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IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: December 1893

US: December 1893

COLLECTION

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894

CHARACTERS

Professor Moriarty Mathematics professor turned criminal genius; Holmes’s archenemy and nemesis.

Mycroft Holmes Elder brother of Sherlock Holmes.

Peter Steiler Landlord of the Englischer Hof hotel in Meiringen.

Of all the Holmes tales written by Conan Doyle, none caused as much of a stir as “The Final Problem.” Most significantly, of course, it tells of Holmes’s untimely death, but it also features the infamous villain Professor Moriarty—the most brilliant of all criminal masterminds and Holmes’s nemesis.

When the story was published in The Strand Magazine, the reaction was consternation, shock, even outrage. Letter after letter of protest arrived on the desks of the Strand and Conan Doyle, with one woman famously beginning her note to the author with, “You brute!” In London, black armbands were worn and the circulation of the Strand dropped so substantially that it almost closed down (see The dreadful event).

"I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression."

Dr. Watson

Justifiable homicide

Conan Doyle was taken aback by his readers’ extreme reaction. Later he defended himself by saying, “It was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defence, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.” He had long felt that Holmes was taking up too much of his life, and churning out story after story to deadline was a demanding task that took precious time away from his serious literary work. Also, by 1893, both Conan Doyle’s father Charles and his wife Louise were seriously ill. Charles died in October, and that same month Louise was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given just a few months to live—although in the end she survived for another 13 years (see Steel True, Blade Straight).

It was while Conan Doyle and Louise were vacationing in the Alps in August 1893 that the author made the decision to kill off Holmes. “He is becoming such a burden to me,” he told a friend, “that it makes my life unbearable.” It was there, in the Swiss Alps, that he found the perfect location for a fittingly dramatic finale: the spectacular Reichenbach Falls. When he had finished writing the story, Conan Doyle wrote in his notebook simply: “Killed Holmes.”

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This lantern slide made in 1895 captures Victoria Station much as it would have looked to Holmes and Watson as they made their escape to mainland Europe, via Canterbury.

The hunter hunted

In most of the other stories, Holmes is the hunter, sniffing out clues and finally cornering his quarry. However, in “The Final Problem” it is Holmes himself who is the prey, pursued relentlessly by the evil genius Moriarty. The entire tale is a chase in which Holmes must use his great skill not for his usual deductions, but instead to avoid capture. As Watson says, it is now as if Holmes himself were the criminal.

Watson engages us in the tragedy of Holmes’s death right from the start, opening with, “It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.” He says he has already stopped writing about Holmes and is only telling this story now because Moriarty’s brother, Colonel James Moriarty, is spreading false rumours, and he wants to set the record straight.

The last battle

The ground has already been laid for Holmes’s final disappearance from the world. He is no longer needed by society, or by Watson, in the way that he once was. Watson is not the disorientated young man who first met Holmes in A Study in Scarlet; he is now married with an established medical practice. The two no longer have the intimate relationship they once enjoyed, and see each other rarely. As for Holmes himself, he has successfully foiled the plans of many dangerous criminals. “I have not lived wholly in vain,” he declares prophetically; “the air of London is the sweeter for my presence.” But before he departs, there is one last villain to defeat—Moriarty, the greatest of them all.

One April evening in 1891, Watson is surprised by a visit from a clearly alarmed Holmes. When Watson asks what he is afraid of, Holmes answers, “Of air-guns.” As we later learn in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, this is the silent, deadly weapon used by Moriarty’s marksman, Colonel Moran. Holmes knows that he is in danger, and invites Watson to come with him on a trip to the Continent. Realizing that Watson needs to know more, Holmes begins to tell him about Moriarty.

"If I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit."

Sherlock Holmes

A CRIMINAL MIND

In his creation of Moriarty, Conan Doyle was influenced by the theories of 19th-century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso believed that some people inherit an irredeemably criminal nature, and that their nasty tendencies are evident in their appearance. Conan Doyle gave Moriarty all the benefits of nurture so as to emphasize the overwhelming effects of nature: Moriarty was born into privilege and became a mathematics prodigy and later a university professor, but his diabolical “hereditary tendencies” were ultimately destined to control him. Conan Doyle would use these same presuppositions to create Colonel Moran 10 years later, in “The Empty House.” For Moriarty, the inherited criminal tendency is particularly dangerous because it is allied to a brilliant brain. His high-domed forehead is a feature he shares with the similarly clever Holmes (and his brother Mycroft), but Moriarty is likened to a lizard or a snake, a sign of the evil behind his genius.

