The Final Problem--WHAT THE #$%^&?!?!?

I sometimes wish I could read this story again for the first time, with no outside knowledge of what was about to happen, or of would come later.

The fact that Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy is Professor Moriarty has so permeated our culture that it is basically as well known as the Superman/Luthor feud. Even people won't aren't Holmes fans probably know about their feud.  It's also well enough known that Holmes survives his experience at Reichenbach Falls. And even if one was somehow free of all our knowledge, well, many of us read our Sherlock Holmes in "complete" collections...so when our hero "dies" when only half the stories are done, modern readers might suspect that something is up. So it is very difficult for someone to come into this story "unspoiled."

But what must it have been like to read The Final Problem when it was originally published? Because back in 1893, this must have seemed tremendously insane.

By modern standards, of course, the Big Bad is old hat to us, the secret villain who turns out to be behind everything. But you don't introduce him or her (or it) in the very last episode!! There is a gradual build, clues subtly introduced in the background that take on more meaning when we realize that something is up--"BAD WOLF" scrawled in graffiti, for example. There are figures seen only in shadow, distorted voices heard over speaker-phones, and other tropes. Than we get the "stunning revelation" at the "mid-season finale," we get to spend the next several episodes groping in shock, and the last 4 stories are about confronting and beating the master villain.

But The Final Problem doesn't play by any of those rules, because of course those rules hadn't been established yet. There was no prior warning of Moriarty: no clues, no hints, no warnings. Out of nowhere, this Napoleon Of Crime just appears, behind half of the evil in London. Holmes says that he's known about him for years (but never bothered to tell Watson?), and now has "seized the thread" and tracked him down--all "off-screen," as it were.

Let's leave aside all of the pastiches and adaptations and speculations that like to make Moriarty responsible for everything, the secret force behind every case and every event that Watson has relayed to us (such as Granada's version of The Red-Headed League). There was none of that boot-strapping when this story was first published. This must have struck the Victorian reader like an atom-bomb! All of a sudden, there's a mastermind behind all crime in England, and he's (almost) as smart as Holmes, and Holmes has been carrying on a campaign against him for months, and Sherlock almost succeeded, but now Moriarty is trying to kill him so we have to flee to the continent!!
All out of whole cloth! All in the first 8 pages!! The entire status quo of what we expect from a Sherlock Holmes story is up-ended, and tossed out the window.

And if that weren't disorienting enough for the Victorian reader, well, they must have gotten whiplash when it turns out that [SPOILER ALERT] Sherlock Holmes dies at the end of the story. Again, no foreshadowing in previous stories, no vague prophecies that suddenly make sense, nada. [Although Holmes' declaration that "his career had reached its crisis" does tread perilously close to the "he has two weeks until retirement" cliche...although that probably wasn't a cliche back then!]

But to kill off the hero of your continuing series of stories?!? Unheard of!! (At least, I assume it was unheard of--were there any other long-running lead protagonists killed off in this manner before The Final Problem?)

How disorienting this most have been for readers in the day! Everything they thought the knew about Holmes was put askew by the Moriarty revelation--and then Holmes himself was killed!! Sherlock Holmes, who had been a monthly fixture in their lives for two and a half years, was gone!! No less an authority than John Watson told us there would be no more stories!!

We can never quite experience this story the way they did back in December of 1893. We already know too many of the particulars of the story, which have seeped into popular culture. Heroes dying is no longer a big deal to us, the shock value eroded by clones and resurrection spells and time travel twists and other cop-outs for us to truly experience the shock of Victorian readers. We're too jaded by the reliance on Big Bads and season-long conspiracies to be stunned my the emergence of a master villain from behind the scenes.

Not to mention, of course, the apparent need of media in modern culture to immediately release every bit of casting/plotting news they come upon, to flood us with "previews," and the propensity for scripts and/or entire episodes to be stolen (ahem "leaked") ahead of broadcast. And of course, there are all the well meaning people who immediately vent their views on social media. No, today is a very different world.

It's not often that I can say sincerely that I wished I lived back then. But I would love to know what it felt like to read this story for the first time, unencumbered by modern knowledge and expectations, and to experience it as readers then did.

OTHER TRIFLES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**So great was the public's upset at the "death" of Sherlock Holmes, it is said, that 20,000 people canceled their Strand subscriptions. And apparently, thousands of people wore black mourning armbands in public.

