by June Thomson
The reference in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ to Watson’s account of the Sign of Four case is surely another example of Watson’s carelessness over facts, a point which has already been examined in Appendix One under the notes on Chapter Six for the dating of this particular account.
Holmes’ attitude to Watson as his chronicler is ambivalent. On the one hand, he praises him for choosing those cases which, though trivial in themselves, best illustrate his own skills at ‘logical synthesis’ rather than concentrating on the causes célèbres. However, he criticises Watson over his style and for putting too much ‘life and colour’ into his accounts to the detriment of that ‘severe reasoning from cause to effect’ which Holmes considered the most important feature of his investigations. As he remarks, ‘Crime is common. Logic is rare.’
No budding writer likes to have his work disparaged and, quite naturally, Watson was annoyed by Holmes’ attitude, seeing it as an example of his egotism, although the reproof was not entirely unjust. As an author, Watson has on occasions a tendency towards exaggeration which is seen, for example, in his description of Alexander Holder (‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’). It is difficult to believe that the senior partner in the second largest City of London bank would behave quite as hysterically as in Watson’s description of him plucking at his hair and banging his head against the wall. Holmes was not the only one with a leaning towards the dramatic.
However, when Holmes himself later turned author and wrote up an account of his own, ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’, he was to admit it was not easy to keep rigidly to facts and figures if the material was to interest the reader. When he came to write his second account, ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, a case which occurred after his retirement from active practice, his style contains as much ‘life and colour’ in the way of description as any of Watson’s narratives.
Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, showed more sensitivity on the subject of Watson’s authorship when he was introduced to him at the beginning of the Greek Interpreter case. ‘I am glad to meet you, sir,’ he says to Watson. ‘I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler.’ It is an obvious reference to the publication several months earlier of A Study in Scarlet and was intended to flatter for, by this time, Holmes’ name was already well known. Like his brother, Mycroft could show considerable social charm when the occasion demanded it.
Because of this reference, the Greek Interpreter case is usually assigned to the summer of 1888, although some commentators have preferred to date it much earlier on the grounds that Holmes would not have waited for over six years before even mentioning to Watson that he had a brother, let alone introducing him to Mycroft. However, the time gap is perfectly understandable. As Watson explains in the opening paragraph of ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, Holmes was extremely reticent both about his relations and his early life, an attitude Watson interpreted as an indication of Holmes’ lack of emotion. This is certainly part of the explanation. But, as we have seen in Chapter One, Holmes’ unhappy childhood could well have caused him deliberately to avoid discussing that period in his life as too painful a subject.
It was an experience which had affected Mycroft as well. Like Holmes, he was a bachelor without friends, and was even more unsociable than his brother, his life being restricted to his Whitehall office, his lodgings in Pall Mall and the Diogenes Club* opposite his rooms, of which he was a founder-member and where he could be found every evening from a quarter to five until twenty to eight. As Holmes says of him, ‘Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them.’ For him to break his routine and actually visit Baker Street would be as extraordinary as seeing a tram coming down a country lane.
Holmes was evidently in close contact with his brother as he speaks of consulting him ‘again and again’ over difficult cases. Indeed, Mycroft had expected Holmes to ask for his advice over the Manor House affair shortly before introducing him to Watson. Presumably the two brothers met either at Mycroft’s bachelor apartment or at the Diogenes Club in the Strangers’ Room, the only part of the premises where conversation was permitted. He never apparently visited Holmes in Baker Street, for when he called there during the Greek Interpreter inquiry his presence was so unexpected that Holmes gave a start of astonishment on seeing him. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Watson had not met him before 1888.
There was no filial jealousy between the two brothers. In fact, Holmes openly acknowledged Mycroft’s superior powers of observation and deduction. But, through lack of ambition and energy as well as an inability to work out the legal practicalities of bringing a case to court, Mycroft preferred to conduct his detection from the comfort of his armchair. If it meant exerting himself, he would rather his deductions were considered wrong than go to the trouble of proving them right.
Much to Watson’s amusement, he was treated to a demonstration of Mycroft’s superior powers of observation when the latter corrected his brother over the matter of the number of children a passer-by in the street possessed from the toys the man carried under his arm. It was clearly a game the brothers had played before, perhaps even in boyhood, and indicates a close and warm relationship. Holmes’ manner of addressing his brother as ‘my dear Mycroft’ suggests affection, while Mycroft’s use of the term ‘my dear boy’ has an almost paternal ring about it, an aspect of their relationship which has already been examined in Chapter One.
Ostensibly Mycroft, who had, as Holmes describes it, ‘an extraordinary faculty for figures’,* was employed as an auditor in some of the Government departments for a salary of £450. It was only eight years later, in November 1895 during the case of the Bruce-Partington plans, that Holmes confided in Watson Mycroft’s true role. With his unique capacity for remembering and correlating facts, Mycroft acted as a confidential adviser to various Government ministers on which policies they should pursue. As such, Mycroft was the most indispensable man in the whole country and at times was the British Government, as Holmes rather dramatically expresses it. ‘The conclusions of every department are passed to him,’ Holmes explains to Watson, ‘and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.’