The Napoleon of crime

With a stroke of genius, Conan Doyle explains why Moriarty has not appeared in earlier tales. “Ay, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” Holmes cries. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him.” Moriarty presides over a vast criminal network, pulling all the strings, and yet with the skill of a master chess player, he completely avoids being linked to it. He has such safeguards against being identified or having any crime proved against him that the police are never able to bring him to trial, even though hundreds of crimes—forgeries, robberies, and murders—have been committed at his bidding.

Conan Doyle based Moriarty on a real master criminal named Adam Worth, whom he had heard about from William Pinkerton, the head of the American Pinkerton detective agency. At the time Conan Doyle was writing, Worth was languishing in a Belgian jail for a petty crime, where his true identity as the head of the world’s greatest organized crime network was unknown to local authorities. American-born Worth was indeed a criminal mastermind who ruled the roost in London, posing as a respectable art lover and racing man. The police could never pin anything on him and dubbed him “the Napoleon of crime.” In deference to Worth, Conan Doyle adopted this same nickname for Moriarty.

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Holmes and Watson do all they can to escape Moriarty—traveling from England, through France, and into Switzerland. Moriarty finally catches up to them at the Reichenbach Falls, where the final, deadly encounter occurs.

The dark side of Holmes

Adam Worth provided the bones for Moriarty, but Conan Doyle’s character is a complex figure. Moriarty is Holmes’s terrible mirror image—a distorted reflection of the great detective’s remarkable power. When Holmes describes Moriarty as “a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker,” he could easily be talking about himself. Holmes creates a chilling picture of how Moriarty operates. “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” This sounds remarkably similar to Watson’s description of Holmes in “The Cardboard Box”: the detective “loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime.”

The dark alter ego, sometimes called doppelgänger, is a classic feature of Gothic fiction. It emerges in stories such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Moriarty is the Mr Hyde to Holmes’s Dr. Jekyll. And, just as Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same, so Holmes is much more intertwined with Moriarty than he would care to admit. In order to solve crimes, Holmes has to think like a criminal, and he becomes, to some extent, tainted by the association. Indeed, as Holmes says to Watson of Moriarty, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill.”

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Watson and Holmes, played by David Burke (in his last appearance as Watson) and Jeremy Brett, are pictured here in the 1985 television adaptation of “The Final Problem.”

Mortal combat

Holmes tells Watson of his struggle to bring Moriarty to justice as though they are two great warriors doing battle: “Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent. He cut deep, and yet I just undercut him.” Holmes always enjoys the thrill of the chase, and this is the most exciting chase of his career. He remarks that he could happily retire, feeling his great work is done, if he could only bring the genius Moriarty down. Like a top athlete, he wants to go out on a high after winning the greatest contest of his career.

The crucial moment of the battle is now approaching, Holmes tells Watson. On the forthcoming Monday, the police will be able to move in and round up Moriarty’s entire criminal network, provided he can stay out of Moriarty’s clutches until then—since he will provide the key evidence that will convict Moriarty. However, the “Napoleon of crime” is thrilled by the challenge, too. With his customary chilling bravado, Moriarty has visited Holmes at 221B Baker Street that very morning, to get a good look at his adversary and to give him one last chance to back down. “If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me,” Moriarty warned him, “rest assured that I shall do as much to you.”

Holmes is not to be cowed, in spite of several attempts being made on his life throughout the day. He gives Watson strict instructions to meet him at Victoria Station the following morning, being careful not to be followed, and then leaves by climbing over the back garden wall.

"…you are now playing a double-handed game with me against the cleverest rogue and the most powerful syndicate of criminals in London."