Obviously, some of these account might be exaggerated, or even apocryphal. But I can't help but think of what would happen if fans would have such a reaction today.

Surely today such people would be derided for "taking their fiction too seriously," for needing to "get a life." The media--not realizing what a boon it is to have that many people actually care about media--would lump them all into the "nerd' and "weird-o" category, and run mocking footage and commentary just before the final weather update.

Just another difference between then and now, I suppose...
**One of the more famous Holmes pastiches is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, wherein author Nicholas Meyer posits that the whole business of this story is merely Sherlock having a bit of a psychotic break, due to cocaine abuse and suppressed childhood trauma.

And it's not hard to see how one could come to that conclusion. Sherlock shows up at Watson's, not having seen him fro weeks, and goes skulking about shuttering the windows for fear of "air-guns" (which never are seen or mentioned again in the story). He breaks out the story of a math professor turned Blofeld from out of nowhere. Watson never even sees Moriarty in this story, except as a vague figure in the distance! Holmes insists they take a vacation on the continent--it matters not where! His accounts of "murder attempts" sound like paranoid descriptions of everyday accidents--surely every day in London someone was almost run down by a horse-drawn vehicle! He sneaks out over Watson's back garden wall, after arranging an incredibly Byzantine rendezvous the next day.

Given the odd behavior, and the fact that Watson remarked more than once how odd Sherlock seems to be, it is easy to see how easy it would be to conclude that Holmes was a little bit nuts. Fortunately, the good doctor knows his friend better than most...

**The Final Problem really isn't much of a mystery story, as there is literally no mystery whatsoever. Holmes has already solved all of the crimes, and given all of his information to the police, before the story even starts. We get precious little deduction from Holmes, either. The entire story, really, is just exposition and flight. Still pretty thrilling stuff, though.

**Moriarty, as portrayed here, has always seemed to come up a little bit short to me. Holmes' final note to Watson says how impressed he was with how Moriarty managed to find them...without bothering to share with us those impressive "methods." Really, aside from Holmes descriptions, we get no actual evidence of the professor's genius. It is a classic case of "tell, don't show." I suppose was compelled by the nature of the story, and never having Watson meet the character...but still, it does leave the professor a tad bit less compelling as a character than I would have liked.

**Through it all, however, Sherlock is frustratingly vague about exactly what it is that Moriarty and gang are being arrested for. In the Final Problem, not one specific crime or misdeed is mentioned, not one particular offense which the Napoleon Of Crime could be convicted of.

Oh, sure, Sherlock throws out "forgeries, robberies, murders." "Half of all that is evil, and nearly all that is undetected in this great city." But what crimes? In what matter did Moriarty make his "little, little trip?"

Others speculate much more specifically. The Granada adaptations, for example, have him behind the events of The Red-Headed League, not to mention The Devil's Foot and The Eligible Bachelor (aka The Noble Bachelor). And Granada's Final Problem tells us that Sherlock's trip to France was to recover the Mona Lisa, which was stolen by Moriarty's organization (he had planned to use the publicity of it's being missing to sell off several forgeries for millions each, which may have been part of the motive when the masterpiece was actually stolen in 1911, and was also the plot of a 1979 Doctor Who episode, when a time-traveling alien forced Leonardo to paint 6 copies that could be sold in the present when his people stole the "real" painting. I guess there are no original ideas in crime...)

**Why the need to wait 3 days to arrest the professor and his minions? Why could nothing happen until Monday? "Matters have gone so far now that they can move without my help"??

When Watson pleased to have Moriarty arrested immediately, Holmes replies, "We should get the big fish, but the smaller would dart right and left out of the net." Of course, the exact opposite is what happened--doing it Holmes' way, they caught all the small fish, but Moriarty (and we soon will learn, his #2 man) escaped. It's questionable whether that was a superior outcome.

So why the three day wait? What possibly legal reason could there be? Try as I might, it is difficult for me to come up with anything that doesn't sound like "transparent plot device."

**During the trial of Moriarty's gang, Watson tells us "of their terrible chief, few details came out during the proceedings."

Why, then, is the professor's brother, "Colonel James Moriarty," writing letters (to the newspapers, presumably) to defend the memory of his brother? Were those "few details" enough to tarnish the family honor? Perhaps a little bit more was being said, if not publicly than in "whispers" throughout polite society.

