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. This understanding will then in turn help us to understand why a man like Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle, who was himself an Irishman, would write the antithesis of the greatest hero of modern British literature as an Irishman. This chapter, therefore, will trace the relationship of the Irish and the English, as well as the tradition of British anti-Irish sentiment, from the point of their first encounter to the Victorian Era.

Many historians pinpoint the start of English imperialism and their conquest of Ireland in the mid-sixteenth century with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; historian John Gillingham, however, suggests that the colonization of Ireland actually began in the late twelfth century, when the Anglo-Normans invaded the island.4 Seán Duffy also argues that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, while at first an accident, was a major turning point for Irish and

English history, thereafter irreversibly changing the “face of Ireland” both agriculturally and socially.5 It is important to note, however, that while the impact of the Anglo-Norman conquest was significant, it was largely confined to the areas of Ireland where Anglo colonization was successful; this area, primarily in the area surrounding Dublin and other coastal areas along the

Irish Sea, came to be known as “The Pale” under King Richard II, with the phrase “Beyond the

3 Joseph Coohill, “Ireland: Prehistory to 1534,” in Ireland: A Short History (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015), 6. 4 John Gillingham, “Images of Ireland 1170–1600: The Origins of English Imperialism,” History Today (February 1987): 16–17. 5 Seán Duffy, “An Accident Waiting to Happen,” in The Concise History of Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Ltd., 2000), 65, 68–69. Cook 7

Pale” originally being used to refer to the areas of Ireland where colonization had not taken so strong a hold.6

Giraldus Cambrensis was a Welsh archdeacon from a prominent aristocratic family who travelled to Ireland with the military company of Prince John in the 1180s. While on this journey, he wrote Topographia Hibernica (or, The Topography of Ireland), which gave readers an extensive look at the people, plants, animals, and landscape of Ireland. He was the first person to do this, as well as the first person to put into writing the confusion and amusement of the people who traveled to Ireland when they saw these things for the first time. Writing to King

Henry II, Giraldus refers to the Irish as “bestial” and “barbaric” throughout the document, and presents narratives and images of the people he met, including a naked woman whose hair covered her entire body, men who had sexual relationships with their animals, and a strange ritual in which an animal was slaughtered and a made into a stew while one of the men involved in the ritual bathed in the stew as he and the rest drank his bathwater.7 This account thus establishes the Irish as inferior to the Anglo Normans, to the point of being subhuman.

Interestingly, Giraldus also presents readers with his impressions of Irish monks’ illuminated manuscripts, which he described as “miraculously written.”8 This sets the idea of the Irish as simultaneously barbaric yet greatly artistic and poetic as early as the twelfth century, an idea that would persist into the twentieth century.

The sixteenth century saw a new period of Irish-British relations with the conquest of the

Tudors, a period which brought in many new limiting pieces of legislation. The Penal Laws

6 Coohill, “Ireland: Prehistory to 1534,” 15–16; Duffy, “The End of the Gaelic World,” in The Concise History of Ireland, 89–90, 92. 7 Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, ed. Thomas Wright, trans. Thomas Forester (Cambridge, ON: In parentheses Publications, 2001). 8 Ibid. Cook 8 controlled the everyday lives of Catholics living in Ireland, disallowing them certain rights and privileges such as holding public office or judiciary positions, intermarrying with non-Catholics, teaching in public schools, inheriting land, and owning animals over a certain monetary value, just to name a few. The overall goal of the Penal Laws was to convert the Catholics of Ireland to

Protestantism, but as Joseph Coohill points out, it is important to remember that these laws were also not evenly enforced across the island of Ireland, and in some areas they were completely ignored.9 The first petitions to Parliament for the emancipation of the Catholics did not come until the late eighteenth century, and emancipation was not fully realized until 1829 when the first emancipation acts were passed, thus allowing Catholics to run for seats in Parliament, and at the same time defusing threats of a civil war.10

Less than two decades after the start of emancipation, however, Ireland was struck by the

Great Famine (also called the Great Hunger, or the Irish Potato Famine because it was the result of a fungal blight to the potato crops, a staple in the Irish diet). In the mid-1840s, the Famine killed an estimated one million people and exiled nearly two million more. Despite the damaging effects of this blight, however, Britain’s relief efforts for its closest and oldest colonial territory were sparse, leading to an increase in tensions between the Irish and the English, and subsequently in different types of nationalism, the militancy of which tended to fluctuate over time before culminating in the 1916 Easter Rising and after that the Anglo-Irish War of

Independence in the early 1920s.

