The Many Faces of Moriarty: A Critical
Examination of the Arch-Criminal’s Evolution
Across the Landscape of the Popular
Imagination
Professor James Moriarty. In contemporary popular culture, the name alone
conjures expectations of evil. And why wouldn’t it? In our collective
imagination, the character has appeared again and again, embodying
innumerable incarnations. Cast and re-cast as the nemesis of not only Holmes—
but of those who seek to emulate him—re-imaginings of the Professor have been
voiced by the likes of Orson Welles and Vincent Price, have been portrayed by
no less than Henry Daniell and Laurence Olivier, and have threatened as diverse
heroes as Darkwing Duck, Dr. Gregory House, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Moreover—across the airwaves of radio, between the pages of numerous novels
and comic books, and within the confines of films, television series, and video
games—Moriarty has been credited with much more than running London’s
underworld. In popular culture, he has been responsible for creating Jack the
Ripper; has become real through “belief made manifest;” has been depicted as a
maligned mathematics tutor; has inspired the hero-nemesis relationship key to
much contemporary fiction; has died in repeated scenarios, many of which
consciously evoke the imagery of his fall at Reichenbach; and, he has
subsequently been shown, on several occasions, to—like his nemesis Holmes—
in fact have survived such falls. Despite his almost absence from the Holmes
canon itself, Moriarty has outlived not only his author, but in some cases, his
most famous foe. Fore-grounded by an overview of the character’s rise through
the annals of pop culture, what follows is a critical examination of several of the
most interesting contemporary representations of Professor James Moriarty, who
continues to flourish in the popular imagination, in spite—and sometimes even
in the absence of—Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
What makes Moriarty’s continual presence in the popular consciousness so
much more fascinating is his virtual lack of presence in the original Holmes
canon itself First introduced in “The Final Problem,” the professor’s entrance
and exit into the series occur within the space of give or take thirty or so pages,
depending upon the edition. What’s more, Watson—Holmes’ only friend and
chronicler, and the narrator through whom the reader’s experience is colored—
never comes face to face with Moriarty, having heard of him from Holmes and
having later seen him only at a distance. Thus, the reader is never presented with
an account of the man other than that given by his greatest enemy; it is this very
narrative discrepancy that makes the premise of stories such as Nicholas
Meyer’s 1974 novel The Seven-Percent-Solution possible. Even more
interestingly, the climactic moment—which H. Paul Jeffers terms, the “titanic