Why Moriarity?
by Michael Kurland
A British online magazine asked me why
Moriarty was my hero. In part I replied:
I am the author of five (so far) novels
casting Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty as my hero. “Antihero
perhaps?” you ask. No, certainly not. Hero.
One reviewer of my most recent Moriarty, Who
Thinks Evil, said that she enjoyed the book but she wasn't planning to read
any more because she couldn't accept Moriarty as a good guy. Well, I sympathize
with her view but it doesn't hold up under what biblical scholars call a
textual analysis. Moriarty is given more than a passing mention in only two Holmes
stories, and even in these cases he is kept offstage. We have only Holmes's
word that Moriarty is “the Napoleon of crime,” and perhaps Holmes is biased. He
provides us with a narrative that is, at best, inconsistent.
As Moriarty himself explains it (as
excerpted from my story “Years ago and in a Different Place”), “...Holmes had
the temerity to describe me as 'organizer of half that is evil and nearly all
that is undetected in this great city' (London). What crimes I had
committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics and
none were offered.
“In 'The Final Problem' Watson relates
that Holmes appeared one day... and told him that he was being threatened by me
and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected
to be attacked again, probably by a man using an air rifle. If that were so,
was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and
thus place him, also, in deadly peril?
“Holmes declares that in three days he
will be able to place 'the professor, with all the principal members of his
gang,' in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason.
But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. If this were so, would not
Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the
hotel of his choosing –- or in the Yard itself –- to keep him safe? But Holmes
says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again
Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?”
I could go on –- indeed in the story the
professor does –- but I think that I've made my point that I'm justified in
portraying Professor Moriarty in a way other than Watson's second-hand and
somewhat biased view. My Professor Moriarty is indeed a criminal, but more in
the mode of Robin Hood or Simon Templar than Al Capone or Charlie Manson. He
commits crimes to support his scientific research, and picks targets that
deserve to be fleeced. The reason, in my books, that Holmes sees Moriarty as “the
greatest villain unhung,” is that the professor is ever so slightly smarter
than Holmes and he can't stand it.
Michael
Kurland
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