In both Ireland and the diaspora, as the Irish found themselves scattered across the British

Empire and into the United States, different types of Irish nationalisms began to develop and

9 Coohill, “Themes in Irish History,” in Ireland: A Short History, 207. 10 Coohill, “O’Connell, Religion and Politics, 1800–1848,” in Ireland: A Short History, 41–42; and Linda Colley, “Victories?” in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 340. Cook 9 evolve. The contempt which the Irish held for the English strengthened, and in a time when many Britons adored Queen Victoria and proudly sang out “God Save the Queen,” the Irish reacted in a much different way, hailing her instead as the “Famine Queen,” vandalizing Unionist and Monarchist monuments across the British Isles, and attacking British officers in retaliation for poor treatment, as the Irish had become second and even third class citizens in Anglo-centric

British society.11 The vast majority of these acts of violence were done at the hands of Irish nationalists, many of whom were members or supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenian Brotherhood. Soon enough, in the eyes of the British and Americans, being Irish and being a Fenian were often seen as one and the same despite Fenian rebels being a minority among the Irish both in Ireland and abroad.

In the 1870s, just two and a half decades after the Famine, as the first Irish Catholics began to vie for seats in Parliament, calls for Home Rule began to be heard. First proposed by

Isaac Butt, a Member of Parliament from Donegal, in May of 1870, the proposal of Home Rule was not a request for complete and total independence. Butt’s proposal for Irish Home Rule was a fairly moderate response to the debate over who should govern Ireland. Under Home Rule, the

Irish would be allowed to self-govern to an extent while still remaining subjects of the British

Empire and allowed all the privileges and protections of British citizens. Despite this, Butt won the support of many Irish nationalists for his defense of the Fenian and Young Irelander movements.12 Bills for Irish Home Rule passed through Parliament every few years for the next several decades, but none of them were successful. Over time, Parliament took up the practice of

“Killing Home Rule with Kindness,” as it was called, a practice in which Unionist MPs sought to

11 Jane Ohlmeyer, “Ireland, India and the British Empire,” Studies in People’s History 2.2 (2015): 182; Ohlmeyer quotes Irish feminist activist Maude Gonne as first calling Victoria the “Famine Queen.” 12 Duffy, “From Famine to Freedom,” in The Concise History of Ireland, 169–170. Cook 10 render the Home Rule movement obsolete and “smother” Irish nationalism by gradually improving the social and economic conditions in Ireland.13

One hamper to the attempt to smother Irish nationalism was the Gaelic Revival at the end of the nineteenth century which sought to renew the Gaelic tradition in Ireland through language, literature, athletics, music, and the whole spectrum of the arts. Another was the development of the Sinn Féin party, a leftist Republican political party founded by Arthur Griffith in the 1880s and 1890s, the goal of which was, according to Duffy, “to help Irishmen recover their self- respect, to love their native language and history, and to develop home-grown industry, but, above all, to stop looking to England for their inspiration.”14 The growing influence of these two movements, which were both heavily inspired by the memory of the (unsuccessful) Rebellion of

1798 and all the years of oppression before and since, helped to create a generation with great pride in their Irishness, who would be more than willing to take matters into their own hands after the start of the First World War set Home Rule back even further.

At this point, one might beg the question: what about the Scottish? The Welsh?

Certainly, they were the victims of British imperialism as well. Why did they not fight back in the same way the Irish did in this period? This seems to be for two major reasons. Firstly, the

Scottish and the Welsh did not have the Famine as the Irish did. A certain percentage of the Irish affected by the Famine did flee to Scotland and other parts of mainland Britain (the island comprised of England, Scotland, and Wales), but the people who were already living there were not aware of the full extent of the suffering the Irish experienced in the 1840s as they did not experience the same Great Hunger firsthand. Secondly, the Scottish and Welsh people were

13 Ibid, 176. 14 Ibid, 179. Cook 11 more willing to accept the dual Celtic and British identity than the Irish were, as historian

Carolyn Conley argues.15 Irish nationalism, then, was its own breed of nationalism, developed and made more extreme over time by distance and heightened struggle and hardships.