Some commentators have regarded this long silence on Holmes’ part about his brother’s true role as curious, given the close friendship between Holmes and Watson. But as it was a highly confidential Governmental matter, Holmes may not have been in the position to divulge it even to Watson until he had received permission to do so from Mycroft.
Physically, the brothers were not alike. While Sherlock was thin, Mycroft, although tall, was stout to the point of corpulence and gave the impression of ‘uncouth physical inertia’, in contrast to Sherlock’s quick and energetic manner. But despite his unwieldy frame, Mycroft’s head, with its ‘masterful brow, alert deep-set eyes, steel grey in colour, and firm lips’, was so strongly suggestive of his dominant mind that one quickly forgot his ‘gross body’. It was only in the sharpness of his expression that Watson could see any family resemblance, and Mycroft’s eyes had on occasions the same ‘far-away, introspective look’ of Sherlock’s when he was brooding over some particularly difficult case.
It was during this same period, 1881–9, that one other important encounter was made, two if the Charles Augustus Milverton inquiry is included, although commentators disagree over its date. However, for reasons explained in Appendix One, I am more inclined to assign this case to the later period, 1894–1902, and this investigation will therefore be more fully discussed in Chapter Fourteen.
But there is no doubt at all that at some time between 1881 and 1889, almost certainly towards the latter end of the period, Holmes came into contact with someone who was to play a significant role in his future; Watson’s, too, although it was Holmes who was the more deeply affected. This man was Professor James Moriarty, whom Holmes was subsequently to refer to as the ‘Napoleon of crime’.
I
t is not known precisely when Holmes first heard of him, nor did he actually meet him face to face until several years later. But by January 1888, the date usually ascribed to the Valley of Fear case, Holmes had already accumulated a comprehensive dossier on Moriarty’s background and activities. According to his researches, Moriarty came from a good family and had enjoyed the benefits of an excellent education but had inherited criminal tendencies, thus bearing out Holmes’ theory about the importance of heredity and how certain aptitudes and characteristics can be passed on to subsequent generations through the blood line.
Little else is known about Moriarty’s background, except for the fact that he was a bachelor and had two brothers. The younger one was a station-master in the West of England and was presumably respectable. Another, an army Colonel, was also called James, a duplication which has led some commentators to assume that James Moriarty was a double-barrelled surname. The family may have been of Irish descent, as other Sherlockian scholars have suggested, although this is not known for certain. Neither is his date of birth. While he is clearly older than Holmes, any theories which give the year he was born, and they vary from 1844 to as early as 1830, are speculative.
What is quite evident, however, is Moriarty’s remarkable intelligence. Holmes, even when acknowledging the man’s genius for evil, openly admits his admiration for the Professor’s ‘extraordinary mental powers’ and ‘phenomenal mathematical faculty’.
‘My horror at his crimes,’ he was later to confess to Watson, ‘was lost in my admiration for his skill.’
At the age of twenty-one, Moriarty had written a treatise on the binomial theorem, as a result of which he was offered the Chair of Mathematics at ‘one of our smaller universities’, a post he was still holding when Holmes first came to hear of him. Although Holmes does not specify which university this was, Philip A. Shreffler may well be correct in suggesting it was Durham, a theory he put forward in an article, ‘Moriarty: A Life Study’, published in the Baker Street Journal in June 1973. According to this theory, Holmes cannot be referring to either Oxford, Cambridge or London as none of these can be described as ‘one of our smaller universities’, while the pronoun ‘our’ suggests an establishment in England rather than Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. As the only English provincial university at the time was Durham, it must have been there that Moriarty held the Chair of Mathematics, although there is no record of his having served in this post.
The problem of raising a binomial, that is two terms connected by a plus or minus sign, to the nth power, had taxed mathematicians for many years. Although simple cases such as (a + b)2 = a2 + 2ab + b2 could be easily worked out, high powers proved difficult and fractional powers impossible. In 1655, Sir Isaac Newton had devised the binomial theorem:
which allowed the binomial, (a + b), to be raised to any power n.
Although the theorem was proved by the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel in the early part of the nineteenth century, Mr Poul Anderson in his article ‘A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem’, published in the Baker Street Journal in January 1955, has suggested that Moriarty was working on the basic idea of number itself and that he had developed a general binomial theorem which could be applied to other forms of algebra.
Moriarty was also the author of The Dynamics of the Asteroid, a book which ascended to ‘such rarefied heights of mathematics’ that it was claimed there was ‘no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it’. An asteroid is a tiny planet revolving round the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. While it is too small to affect the orbits of the nine major planets, their gravitations simultaneously influence the orbit of the asteroid, although no general mathematical solution had been formulated to express even the effect of three of these planets (the three-body problem), let alone the nine.
