Professor Moriarty

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Professor Moriarty, illustration by Sidney Paget

Professor James Moriarty ( listen ? / I ) is a fictional character who plays key roles in two Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and is mentioned in five others. Moriarty was conceived by Doyle as a criminal genius on par with the detective . Holmes calls him the " Napoleon of Crime". Audio file / audio sample

Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes

Moriarty occurs only in the narrative problem The Final (dt .: The last problem ) and the novel The Valley of Fear (dt .: The Valley of Fear on). Doyle originally created the character Moriartys to bring Sherlock Holmes to death in The Final Problem by an equal opponent, as the writer wanted to end the detective series.

Is mentioned by name Moriarty in the stories: The Empty House (dt .: The Empty House ), The Norwood Builder (dt .: The builder of Norwood ), The Missing Three-Quarter (dt .: The Missing Three-Quarter ), The Illustrious Client (German: The illustrious client ) and His Last Bow (German: His farewell performance ).

The name "Napoleon of Crime" ( The Napoleon of Crime ) possibly goes back to the Scotland Yard employee Robert Anderson , who described the German-American criminal Adam Worth as "the Napoleon of the criminal world". Worth is considered to be one of the role models for the Moriarty character, a theory that is particularly favored in the United States. Also the Englishman Jonathan Wild , on whom Doyle had his Sherlock Holmes reflected in The Valley of Fear as Moriarty of the 18th century, and the legendary William Brodie in Doyle's native Edinburgh , who was an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson and his masterpiece The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (dt. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ) were, are considered real templates for the criminal master brain behind the bourgeois facade. Sidney Paget apparently used none other than the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning , and his 1882 portrait of George Frederic Watts as a model for his illustrations for The Final Problem .

Fictional biography

Professor James Moriarty, one of three brothers (the others are Colonel James Moriarty and a station master in the west of England) comes from a good family. Already in his childhood he showed his extraordinary mathematical talent, at the age of 21 he wrote a sensational treatise on the binomial theorem and was then given the chair at one of the smaller English universities. Slander that soon emerged forced Moriarty to give up the chair to go to London as a military adviser . In the metropolis he built up a comprehensive criminal syndicate, at the center of which he sat “like the spider in its web”, registering the trembling of every single one of the countless threads. Holmes blamed him for organizing half of all crimes in London and "almost everything that remains unsolved". Moriarty's official salary was £ 700 a year, but his enormous crime income enabled him to pay his executive hand, Sebastian Moran, an annual salary of no less than £ 6,000 (according to a multiplier proportioned by Gisbert Haefs , today's value would be over 460,000 For comparison: the annual income of the British Lord Chancellor in 1900 was 4000 pounds). In Moriarty's service, the blind German mechanic Von Herder developed an air rifle that can be dismantled and is as precise as it is silent .

In 1891, Sherlock Holmes succeeded several times in thwarting Moriarty's plans and ultimately disrupting its organization. However, the professor escaped arrest and pursued Holmes through England , France , Belgium and Switzerland , where on May 4, 1891 a duel broke out at the Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen , in which Moriarty fell into the falls and died.

Moriarty was also the author of the non-fiction book The Dynamics of an Asteroid , which "rose to such heights of pure mathematics that not one from the specialist press was able to review it".

Professor Moriarty apart from Arthur Conan Doyle

Like Sherlock Holmes himself, Professor Moriarty has developed an extraordinary afterlife , but unlike Sherlock Holmes he has no real life of its own . Moriarty (with Doyle more of an Enigma that only plays a role in only two stories) remains closely linked to Holmes, and hardly any of his appearances can do without a reference to the great detective. Apart from his role as arch villain in Sherlock-Holmes-Pastiches or in Kintopp , where he once steals the crown jewels and another time makes common cause with the National Socialists , since the 1970s more and more authors and filmmakers have been concerned with the possibilities of both his Past as well as its future.

In Nicholas Meyer's novel No Coke for Sherlock Holmes (1974, the only pastiche that made it onto the bestseller lists), he turns out to be Holmes' former tutor and lover of his mother, who only mutates into a criminal genius in the drug-fogged imagination of his former student. It is Sigmund Freud who frees Holmes from this delusional compulsion. Also in the film The Secret of the Hidden Temple (1985), scripted by Chris Columbus , which describes Holmes and Watson's school days together , he is the adolescent detective's teacher, albeit revered . Under the name Rathe, he gives Holmes valuable advice for life during the day, while at night, as the leader of an Egyptian sect, he seeks revenge for the desecration of a tomb. Only at the end of the film does he take the name Moriarty.

