The last problem

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The Final Problem (also His Last Case , The Last Case, or Sherlock Holmes' Fall OT: The Final Problem ) is the title of a Sherlock Holmes short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle . It is the last of the volume The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and comes from the year 1893. The story includes the fight of the master detective against his criminal opponent Professor Moriarty , which ends with the fall of the two in the Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen in Switzerland .

The real Reichenbach Falls

action

Sherlock Holmes is about to nail down the most dangerous man in London. Prof. Moriarty and his gang have long been terrorizing London with their secret operations. Holmes now manages to arrest all members of the gang, only Moriarty himself escapes. Since Holmes fears that Moriarty will take revenge on him, he travels across Europe with Watson. In Meiringen, Switzerland, Holmes and Moriarty finally meet again. A last life-and-death struggle took place on May 4th, 1891 at the remote Reichenbach Falls, in which both of them finally fell into the depths. Watson, who had previously been called back to the village by a fictitious medical emergency and thus did not personally observe the fight, finally concludes that the two were dead. However, Holmes' body was never found.

In the short story The Empty House (from 1903) the actual details of the fight and the (supposed) fall are finally revealed.

Professor Moriarty, illustration by Sidney Paget from 1893

background

The story was to be the end of the Sherlock Holmes franchise with the protagonist's death , as Doyle became too time-consuming to regularly write new detective stories. The writer's mother, an avid reader of the stories, tried in vain to dissuade her son from the project.

The great popularity that Holmes had achieved in the meantime led to public mourning for the fictional person, so that allegedly disappointed readers in London tied black ribbons around the upper arm. Many customers canceled their subscription to The Strand magazine. Conan Doyle received letters calling him a monster or a beast.

Doyle continued the Holmes series from 1901 with the novel The Dog of the Baskervilles . Doyle had heard of a legend from a friend, Fletcher Robinson, according to which a family in Dartmoor was being chased by a mysterious ghost dog. Doyle realized that this would be an ideal Holmes novel to set in the final short story before he died. Due to the great success of the novel, Doyle allowed his publishers to persuade him to write new stories about Sherlock Holmes for an enormously high fee .

Holmes' death was in 1903 The Empty House (dt .: The Empty House ) revised literary, with this story Doyle began the second period of creativity in terms of Sherlock Holmes. The "Auszeit" (the "Great Hiatus") mentioned briefly in this story, which Sherlock Holmes under the code name Sigerson et al. a. has spent in Tibet, is in the pastiche story of Jamyang Norbu in the novel Das Mandala des Dalai Lama , published in German in 2004 (original title: The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet ) and in others Pastiche stories depicted.

Holmes versus Moriarty

Although Moriarty in Doyle's original work only in this story and the novel The Valley of Fear (dt .: The Valley of Fear occurs) in appearance, he was in the literary reception and the Sherlock Holmes pastiches made the greatest adversary Holmes'. The popularity Moriarty meant that the figure also appeared in many films, for example in the feature film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes of 1939 , the free on a play by William Gillette is based. George Zucco , who plays Moriarty, is one of the most famous actors in the role.

Most recently, the duel at the Reichenbach Falls, its “true” history and the events that took place in London afterwards were described in the 2014 novel Der Fall Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz from Moriarty's point of view. In this book, he survived and assumed the identity of a Pinkerton investigator in order to instrumentalize Scotland Yard inspector Athelny Jones and ultimately his entire apparatus to eliminate a competitor who had immigrated from the USA. Ultimately, he leaves Great Britain with the goal of New York to take over the criminal empire of his ultimately defeated adversary. This also explains why Moriarty is not up to mischief in London after Holmes' return.

Also in 2014, the history of the duel between Holmes and Moriarty is presented by the author Annelie Wendeberg in 4 novels (Devil's Grin, Deep Fall, The Irish Lion, The Long Journey). 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 she thwarted human experiments with Holmes for medical purposes, Professor Moriarty, who is behind the matter, kidnaps her and forces her to continue 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.

Film adaptations
  • The second part of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films, Sherlock Holmes: Spiel im Schatten , loosely processes various motifs from the story, above all the relationship between Holmes and Moriarty, which alternates between competition and fascination for each other, and the final battle in Reichenbach. Unlike the story, the end of the film anticipates the return of Holmes.

Radio plays

Web links

Further information

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "The Last Problem" in the German Sherlock Holmes Wiki
  2. ↑ George Ridgwell: The Final Problem. March 1923, Retrieved February 17, 2018 .