In the same article, ‘A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem’, Mr Poul Anderson has suggested that Professor Moriarty had discovered a general solution for the orbit of an asteroid together with a set of equations which could be applied to any similar body, as far as even the n-body problem. Mr William S. Baring-Gould has further suggested that Moriarty may have anticipated Einstein’s equation E = mc2, which prepared the way for the development of the atomic and hydrogen bomb, and that he may also have supplied the theoretical groundwork for man-made satellites and space stations.
Whether this is true or not, it is clear Holmes was correct in describing Professor Moriarty’s powers as ‘phenomenal’, although he had deliberately chosen to dedicate his genius to a much more sinister purpose than research into pure mathematics. Instead, he had set up an international criminal organisation of over a hundred members, including pickpockets, blackmailers, cardsharpers and murderers, which he ruled over with a rod of iron. The punishment for any transgression of the organisation’s rules was death.
His Chief of Staff was Colonel Sebastian Moran, son of Alexander Moran, the former British minister to Persia. Born in 1840, Colonel Moran had been educated at Eton and Oxford University and later joined the First Bengalore Pioneers,* an Indian Army regiment. He had served with some distinction in several campaigns and had been mentioned in despatches. He was also the celebrated author of two books, Heavy Game in the Himalayas and Three Months in the Jungle, and was considered one of the best shots in the world, a skill he was later to put to deadly use.
Although there was no open scandal, he was obliged to retire from the army and, on his return to England, Moriarty recruited him into his organisation to carry out those top-class crimes which none of the ordinary gang-members would undertake. Holmes, who considered him the second most dangerous man in London, suspected him of being responsible for the murder in 1887 of Mrs Stewart from Lauder.
Professor Moriarty paid Moran the huge sum of £6,000 a year, more than the Prime Minister’s salary. It was money Moriarty could well afford, for his criminal activities brought him considerable wealth. By tracing some of Moriarty’s cheques, Holmes had discovered he had six separate bank accounts and suspected he owned twenty in all, the bulk of his fortune being invested abroad in Deutsche Bank or Credit Lyonnais.
The problem was finding evidence which would prove Moriarty’s guilt. It was not an easy task. Holmes had visited his rooms on three occasions, twice legitimately, using different pretexts for calling on him but leaving before the Professor returned home. Although Holmes does not give details, he hints that on the third occasion he broke into Moriarty’s rooms during his absence and searched his papers but found nothing incriminating. Holmes does not make it clear where these rooms were situated, whether at the university, possibly Durham, or in London where Moriarty may have kept a separate establishment for his use during the vacations. As his criminal organisation was London-based, this is perfectly feasible, in which case Holmes would have timed his visits to coincide with Moriarty’s presence in the capital.
Nor is it clear how Holmes first heard of Moriarty, although it may have been through a man known by the pseudonym Fred Porlock. The surname is probably a reference to the man from Porlock who called on the poet Samuel Coleridge and interrupted his composition of ‘Kubla Khan’. Or Holmes may have already been aware of Moriarty’s existence through his own enquiries and established contact with Porlock himself. Whatever the circumstances, Porlock was a useful informer inside Moriarty’s organisation, what in the language of John le Carré’s spy fiction is referred to as a ‘mole’.
Porlock, a ‘shifty and evasive’ character, was a minor member of Moriarty’s gang, a pilot fish to his whale, a jackal to his lion. Out of what Holmes refers to as ‘a rudimentary aspiration towards right’ but principally for financial gain – the ‘judicious stimulation of a ten-pound note’, as Holmes ironically calls it – Porlock was willing on occasions to supply Holmes with advance information of Moriarty’s plans. These sums of ten pounds, a large amount of money in the 1880s, were presumably paid out of Holmes’ pocket and were always sent in cash to Camberwell Post Office. Communication between them was in co
de, using a system which is virtually unbreakable. The message was composed of a set of figures which referred to a page, to lines on that page and to the position within those lines of individual words contained in a certain book, the identity of which was known only to the correspondents. Anyone not knowing which book had been used to compile the cipher had little hope of unscrambling the message.
In the Valley of Fear inquiry, Porlock sent the coded message but lost his nerve at the last moment and failed to supply the name of the volume on which the code was based. It took all of Holmes’ ingenuity and knowledge of ciphers, on which he was an expert, in addition to some invaluable assistance from Watson, to deduce that the code was taken from a page in Whitaker’s Almanac.
Breaking through the web of evil which surrounded Professor Moriarty was to prove a much more difficult task. As Holmes says of him, he had a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations. This is an interesting echo of his comment on Mycroft’s role. In fact, the two men had much in common. Both possessed great mathematical skills. Both men also concealed their true activities, Mycroft as adviser to Her Majesty’s Government, Moriarty as head of an international criminal gang.
But it is between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty that the closest parallels can be drawn. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes refers to himself as a ‘specialist in crime’, an epithet which could be applied with equal accuracy to Moriarty; but while Holmes had dedicated his own phenomenal powers to the fight against crime, Moriarty had concentrated his on building up a Mafia-style underworld organisation, the sole purpose of which was the perpetration of crime.