Rather, in the spirit Meyers track The Last Sherlock Holmes novel (1978) by Michael Dibdin and 1988 with Jeremy Brett , first performed in the lead role play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes by Jeremy Paul theorized Moriarty is nothing but the product of a schizophrenic Constitution Holmes', supported by the fact that in Doyle's canon only two characters actually encounter the professor - namely Holmes himself and Inspector MacDonald, who only gets to see him in penumbra, which opens up the possibility that this was Holmes in disguise.

There are a number of alternative versions of the processes at the Reichenbach Falls apart from those of Doyles, Dibdins and Pauls. John Edmund Gardner describes in Moriarty (1973) that the Napoleon of Crime and the great detective had made an agreement to avoid each other's paths in the future. Accordingly, Holmes only plays a subordinate role in this novel and its sequel, The Revenge of Moriarty (1975).

Robert Lee Hall's Exit Sherlock Holmes (1977) makes use of the external similarity between Moriarty and Holmes in an illustration by Sidney Paget and depicts the antagonists as cloned time travelers from the 24th century who, after returning from Switzerland, had a final duel on a theater stage deliver before Holmes succeeds in overpowering the genius criminal thanks to his faithful Watson and bringing him back to his own time.

In The Earthquake Machine (also 1977), a novel by Austin Mitchelson and Nicholas Utechin (editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal ), Moriarty survived the fall in the Reichenbach Falls with very serious injuries. He discovered and developed nuclear energy to drive his prosthetic arms , which he also wanted to use in the form of an atom bomb for his sinister plans for revenge. A master shot Dr. Watsons at Kings Cross Station kills him at the last second. The book features numerous characters from Doyle's Holmes canon, plus Irene Adler's daughter , the Russian tsarist family , Rasputin and his murderer Jussupoff and the young Winston Churchill .

In the 2014 novel Der Fall Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz , too , Moriarty survived the battle at the Reichenbach Falls. But it is a trick there to avoid criminal opponents from the USA who have taken over his criminal empire using terrorist methods and to take revenge. He takes on the role of a Pinkerton agent in order to instrumentalize the Scotland Yard inspector Athelny Jones, who is investigating the death of Holmes, for his own purposes. In the end, he travels to New York to take over the criminal empire of his ultimately defeated adversary.

Also in 2014, the prehistory of the duel between Holmes and Moriarty is presented by the author Annelie Wendeberg in 4 novels ( Devil's Grin , Deep Fall , The Long Journey , The Irish Lion ). Afterwards, a young woman, Anna Kronberg, who for a long time lived disguised as a man, studies medicine and practices as a doctor, meets Holmes, who feels connected to her. After thwarting human experiments with Holmes for medical purposes, Prof. Moriarty, who is behind the matter, kidnaps her and forces her to continue the experiments with deadly diseases for biological warfare purposes. She apparently falls in love with Moriarty, but betrays this to Holmes, which ultimately leads to the fight at the Reichenbach Falls.

In the novel The Beekeeper’s Assistant (author: Laurie R. King ), published in 1994, the daughter of the late Professor Moriarty uses his criminal infrastructure to take revenge on Holmes, who was retired in 1918, and his young companion Mary Russell, but ultimately fails.

In the Disney cartoon Basil, the great mouse detective (1986), based on a successful children's book series by Eve Titus , the Sherlock Holmes universe was transferred to the microcosm of rodents. Professor Moriarty is embodied there by a large rat named Professor Ratigan (Eng. "Rat tooth") and spoken in the original language by Vincent Price , who also had a decisive influence on Ratigan's appearance and facial and gestural repertoire. There is a short appearance by the "real" Sherlock Holmes using the voice of Basil Rathbone .

In the comic book Scarlet in Gaslight (1988), written by Martin Powell and drawn by Seppo Makinen , the events of Doyle's story The Last Problem and the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker are linked and it is ultimately the king of the vampires, Moriarty in the abyss of the waterfall thrown down and destroyed.

