Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
the end of The Sign of the Four. Thereafter, in several cases that are part of The Adventures, Watson is clearly living with a long-suffering wife, presumably Mary, and has entered private medical practice. Repeatedly he leaves Mary (and turns over the practice to an accommodating colleague, Jackson or Anstruther) briefly to accompany Holmes on some adventure. But by the time of “The Empty House,” which takes place in 1894, Watson has suffered a bereavement, and is free to move into the old rooms again, abandoning medicine for biography, when Holmes returns to London after a three-year absence. Still later, in “The Blanched Soldier,” Holmes speaks of Watson having “deserted me for a wife,” and one infers a second marriage.
Sherlockians traditionally drink a toast to “Dr. Watson’s second wife,” and a number of them have tried to identify her. The chronology is impossibly complicated, with inconsistencies that can be attributed to Watson’s muddled thinking or, more realistically, to Doyle’s complete indifference to such details. Of course it is more fun for Sherlockians to speculate that, as one of them has put it, “Watson had as many wives as Henry VIII.”
The fair sex is his department, as Holmes says; but he is chivalrous about it, and decent in every way. (Rex Stout’s article “Watson Was a Woman,” in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941 and the anthology Profile by Gaslight three years later, was only a joke.) He seems to be the ideal Britisher, whom the author holds up to the reader as the measure of the less conventional Holmes. Indeed, one might say, he seems to be the author’s representative. Says Peter Costello in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes (1991): “Dr. Watson, whatever other models he may have had in real life, such as Conan Doyle’s own secretary Major Wood, is largely drawn from Doyle himself. For a start both are medical men of much the same age with sporting interests. Both have a bluff, hearty appearance. Both seem conventional, Imperialist in politics, non-intellectual men of action. Dr. Watson even shares Conan Doyle’s love for Southsea, and his literary tastes.” If Holmes is Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor, Joseph Bell, surely Watson is Doyle himself.
PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY. For all the reputation he has developed as Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor James (if that was in fact his given name) Moriarty figures in only three stories — in “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House,” with complementary narratives of the events surrounding his death, and briefly in The Valley of Fear. Countless cartoonists and parodists have drawn Moriarty into their creations; such respectable Holmesians as the producers of the Granada television series of the 1980s have succumbed to the temptation to expand his role, for example making Moriarty the genius behind the events of “The Red-Headed League,” an idea for which there is no justification in the original story.
Moriarty is presented, in “The Final Problem” and the second chapter of The Valley of Fear, as the master-criminal behind “half that is evil and ... nearly all that is undetected” in London:
He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed — the word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and carried out.
In short, Moriarty is the modern Jonathan Wild, a successor to the criminal leader who operated in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century (born in 1683, he was hanged in 1725) and is known chiefly from Henry Fielding’s 1743 satire The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild the Great. Alec MacDonald, the Scotland Yard inspector in The Valley of Fear, vaguely dismisses Wild as “someone in a novel.” Holmes, of course, noting that Wild was real, adds that “The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up.” In “The Final Problem” he calls Moriarty “the Napoleon of crime.” The title is apparently borrowed from the sobriquet of another real-life criminal, Adam Worth (1844–1902), best known for the 1876 theft of a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by Thomas Gainsborough from a London gallery. His story is told in The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre (1997).
Moriarty is presented as a professor of mathematics, formerly of “one of our smaller universities,” dismissed as the result of “hereditary tendencies” which led him into unspecified wickedness. “At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue,” Holmes says, referring to one of the basic principles of algebra. More ominously, he elsewhere refers to Moriarty’s work on The Dynamics of an Asteroid, which has been interpreted as having to do with space travel or even atomic energy (and may in fact be a study of the notoriously complicated three-body problem of gravitational attraction). Sherlockians have sometimes compared his academic career with that of Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), an astronomer and author in other fields who worked at the Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere and is known as the rival of logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Of Moriarty’s personal life the only information provided in the Canon is that one brother was “a station master in the west of England” and another, also named James, a colonel. The professor’s physique was remarkable, as Holmes describes it in “The Final Problem,” as he was “extremely tall and thin,” with a great domed forehead, rounded shoulders, and a habit of oscillating his face “from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.”
Some close readers of the text have suggested that Moriarty never existed — that he was a fantasy of a drug-addicted Holmes, or at least that he was an innocent man, all his crimes imagined by Holmes in some paranoid delusion. Nicholas Meyer used that idea to good advantage in his highly successful novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), and Jeremy Brett’s play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes (1989) offers a variation on it. That extreme is no more reasonable than the popular Sherlockian belief that everything evil has Moriarty behind it, and the vague impression among the public that the Holmes stories are about one struggle after another between the detective and the professor, rather as Denis Nayland Smith endlessly battles Fu Manchu in the writings of Sax Rohmer. A particularly well-rounded picture of Moriarty the master criminal is provided in a trilogy of novels by John Gardner: The Return of Moriarty (1974), The Revenge of Moriarty (1975), and, much delayed, Moriarty (2008).
IRENE ADLER. “She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet,” Holmes reports in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” before setting eyes on Irene Adler. No matter: the description has been generally accepted, as has Watson’s report that Holmes characterized her as “the woman.” She is mentioned in one or two other stories, but only in reference to the adventure of which she is the central figure, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
Early in that story, Holmes looks her up in a reference book and reports that she is an operatic contralto, born in New Jersey and now retired from the international stage. He patronizingly calls her a “young person”; the King of Bohemia, who feels the threat of blackmail from her, calls her a “well-known adventuress.” Holmes is engaged to recover the compromising papers from her clutches, and quite fails to do so. By the end of the tale, having seen the lady in person, he is so impressed — perhaps with her courage and intelligence, perhaps with her beauty — that he asks for her photograph as a souvenir, and allows Watson to record that he had been “beaten by a woman’s wit.”
Irene Adler lives in St. John’s Wood, the fashionable London neighbourhood in which wealthy men did typically install their mistresses. She is presumably modelled on the women known as adventuresses, grandes horizontales, or “pretty horsebreakers” — courtesans more realistically associated with the 1860s, such as Laura Bell, Cora Pearl, Catherine Walters, and Caroline Otero. Fanfare of Strumpets (1971), a non-Sherlockian book by that venerable Sherlockian Michael Harrison, is full of anecdotes about them. In Irene Adler there may also be a whiff of the scandalous Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) and of Lillie Langtry (1852–1929), “the Jersey Lily” who became a mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. Yet another original is clearly Lola Montez (1818– 61), whose intrigues with Louis of Bavaria had been notorious five decades earlier. At a less exalted level, Sherlockians