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Professor Moriarty and the Adventure of the Irish(?) Criminal: Tracing the Evolution of Sherlock Holmes’S Arch-Nemesis, 1893–2017

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Professor Moriarty and the Adventure of the Irish(?) Criminal: Tracing the Evolution of Sherlock Holmes’S Arch-Nemesis, 1893–2017 Professor Moriarty and the Adventure of the Irish(?) Criminal: Tracing the Evolution of Sherlock Holmes’s Arch-Nemesis, 1893–2017 by Kayla M Cook Cook 1 Introduction The first installment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet was first published in November of 1887 in Beaton’s Christmas Annual. This was the first story to feature Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson, who would soon become two of the most famous characters in detective fiction, as well as two of the most famous fictional characters of all time. Over the next four decades came three more novels and fifty-six short stories. In each of these, a crime is committed in some quaint little English village, offsetting society from the norm; the Metropolitan Police, also called Scotland Yard due to their geographic location within London, is called in, and if it is too much for them to handle—which often is the case, at an almost unsettling rate, in these stories—they call in Sherlock Holmes, an amateur detective with a genius mind and a keen eye for observation who, thanks to his ability to notice things that others do not, solves the cases quickly, thus resetting the town to its social norm. At the end of the Victorian Era, London was a center for crime, so stories like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes narratives, in which the detective is always able to solve the crime and the culprit is always caught and locked away, were comforting to many London readers. Sherlock Holmes gained popularity fast, and with each new story, was further established as the representative and protector of respectable, law-abiding Anglo-centric Victorian British society. Though he himself behaved outside the normal realms of respectability, Sherlock Holmes was widely accepted as its protector, the defender of Anglo-centric social structure like the knights- errant of old. He represented civilized English values such as reason and justice and virtue, and there was only one person in all the fifty-six short stories and four novels about him who could ever come close to defeating him: Professor James Moriarty. Cook 2 The character of Professor Moriarty was introduced six years after Holmes, in the short story “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” which appeared in The Strand Magazine’s 1893 Christmas edition. Moriarty is a complete and total contradiction to everything Holmes represents, while also mirroring Holmes’s intelligence and sometimes isolative eccentricities. Moriarty does not fit the mold of the small-scale, localized criminal of nearly every other Sherlock Holmes story. His crime ring is wide—he is a “spider at the center of its web…[which] has a thousand radiations”—and functions on a global scale, making him nearly impossible for Holmes to keep up with, let alone destroy as he hopes to do.1 Moriarty’s nationality and his origins are never explicitly given, but based on his name and what information Conan Doyle gives us about his personality and appearance, there are certain deductions readers can make. He is implied to be, much like the author himself, an Anglicized Irishman who has assimilated into the respectable British upper middle class. Where Conan Doyle was a medical doctor and a writer, Moriarty is a mathematics professor. But as Holmes’s only worthy nemesis and the “Napoleon of Crime,” Moriarty’s Irishness only makes sense in a time when the Irish in the British Empire were viewed as one of the greatest social, political, and criminal threats of the period. Though Conan Doyle was the son of Irish parents and identified strongly as an Irish person, his relationship with his own Irish identity, and with Ireland and its politics in particular, is more than a bit contradictory. Moriarty is not his only Irish character, and “The Adventure of the Final Problem” and The Valley of Fear, the short story and novel in which Moriarty appears, are not Conan Doyle’s only stories in which the role of the Irish in British society is brought into 1 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 1:719. Cook 3 question; nor is the world of fiction the only place in which Conan Doyle decided to acknowledge the “problem” which the Irish represented in British society and politics. While Conan Doyle is best known for his Sherlock Holmes narratives, he also wrote a fair amount of gothic prose and medieval histories, and even had a stint as a politician, running twice for British Parliament as a Unionist and speaking staunchly against Irish Home Rule, his position on which remained firm until 1911. While Conan Doyle was still writing his Sherlock Holmes stories for The Strand, films were already being made of his work. Moriarty, as Holmes’s only worthy nemesis and by far the most intriguing villain of the whole series, was