In The Mandala of the Dalai Lama (1999) by Jamyang Norbu , Moriarty turns out to be less a mathematician than a metaphysicist , a kind of Indian sorcerer who, during the crash in Switzerland, found his once lost memory, but has lost his physical integrity and good manners and now wants to reach for “absolute power”. The book uses Rudyard Kipling's Hurree Chunder Mookerjee (from Kim ) as its narrator, but ultimately it does justice to the universe of the Indiana Jones films than the poetic, atmospheric cosmos of its literary originals.

Frogster Interactive published the adventure game Sherlock Holmes: The Trail of the Awakened for PC in November 2006 . In this adventure, based on Conan Doyle's templates and the fund of stories from Howard Phillips Lovecraft , the investigations take Holmes and Watson back to Switzerland . During his covert investigation in the clinic “The Black Edelweiss” Holmes fell into the hands of a nameless patient who was seriously injured and pulled out of a river and who - although suffering from memory loss - seems to have a very alert mind. When Holmes later meets this patient, it turns out that it is Moriarty, who survived the fall into the Reichenbach Gorge, but is only a shadow of himself.

Even before computer games mixed the worlds of Conan Doyle and Lovecraft, there were corresponding literary attempts. Professor Moriarty and his right-hand man Colonel Moran emerge as the protagonists in Neil Gaiman's short story A Study in Emerald Green (2003). As detectives in the service of Her Majesty, they investigate the activities of an anarchist who uses the pseudonym "Vengeance" (Holmes). The story proceeds from a parallel world premise where Britain - Albion - is ruled by the Ancient Ones and the Queen is an alien entity. Gaiman won the renowned Hugo Award for the best short story in 2004 and the Locus Award for the best novel in 2005 for this story .

In the science fiction television series Star Trek - The Next Generation (German: Spaceship Enterprise: The next century ), Professor Moriarty - played by Daniel Davis - comes on board in two episodes as a character in a holodeck simulation (an artificial reality) Starship Enterprise on. Here it is initially a hologram image tied to the holodeck but touchable in an android Data depicting an adventure by Sherlock Holmes . However, Moriarty realizes, since he was created - through a formulation error by Geordi Laforge - as a data (and not Holmes) equal opponent, that his existence is artificial, and tries to control the spaceship by means of his superior mind generated by the on-board computer bring and thus force the occupation to allow him to continue to live in the real world. Finally, after negotiations with Captain Picard, he is deceived and isolated in a holocrystalline data storage device and will continue to experience his adventures there.

In Sherlock , a BBC television series that reimagines Conan Doyle's canon in the present, the name and attribute of the criminal master brain is the only remaining link to literary creation. Jim Moriarty is a very young, implicitly homosexual, exaggeratedly hysterical in demeanor, but highly intelligent psychopathic robber and murderer who competes with Sherlock Holmes solely for personal pleasure and wants to bring about his annihilation out of a kind of love-hate relationship. In the US television series Elementary , Irene Adler and Jamie (!) Moriarty are one and the same person. Under the first name she had an alleged love affair with Holmes, who after her faked death succumbs to drug addiction.

Professor Moriarty apart from Sherlock Holmes

In Philip José Farmers The Real Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), Professor Moriarty is not only identical to Captain Nemo , but also an alien who pitches himself against Phileas Fogg , a competing extraterrestrial, in the second half of the 19th century . The idea that Moriarty and Nemo were the same person was first dealt with in the essay A Submersible Refuge, or What To Prove, by Sherlockian Professor HW Starr from 1959, which is a reprint in the appendix to Farmer's novel.

In the radio play story A Shambles in Belgravia by Kim Newman , which was broadcast on the BBC in January 2005, the author links an idea from Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia with Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda . Colonel Sebastian Moran acts as the narrator of the story in which Irene Adler succeeds in outwitting Professor Moriarty. Basically it is an amusing puzzle with Doyle's model, with Moriarty and Moran as dark mirror images of the (unmentioned) luminaries Holmes and Watson. Newman has published a number of Moriarty / Moran short stories over the years that were eventually published in The Hound of the d'Urbervilles in 2011 . Here then Sherlock Holmes appears as "The Thin Man" (in contrast to Mycroft Holmes, "The Fat Man") in the last two stories, with Newman finding an alternative solution for the events at the Reichenbach Falls. Moriarty's brothers James and James, the Colonel and the stationmaster, also make an appearance.

