course, either of the latter choices would have been a bit conspicuous as a disguise.
22Although Mycroft Holmes’s aid here seems purely altruistic, Ronald A. Knox believes instead that he was a double agent, working for Moriarty while feeding information to his brother. It is clear, argues Knox, that someone leaked information from Holmes’s camp to the professor, and he accuses Mycroft of being the “mole.” This information would have included both a description of Holmes, whose physical appearance was not, at this time, known by either the public or Moriarty (remember that Moriarty, upon meeting Holmes, “peered at [him] with great curiosity,” yet Moriarty’s gang recognized Holmes sufficiently to be able to attack him), and the precise time of Holmes’s departure for Victoria Station (explaining how Moriarty could have followed so closely). Knox further identifies Mycroft as Moriarty’s agent in “The Greek Interpreter” (see “The Greek Interpreter”) and as Porlock, a nom de plume of an informant in the Moriarty camp in The Valley of Fear; yet he understands that Mycroft inhabits a difficult rôle as “a man playing a delicate part in an irreconcilable duel between his brother on the one hand, and a super criminal on the other.” Sherlock Holmes knew of his brother’s deceptions and boldly risked relying on him, concealing from Watson Mycroft’s equivocal part.
23By this, Holmes means that Moriarty, as a man of means, might be able to hire a smaller-sized, dedicated train to take him alone to his intended destination. “Though specials are still run for parties, the one-man train was usurped by the hire-car [rental car, in America] and did not survive the First World War,” writes Bernard Davies, in “Canonical Connections.” “A purse deep enough for the suitably grand fare—usually five shillings a mile—could command a first-class carriage, a light engine, and a line cleared of slower traffic.”
24The question of which train, and which route, the pair took from London to France is hotly debated by American, English, and French scholars. Christopher Morley, author of the first annotated collection of Holmes stories, notes that there were regular steamers that crossed the Channel from Dover to Calais, from Folkestone to Boulogne, and from Newhaven to Dieppe. Holmes’s original plan may have involved taking the Dover-Calais boat, which was the shortest of the three crossings at twenty-two miles. There were other possible trains too, which ran from London to Dover or Folkestone (but made no stop at Canterbury). Amid this confusion, scholars disagree as to which train was the “Continental Express” Holmes and Watson took from London, and what times it might have left Victoria Station and arrived at Canterbury and then at Dover.
Once Holmes decided to make the crossing at Newhaven instead (a much longer crossing, at sixty-seven miles), he and Watson would have had to take a fairly lengthy train ride from Canterbury to Newhaven, “a tedious [trip],” according to Morley, “involving probably two changes of trains at Ashford and Lewes, but passing along the beautiful country of the South Downs to which Holmes eventually retired.” The train from Canterbury to Newhaven, naturally, is also a matter of vehement discussion. More detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this volume but may be found in B. D. J. Walsh’s “Railways of Sherlock Holmes,” Bernard Prunet’s “The Final Problem: A Study in Railways,” and Bernard Davies’s “Canonical Connections.”
25June Thomson suggests that Holmes underestimated Moriarty, who would have concluded that Holmes and Watson would not follow the luggage to Paris. Instead, Moriarty considered Brussels as their possible destination. Telegraphing to an agent there, he waited in Dover for information. Holmes and Watson were not travelling incognito, and it would not have been difficult to trace them.
26D. Martin Dakin points out that this entire imagined scenario meant that Moriarty could not be ensnared by the London police on the following Monday, as Holmes had supposedly prearranged—unless for some reason
Moriarty were to hurry back home in time to be captured. It is evident from later events that Holmes never expected the police to arrest “the big fish” and that he would have to personally deal with Moriarty.
27The two preceding sentences appear only in the English book edition of “The Final Problem.”
28French: a masterstroke.
29Bernard Prunet wonders why Moriarty went to the trouble of chartering a “special” if he believed Holmes and Watson were proceeding to Dover, for the regular Continental Express at 11.00 A.M. would have delivered Moriarty to Dover in time to catch the same ship bound to Calais. Prunet also argues that Holmes could have already decided to leave the train at Canterbury before he even boarded it. Holmes never said explicitly that he intended that he and Watson go on to Paris—he told the porter only that his luggage was to be booked all the way through.
30The case definitely began on Friday, April 24, 1891. Holmes and Watson travelled from London to Brussels on the following day (Saturday, the twenty-fifth, although Michael Kaser suggests that they arrived in the early morning of the twenty-sixth). They presumably spent Sunday, April 26, in Brussels, moving to Strasburg on Monday, April 27, the “third day.”
31Holmes reveals in “The Empty House” that this was not true: Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London, was still very much at large, as was Parker, the garroter. As to the colonel’s escaping arrest, Holmes says, “So cleverly was the colonel concealed that, even when the Moriarty gang was broken up, we could not incriminate him.” How Parker escaped custody is unknown, except that Holmes says of him, “He is a harmless enough fellow,” and so perhaps was not arrested.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 95