of course featured in many of these early films. From 1915 until 1945, Moriarty appeared in no less than eleven Sherlock Holmes film adaptations, and in each of these, he was almost always portrayed as some kind of ethnic or social “other.” Interestingly, however, he was never portrayed as being Irish, as he was originally written. In this thirty-year period Moriarty appears as French, German, Scottish, Welsh, and Italian, just to name a few—all nationalities which were viewed as foreign, inferior, and somewhat threatening to a still very Anglo-centric British society even in the early twentieth century. In this way, he reflected not only British but also American (as many of these films were made in the United States) fears of foreigners and people who were ethnically different from themselves. Then, Moriarty disappeared for nearly thirty continuous years without any cinematic presence from 1945 to 1975. From 1975 until 2005, with only one exception, Moriarty is portrayed as a member of the respectable white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority in thirteen different adaptations. The only Moriarty who exists as an outlier to this trend is the Moriarty of Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, played by Leo McKern. Cook 4 McKern, though Australian himself, plays Moriarty as a Catholic Irishman who is rife with racialized Irish stereotypes seemingly plucked straight from the comics section of Punch Magazine. He is stupid, incompetent as both a criminal and a mathematics professor, and inherently violent and evil, blaming his identity as an Irish Catholic for his inability to do good. It seems that this Moriarty’s Irishness, however, though it is given as the reason for his madness and his desire to commit a terrible crime every twenty-four minutes, exists to bring about awareness of harsh stereotypes rather than to support their use in favor of villainizing a particular group of people. After McKern, the tradition of casting Moriarty in a way that reflected the fear of an ethnic “other” fell out of fashion, leading to Moriarty being cast and portrayed as English by default in nearly every adaptation after 1975. This remained the case until 2010, when Andrew Scott, an Irish actor from Dublin, was cast as “Jim” Moriarty in the BBC’s made-for-television series, Sherlock, which is set in modern-day London. In this adaptation, unlike the adaptations of the previous century, Moriarty’s minority status is never used against him. He is undeniably Irish, but his Irishness is never used as an excuse or explanation for his criminality or his erratic behavior, nor is it even ever explicitly acknowledged by any of the characters. Essentially, by 2010, British society had progressed to a point when the Irish were no longer associated with widespread violence and crime. In fact, the Moriarty of Sherlock became something of a “source of national pride” for the Irish people who watched the series, which comes as a real surprise considering just a few decades before, this could have caused an uproar, according to Peter Crawley of the Irish Times.2 2 Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott,” Irish Times, Feb. 25, 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/a-thrillingly-intimate-30-minutes-with-andrew-scott-1.2111245. Cook 5 In order to make sense of the Irish villainy of Professor Moriarty, it is also deeply imperative to understand where anti-Irish sentiment started, how it developed over time, and what effects that had on Holmes and Moriarty’s creator, who was himself an Irishman. In order to achieve this, this paper will start with a brief summarization of the complex—and sometimes contradictory—history of Irish-British relations, followed by an examination of the equally complex and contradictory life and times and the political position(s) of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This paper will then trace the evolution of the character of Professor Moriarty, his journey from being Irish-coded to explicitly Irish, and the ways in which he was used to represent society’s fear of various ethnic “others” throughout a hundred and twenty years of history. More importantly, it examines, through the lens of the character of Professor Moriarty, the role of the Irish in British and American history and their journey from being viewed as an ethnic “other” themselves to becoming members of white society, almost indiscernible from any other white Western European ethnicity, something which I argue made it possible for Moriarty to become unproblematically Irish in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Cook 6 Chapter 1: What It Meant to Be Irish in the Victorian Era and Beyond Irish historian Joseph Coohill wrote in his book Ireland: A Short History, “Understanding Irish history before 1800 is a difficult task,” which I have found to be a great understatement.3 However, for our purposes, it is incredibly important to make sense of at least the previous seven centuries in order to understand why British-Irish relations were the way that they were in the late Victorian Era.
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