As the Irish began to develop their own gradual social independence through their

“home-grown industries” and to revive and adapt their own tradition of music, art, writing, sports, and language, and as they began moving politically toward their own way of ruling without a need for the English, the English began to worry. Of course, this worry was not unwarranted, however, as violence from the Irish criminal classes was at the same time beginning to increase, all toward the goal of ending English rule over Ireland. Even those who had been staunchly against Irish Home Rule in previous decades were beginning to see that it was inevitable at this point; the Irish were determined to get out from under England’s thumb and had proven they were not above resorting to violence to attain this goal, and those in

England who understood this began to take a step back from their previous strong political opinions.16

Social opinions, on the other hand, persisted beyond the political compromise. The long tradition of anti-Irish sentiment continued despite the improving social conditions in Ireland and the advancement of Irish politicians into Parliament—things which seemed like they would have proven the ability of the Irish to self-govern and function socially—the Irish were still viewed as inferior and savage. Authors and artists in nearly every form of media dehumanized the Irish, likening them to apes and beasts, depicting them as inherently criminal, dangerous to women,

15 Carolyn A. Conley, “Wars among Savages: Homicide and Ethnicity in the Victorian United Kingdom,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 775. 16 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even, who had run for Parliament twice as a Unionist, wrote a letter in 1911 in which he stated that he was now in favor of Home Rule after seeing how it had been successful in other imperial territories, as well as how determined the Irish seemed to self-govern. He did, however, like many others in similar positions, believe that the Irish would never be fully independent of Britain. Cook 12 and controlled by their supposed compulsion to drink. Near the middle to late nineteenth century, as these acts of social upheaval and near-anarchy began to pick up, the British came up with many ideas to help explain and dismiss this increase in criminal behavior. Perhaps two of the most popular of these ideas are the “hooligan” and the “Irish ape.”

In mid-nineteenth century Britain, the Irish were far more likely to be arrested than any other British citizen of another nationality or ethnicity, and the idea of the Irish as inherently criminal, though not a new one, was firmly cemented by the early Victorian period.17 One concept which developed in this period to help categorize and dismiss these crimes was that of the “hooligan.” This term, which now is used almost universally to refer to any rowdy youth, was originally coined in the late nineteenth century using Irish-sounding syllables to describe usually (but not exclusively) Irish gang members who terrorized the streets of English cities.18

Author Geoffrey Pearson writes that not only were supposed Irish gang members dubbed

“hooligans,” so was anyone who decided to stoop to a similar level of social disruption and blatant disrespect of the Crown—essentially any working class criminal.19 Of this, Pearson says,

“it was most ingenious of late Victorian England to disown the British hooligan by giving him an

Irish name.”20

In contrast, while the hooligan was largely a social, economic, and sometimes geographical stereotype, the concept of the Irish ape was steeped heavily in the popular racial theory of the time, drawing on and creating certain biological or racial stereotypes. The name alone is much more demeaning and dehumanizing, and the image is even more unsavory. The

17 Roger Swift, “Heroes or Villains?: The Irish, Crime, and Disorder in Victorian England,” Albion 29.3 (1997): 399–400. 18 Geoffrey Pearson, “Victorian Boys, We Are Here!” in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillian Press Ltd., 1981), 75. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. Cook 13

Irish ape, as can be inferred from the name, is a simian creature, almost a man but not quite, with a large head and a jaw that juts forward; he has no defined shoulders and therefore suffers from chronically poor posture; his features are hideous and his clothes dirty and ill-fitting. Some of the more extreme examples depict him with a tail and hand-like feet like a monkey. Throughout the Victorian era and even beyond, into the early and mid-twentieth century, various media outlets distributed images like these, with a common trope being the comparison of an Irish individual to an English person, with the English person always depicted as a being exceptionally beautiful (particularly when women were compared) or regal.

One such early example appeared in 1848 in Punch Magazine, and was given the title

“The British Lion and the Irish Monkey. Monkey (Mr. Mitchell [sic]). ‘One of us must be “put down.”’”21 In this image, which satirizes Young Irelander John Mitchel’s fight for Irish freedom, a monkey stands to the west on the eastern bank of an island (Ireland), facing a lion who stands to the east on the western bank of an island (England). The monkey is dressed in a court jester’s costume and holds a spear menacingly toward the very composed and regal- looking lion, who wears an ornate crown and bears an unsettlingly humanlike face; beside the monkey stands a primitive torch, and behind the lion is a large British warship, or possibly a prison ship. There is certainly a lot of obvious symbolism in this image, which would have certainly made an impact in the mid-nineteenth century when Punch readers first saw it. The artist’s opinion of the English as powerful and superior, and the Irish as uncivilized, animalistic, and foolish comes through potently, as does the apparent threat that if the Irish do not retreat from their violent but disorganized attacks, the English do have a large and powerful military at their disposal and are not afraid to use it.