**If, that is, the "Colonel" really is the professor's brother.

Moriarty is given no Christian name in this story. Only in The Empty House is his first named mentioned..."James." Apparently the same first name as the brother!!

Well, it's not impossible--there have certainly been cases of brothers being given the same name, and being differentiated at home by middle names or nicknames.

Or...perhaps the professor  had a little bolt-hole designed, a place to hide in plain sight should his schemes fail--posing as his own "brother"?!?

Which, of course, would mean that Moriarty also survived Reichenbach...

Or maybe it just means that Doyle goofed up on the name...

**Holmes mentioned how, in his career as a university professor, "dark rumours gathered round [Moriarty] in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair..."

Well, that doesn't sound very much like the nearly-invisible, Holmes-level criminal mastermind, does it? Or perhaps that small town is where he learned his lesson--to be the brains behind everything, but to do nothing himself, to insulate himself from the rest of the organization, to become the spider in the centre of the web.

Still, Holmes should have started his investigation there. If there was enough to start rumours amongst university folks, perhaps there would be some actual evidence that a mind such as Holmes could have detected, and used to bring down Moriarty...

**Much has been made of the Swiss lad and the forged note.

But what if Peter Steiler, the innkeeper, were in on it? After all, his English was excellent, so the note and the story about the tubercular woman certainly wouldn't have been beyond him. And he is the one who gave Holmes and Watson their route, and "strict instructions" to make a detour to see the falls.

So did he help set the trap for Holmes? Or was he working for Holmes, making sure that Watson would be away for the final confrontation!?

**A death-duel with your arch-nemesis on a narrow cliff above a raging waterfall? As these things go, that's a pretty classic way to go.

But it is telling, I  think, that no matter how "tired" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was of his most famous creation, he gave him a death with no body being found, and therefore a death which could, if need be, be easily explained away if he ever changed his mind and wanted to go back to Holmes. Which is, of course, what happened.

It would have been easy enough to give Holmes a final, inarguable end...but Doyle was, perhaps subconsciously, hedging his bets.

**It is interesting that it was Inspector Patterson who was working with Holmes on the biggest case in the history of English crime.

Patterson's name never comes up again in the Canon, and more familiar Scotland Yard names such as Lestrade and Gregson are apparently left on the side.

Did Holmes not trust them on a case of this magnitude? Or perhaps he was protecting them, knowing that they were not capable of evading Moriarty's machinations?

Presumably this case was a hell of a feather in the cap for Patterson, whoever he was...But Moriarty himself got away, so perhaps not so much?

**Holmes declares that he has had "over a thousand cases." Get writing, Watson!!

**"Danger is part of my trade." Oh, Sherlock...

**Apparently, you actually could hire a "special" train in those days, exclusively for your own use, for only 5 shillings per mile. Basically you get a small engine, a passenger car, and the railway telegraphing ahead to clear the line of slower traffic. Although surely it must have played havoc with with the railway's schedule, and almost surely you needed some amount of advance notice?

Say what you will about Moriarty, he is willing to dip into his crooked fortune.

NOTE: Because Hound is so long, and they are so many long adaptations I wish to peruse, there will be a two-week break between posts this time. So nothing on Sunday 12/14...we will be back Sunday 12/21!

SHERLOCK HOLMES WILL RETURN IN--THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES!!

The Red-Headed League--The Problem of "Again With The Moriarty?"

There is, in much genre movie writing, an obsession with The Big Bad.

Whomever is known as the hero's greatest foe will invariably be trotted out early and often as the villain of the piece, even to the extent of seriously altering the origins of both hero and villain. It's as if there is an ingrained fear that the public will reject the version if , somehow, they're not immediately facing their most famous foe.

But that's still not enough; the creators then feel the need to make the villain not only the hero's greatest foe, but also responsible for every damn adventure the hero has. Which is why, for example, you get the Kingpin as the gangster who killed Daredevil's father. Or Doctor Doom has to receive his powers from the same accident which mutated the Fantastic Four. Or why the Joker turned out to be the one who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents. Or why every villain in the Spider-verse is a result of Norman Osborn's work.

Which brings us to Moriarty.

There is, apparently, some massive, literary gravitational field that irresistibly requires modern creators to use Moriarty in every Sherlock Holmes story they try to tell. Even worse, so great is the compulsion that authors seem to need to go back and retcon every single Holmes story so that, ultimately, Moriarty is the true villain. The Napoleon of Crime, it seems, is responsible for every bit of illegal activity in Victorian England.