Sherlock Holmes

The chase begins

Watson follows Holmes’s instructions precisely, taking a brougham cab to the station that he later discovers was driven by a disguised Mycroft Holmes. As he settles into the first-class carriage reserved for himself and Holmes, he is irritated to find himself joined by an elderly Italian priest. The reader may be one step ahead of the doctor here—the priest is, of course, Holmes in disguise. Unmasked, Holmes informs Watson that members of Moriarty’s gang had set fire to his rooms in 221B the previous evening, but that little damage was done. As the train pulls out of the station, Moriarty appears on the platform, angrily trying to stop the train. Watson breathes a sigh of relief when the train speeds away, but Holmes knows that Moriarty won’t be stopped so easily. He guesses that he will likely rent a “special” (one-car) train to pursue them. But he has a plan: they will give him the slip by getting off the train at Canterbury and detouring to Newhaven. The ploy works, and they see Moriarty’s train roaring by as they hide behind a stack of luggage on a platform at Canterbury Station.

After reaching Strasbourg via Brussels, they learn that the police have arrested Moriarty’s gang, but Moriarty has escaped. Holmes knows his enemy will now be set on revenge. Holmes and Watson decide to continue traveling, hoping to stay one step ahead of their pursuer. After a week’s walking in the Alps, they arrive in the Swiss town of Meiringen. At the advice of the hotel landlord, Peter Steiler, they make a trip to the spectacular Reichenbach Falls, where “the torrent… plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house.” As they leave the waterfalls, a boy approaches Watson with a letter, ostensibly from Steiler, asking him to return and tend to an English woman who is dying of tuberculosis. Holmes realizes at once that it is a hoax, but says nothing, clearly feeling the time has come for his final combat with Moriarty.

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Holmes’s deerstalker tumbles into the gorge as he and Moriarty struggle on the edge of its precipice, in this illustration by Sidney Paget originally published in The Strand Magazine.

The final moment

When Watson reaches the hotel, he finds that there is no sick woman awaiting his attentions. Realizing the trick, he rushes back to the Reichenbach Falls, but he finds only Holmes’s Alpine-stock (walking stick), leaning against the rock. Two sets of footprints lead to a precipice above a deep chasm into which the water plunges, and there are no returning footprints. The plowed-up soil and torn branches and ferns at the edge of the path show that there has been a fight beside the chasm.

Watson sees something gleaming from the top of a boulder, and finds Holmes’s silver cigarette case. As he picks it up, out flutters a note from Holmes, which Moriarty had allowed him to write before their battle. The note reveals that Holmes is prepared to die in order to rid the world of Moriarty. The detective has written that “no possible conclusion to [my career] could be more congenial to me than this.” The note ends by asking Watson to inform the police that the papers that will convict Moriarty’s gang are with his brother Mycroft for safekeeping.

When Watson and the police search the scene, they find unmistakable signs that the two men tussled on the brink, then fell, presumably to their deaths. Watson thinks it is all over, and he has lost the man “I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known”—but of course he is wrong. For Watson, Holmes does return in “The Empty House,” which reveals he did not perish at Reichenbach after all. The public, however, had to wait nearly a decade before he was seen again in The Hound of the Baskervilles—set before his apparent death—and in the meantime fans had to live with the devastating belief that the great detective was no more.

THE REICHENBACH FALLS

Situated in the Swiss Bernese Oberland region, the Reichenbach Falls were well known long before Conan Doyle’s time. Dropping a total of 820 ft (250 m) in a series of torrents, the waterfalls are among the most spectacular in Europe. They were painted by the English Romanticist J. M. W. Turner in the early 1800s, but it is their role in “The Final Problem” for which they are best known today. Tens of thousands of Holmes fans trek to the site every year to see where Moriarty met his doom. There is a funicular railroad to take them there from the nearby town of Meiringen, where there is also a Holmes museum. Many fans dress as characters from the Holmes stories and reenact the struggle, even sending dummy bodies plunging into the depths. On the cliff face is a plaque marking the spot of the great struggle between Holmes and Moriarty. The path on which the pair wrestled was then right beside the falls, but over the years it has crumbled away, and today it ends around 330 ft (100 m) short of the falls.

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