James Moriarty
From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Fictional character.
In the Sherlock Holmes stories
Description
- His name was James Moriarty (EMPT 406).
- He had a brother with the same first name, Colonel James Moriarty (FINA 4), and a younger brother who was a station-master in the West of England (VALL 355).
- He was a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order (FINA 67).
- He was extremely tall and thin, his forehead domed out in a white curve, and his two eyes were deeply sunken in his head. He was clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders were rounded from much study, and his face protruded forward, and was for ever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion (FINA 96).
- He'd have made a grand minister, with his thin face and grey hair and solemn-like way of talking (VALL 292).
- He had one of the first brains of Europe and all the powers of darkness at his back (VALL 97)
- Sherlock Holmes said Moriarty thought he was an antagonist who was his intellectual equal (VALL 79).
Also known as:
- The Napoleon of crime (FINA 65).
- A spider in the centre of its web (FINA 69).
- Arch-criminal (VALL 419).
Public Career
- He was unmarried (VALL 354).
- He was a professor (VALL 355), his chair was worth seven hundred a year (VALL 356).
- However, he was a very wealthy man (VALL 352).
- He owned a painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (La jeune fille à l'agneau) (VALL 309).
- His career has been an extraordinary one. He was a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by Nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty (FINA 53).
- At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue (FINA 55).
- He was the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid — a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it (VALL 32).
- On the strength of it, he won the Mathematical Chair at one of the smaller Universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his Chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an army coach (FINA 56).
Criminal career
- He was the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld — a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations (VALL 29).
- He was so aloof from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement (VALL 29).
- His cheques were drawn on six different banks (VALL 396).
- Holmes had no doubt that he had twenty banking accounts with the bulk of his fortune abroad in the Deutsche Bank or the Crédit Lyonnais (VALL 402).
- He ruled with a rod of iron over his people. His discipline was tremendous. There was only one punishment in his code. It was death (VALL 415).
- He pervaded London, and no one had heard of him (FINA 47).
- He was put on a pinnacle in the records of crime by Sherlock Holmes (FINA 48).
- He was the organizer of half that was evil and of nearly all that was undetected in London (FINA 66).
- He sat motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knew well every quiver of each of them (FINA 69).
- He did little himself. He only planed. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized (FINA 70).
- He was the cleverest rogue of the most powerful syndicate of criminals in Europe (FINA 182).
- His chief of the staff was Colonel Sebastian Moran which he paid him six thousand a year (VALL 386).
- He fought Sherlock Holmes at the top of Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland, but fell in the falls and died (VALL 129).
Stories
Professor Moriarty is mentioned in the following stories:
- The Adventure of the Final Problem
- The Adventure of the Empty House
- The Valley of Fear
- The Adventure of the Illustrious Client
- The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
- The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
- His Last Bow
Performers