Such speculation can be fun, of course. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Moriarty out of whole cloth, as a way to kill of Sherlock Holmes with a bang. The back story he gave the man meant that he had to have been active in crime for many years. So, yes, it can be fun, if albeit ultimately silly, to try and go backwards and figure out which crimes Moriarty was really the true instigator in. In virtually every Holmes story, some theorist can stretch to find a way Moriarty is involved. The never identified "friend" who posed as a woman to recover the ring in A Study In Scarlet? Moriarty, some say (in fairness, some also suggest it must be Irene Adler...). How could Jonathan Small afford to finance his activities before he stole the treasure in The Sign Of The Four? Moriarty fronted him the money!

Well, that's all harmless fun. But when you begin to actually retell the stories so that Moriarty is explicitly involved, you go past whimsical into, perhaps, doing damage to the story.

Which brings us to The Red-Headed League, and more specifically, the Granada adaptation of it.

In the original story as told by Doyle, John Clay is "the fourth smartest man in London," a "murderer, thief, smasher and forger" who is the grandson of a royal duke. He's attended Oxford and Eton, and Holmes describes him as "the head of his profession." He's running a real long game con and robbery, an Ocean's Eleven of the 1880s. It's a clever plan, just fantastical enough to work, without drawing attention from the authorities. Clay buries himself in his role, proving himself an adept actor, as well. Truly, he is a formidable opponent.

And yet the Granada series decided that Moriarty was behind the whole scheme. They wanted a Big Bad for the series, which they planned to end with their adaptation of The Final Problem. And to that end, they portrayed Moriarty as the true mastermind behind several of this and other cases, so they could have the thread of his villainy throughout the season.

However, this does have the effect of robbing John Clay of his agency. He goes from being a great villain to a mere lacky. It wasn't even Clay's plan anymore! The Granada Holmes describes Clay as just "just a pawn," a pretty large comedown from how the character was described earlier. Furthermore, because of some of the plan's flaws, this has the unintentional effect of making Moriarty himself look less intelligent. Some mistakes we could accept from an arrogant con man and thief working on his own; the same mistakes, if they're made by Moriarty, make him look look rather less like the near-invincible mastermind. The tale works much better, and Clay is a better character, if he is a free agent, rather than if he's just doing his master's bidding.

So, by insisting on making Moriarty a part of more stories, we diminish the villain, we diminish the story, and we diminish Moriarty himself. I suppose it doesn't make a huge difference in the end; it's just me being me, obsessing on trifles. Still, I think there should be a lesson here for future creators: every story doesn't have to be about The Big Bad. It's all right to have Holmes stories without Moriarty looming in the background. Superman doesn't have to fight Luthor every time, right?

FURTHER TRIFLES AND OBSERVATIONS:

**It must be said aloud--the Granada DVDs (at least the editions I own) have the worst subtitling in the history of the universe. No, that is not hyperbole.

Clearly, whoever did the actual subtitling did not consult a script, or the original stories. They just wrote down what they (thought they) heard. And perhaps it's the British accents, or they just weren't terribly perceptive, but man, it creates some astonishingly inept results.

For example, when discussing the bequest of mysterious millonaire Ezekiah Hopkins:

We could give them a pass...after all, "Ezekiah" is hardly an everyday name. Although surely someone in charge should have done the tiniest bit of proofreading and questioned, "Hey, does the story really have a Mr. Ethic Guya Hopkins in it?"

But when meeting the client, Jabez Wilson, for the first time:

Seriously. "Jay Beards Wilson." Every. Single. Time. Which is quite a number of times. Even though his name is spelled out on a the outside of his shoppe several times.

Simply amateurish and embarrassing and unforgivable.

**Speaking of the name Jabez...If we are to believe this website, there are 341 men named Jabez in the United States right now. And Vermont has the most Jabezes per capita. And there are apparently 3 men in New York state named Jabez Fu, which is possibly the coolest thing ever. The things you learn in this job...

**Watson defaming an entire class of people: "Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow." Given that many versions of Watson have portrayed him as obese, pompous and slow, that's fairly ironic. Just sayin.'

**So how, exactly, did Clay know about the French Napoleons being stored in the bank vault? Or was it just going to be a standard bank robbery, and the presence of the gold a happy coincidence for the thieves?