In the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999) by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill , Moriarty alias " M " is both the head of the military intelligence service and the ruler of a state-controlled underworld that survived the fall into the Reichenbach Falls described in a flashback Has. He instructs the formation of the title-giving league under the direction of Mina Murray (from Stoker's Dracula ), which consists of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo , Henry Rider Haggards Allan Quatermain , Robert Louis Stevensons Dr. Henry Jekyll aka Edward Hyde and HG Wells ' Dr. Griffin (from The Invisible Man ) and initiates an aerial battle over Victorian London to defeat his criminal opponent Dr. Destroy Fu Manchu . In Moore's comic, the leader of the league, Mina Murray, suspects that "M" is Mycroft. In the very free and, in terms of respect for literary models, rather revealing film adaptation of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , Prof. Moriarty plays the role of the antagonist who apparently killed Sherlock Holmes and wants to conjure up a world war by playing off the great powers of Europe . Moriarty uses three aliases, on the one hand "M" (as in the comic) and on the other hand " The Phantom ", and finally he poses as (rather skinny) Mycroft Holmes.

One of the most unusual, but at the same time most famous, variations of Moriarty's alternative existence can be found in TS Eliot's poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats from 1939. It depicts Macavity, a skinny criminal tomcat with deep-set eyes and a high forehead Let your head swing back and forth like a snake and appear respectable to the outside world. In the last sentence Eliot finally lets the cat out of the bag and describes Macavity as the “Napoleon of crime”. Macavity: The Mystery Cat can also be found as a song in the Musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber , an adaptation of the Eliot poetry collection.

In the science fiction novel At All Costs (2008) by the American writer David Weber (from a series of books about the fictional heroine Honor Harrington ), a missile control system called Moriarty is introduced.

In the novel On the Road by the American writer Jack Kerouac there is a character named Dean Moriarty, after whom the band Moriarty is named.

The asteroid (5048) Moriarty was named after the figure of the professor and probably not least in reminiscence of his magnum opus .

In the US television series Dr. House shoots a man named Moriarty House in the season 2 finale. The figure of Dr. House is based on Sherlock Holmes.

In the video game Fallout 3 from Bethesda Softworks there is one person in the town of Megaton, the Moriarty's.

In the short story collection The kangaroo chronicles of Marc-Uwe Kling the narrator opens with his roommate - a communist kangaroo - a detective agency. After a while, a new neighbor moves in: a penguin named J. Moriarty.

In the series of novels The Legacy of Power by Andreas Suchanek , Professor Moriarty appears in Volume 9 as one of the immortal shadow warriors.

In the mass multiplayer online role-playing game Wizard101 , the character Miauriarty appears as the final boss of the world Marleybone. The world inhabited by cats and dogs is based on 19th century London and is threatened by the criminal genius Miauriarty, whose opponent is the famous dog detective Sherlock Bones.

In the comic Moriarty Lives! Moriarty stays after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, where he wants to rob the rich tyrant Bombastus von Hohenheim, who considers himself unassailable and, for example, operates the heart out of victims of sadism. He is supported by a little boy named Udo, who wants to avenge his father and over time becomes Moriarty's pupil. After much planning, Moriarty succeeds in killing his rival, who is armed with a glove that fires electric lightning, by throwing a bottle of water at him, which causes Von Hohenheim to short-circuit himself. When Udo asked what he was going to do now, Moriarty said that he could travel to London because he believed that besides himself an “old friend” (Sherlock Holmes) survived the fall in the Reichenbach Falls.

Professor Moriarty in film and television

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ niatu.net Adam Worth
  2. ↑ Henry Edward Manning portrayed by George Frederic Watts
  3. ↑ Paul Murdin: Rock Legends. The Asteroids and Their Discoverers (=  Springer Praxis Books ). Springer International Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-31836-3 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-319-31836-3 .

literature

Primary literature

Secondary literature

  • William S. Baring-Gould: Sherlock Holmes: The Biography of the Great Baker Street Detective. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1978, ISBN 3-421-01861-8 .

Web links

Commons : Professor Moriarty  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files