The 1965 BBC version had Clay, during one of his burglaries, steal from the home safe of bank director, Mr. Merryweather, where he found papers that revealed the gold's presence. (He also left a calling card, a clay pipe with a clown face, at every crime he committed!!) The Granada edition had a corrupt bank guard leave a message for a shady character, who ran the information straight to Moriarty.

**One question to contemplate is this: what if Jabez Wilson weren't a red head? What scheme would Clay had to have come up with then? The Obese Pompous And Slow league? Was there a whole plethora of League options he had come up with that might work? Would they have just had to find another business to infiltrate?

And one serious question--what if Jabez Wilson hadn't advertised for a clerk? Then how would Clay have been able to infiltrate the establishment? Did he (or Moriarty) do something to make sure the previous clerk was out of the way?

**"You must find your own ink, pens, and blotting-paper..." Seriously? You can't go cheap on a long grift like this one. If Wilson had been a tiny bit sharper, he might have questioned why a millionaire can afford to pay 4 pounds a week for busy-work, but can't provide the basic necessities for that job. That's what we detectives call a clue...

**The most damaging, fatal mistake Clay made was closing the Red-Headed League office prematurely. If you don't close it, if you show up just one more time to pay Jabez, he has no reason to go to Sherlock Holmes, and you get away with the gold unscathed.

Why such a clumsy, careless error? Impatience, because they were so close to their goal? Trying to avoid paying an extra week's or month's rent on the office? Underestimating Jabez Wilson, by assuming he was so hopeless that he would never investigate, or seek help?

This is a very good reason to assume that this was NOT Moriarty's plan. Certainly he would not have overlooked such a crucial, all-important detail.

**No past apocryphal cases brought up this time. You're set-up to believe that "the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland" is an untold story, but it is actually the next published case. Foreshadowing by Doyle? Or Was A Case Of Identity written first, but published later for unknown reasons, and the reference intedned to refer to a story we had already read?

**Make sure you explain to your children the concept of copying something my hand, and hard-bound multi-volume encyclopedias, or they may not understand this story. "You must cut and paste the entirety of Wikipedia...oh, what, done already?"

**What is the state of Watson's practice? Why, he can take the entire day off, as "I have nothing to do to-day. My practice is never very absorbing." Doesn't sound like you're making a very good living there, John. Thanks, Obamacare. Then again, it was a Saturday...

**One of the businesses around the corner from Wilson's shoppe was "the Vegetarian restaurant." Another reason to love the Canon. Silly me kind of assumed that vegetarian restaurants were a more modern invention. Reading Doyle reminds us of how wrong some of our preconceptions about our own era are, with his looks at his era.

However, I'm fairly sure that we won't see an In-N-Out Burger in Victorian London...

**I hope you all appreciate my maturity at not sniggering at Mr. Merryweather's "Still, I confess that I miss my rubber. It is the first Saturday night for seven-and-twenty years that I have not had my rubber." Nope, no sniggering at all.

**Inspector Peter Jones? Many commentators declare that he must really be Altheny Jones returned. Based on his references to The Sign Of The Four and Holmes' "theorizing," they argue it's the same character and Doyle (or Watson) just erred. There's really not much to go on, and Jones is hardly an uncommon surname. And he seems much more affable and friendly here. But Granada bought the theory, and just renamed him Altheny. He is played by a different actor than the one who played Athelny Jones in their TSOTF production 2 years later...

**Holmes tells the bank director, "I have been at some small expense over this matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund..."

As far as I can tell, Holmes didn't spend a single bloody penny on the entire case, aside from attending a violin performance in his spare time. Was this just a subtle, "polite" way of asking for a reward?

**As written, the entire case has no closure at all for poor Mr. Jabez Wilson. After his initial meeting with Holmes, we never see or hear from him again. We never even know for sure if anyone told him that his shoppe was being used for bank robbery. Or that his wonderful half-wages clerk had completely used him.

The TV adaptations correct this oversight. The 1965 version has Wilson join them Holmes and the police in the wait in vault; Granada has his shoppe wrecked in Artie's struggles to get away, but Holmes sends part of his reward to recompense the man.

SHERLOCK HOLMES WILL RETURN IN A CASE OF IDENTITY (A.K.A. The Case That Made You Go "EEEWWWWWWW")