21 Punch Archives, “Ireland-Cartoons-Punch-1848.04.08.147.tif,” retrieved from https://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Ireland-Cartoons/G0000tcWkXyP4OHo/I0000c1E5Q7ELdBI. Cook 14

Figure 1: “The British Lion and the Irish Monkey,” retrieved from Punch Archives22

Along with the idea of the Irish as subhuman came the idea that the Irish were simply biologically prone to crime. They did not have the same level of thought and control as the

English did. This line of thought was not original, nor was it exclusive to England. In Italy, for example, criminologists and practitioners of medicine like Cesare Lombroso believed that a criminal could be identified by various biological and phenotypical markers, like the shape of one’s ears or the distance of one’s facial features from each other, ignoring the classical idea that criminality is a trait of humanity and not a marker of a separate race or even subspecies.23 These

22 Ibid. 23 At various points in the Holmesian canon, Arthur Conan Doyle makes references to Lombroso’s work and theories, particularly that of the “born” criminal, and of these particular markers which can be used to identify a criminal. Moriarty, for instance, with his “hereditary tendencies” (mentioned in “The Final Problem”) fits the bill of the “born” criminal, while in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle’s first Holmes novel, Holmes himself uses Cook 15 ideas tended to spawn from contempt felt by one group of people for an adjacent group.

Lombroso was Northern Italian, and many of his proposed criminals were Southern Italian. It is common to villainize those who are close at hand and who we perceive as different from ourselves.

The English therefore, like many others, made a villain of the closest foreigners to home: the Irish, who also happened to be their oldest colonial territory. They were able to use this idea of biological criminality as a means to dismiss Irish criminality as simply a part of their inherent behavior and to remove any blame for themselves so they did not have to acknowledge that in many ways, the violence committed by the Irish was done in retaliation for English misdeeds.

This also draws to attention to the notion of “Killing Home Rule with Kindness,” which was discussed earlier in this chapter—the English found when they improved the social and economic conditions of Ireland, and retracted oppressive legislature over the Catholic majority, militant nationalism and violence began to taper out and be replaced instead by a more cultural form of nationalism, rather than a violent militant form, consequently revealing the notion of the

Irish as inherently and uncontrollably criminal to be an invalid assertion. Nonetheless, it is an idea which persisted and continued to develop for nearly a century more, and to travel into

America and across the British Empire as well.

Lombroso’s identification methods. Anna Neill gives a much more in-depth analysis of Holmes and Lombroso in her article: Anna Neill, “The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.2 (2009): 611–626. Cook 16

Chapter 2: Arthur Conan Doyle, Professor Moriarty, and the Question of Irish Home Rule

Victorian British anti-Irish sentiment was not, as might be the common assumption, exclusive to England. Throughout the mainland of Great Britain, the Irish were viewed as significantly inferior to their fellow Celtic as well as their Anglo counterparts, and as possibly the greatest—and definitely the closest—threat to respectable British society. Catholicism, too, was looked down upon as “the greatest obstacle to success,” making the vast majority of Irish people “incapable of success,” according to historians Bernard Aspinall and John F.

McCaffrey.24

In the Scottish capital city of Edinburgh, where Arthur Conan Doyle was born and grew up, it could not have been easy to identify too heavily with one’s Irish heritage. A desire or need to hide his Irishness, therefore, could explain Conan Doyle’s strained and conflicting relationship with Ireland and Irish politics, as well as with his own family. This was reflected in his writings, which English literature professor Catherine Wynne posits were a way for him to come to terms with his own Irish identity.25 Wynne offers this explanation multiple times throughout the first chapter of her book, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the

Gothic, regarding Conan Doyle’s complex Irish characters and narratives. In many ways, Conan

Doyle’s Irish characters appear to conform to the assumptions of the period that the Irish were inherently criminal and racially inferior; interestingly, at the same time, many of them are also characterized by dignity and intelligence. Much was the case with the character of Professor

24 Bernard Aspinwall and John F. McCaffrey, “A Comparative View of the Irish in Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Irish in the Victorian City, ed. Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 130. 25 Catherine Wynne, “Imperial War and Colonial Sedition: Soldiers, Mollies, and Fenians,” in The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 23. Cook 17

Moriarty in particular, who was both a deranged criminal and a respected and accomplished mathematician in days gone by.

At the middle of the nineteenth century in Edinburgh, Irish immigrants and people of

Irish descent made up only about four to five percent of the population.26 The Irish were the largest immigrant group to Scotland during the Victorian Era, making Charles and Mary Doyle,

Arthur Conan Doyle’s parents, just two in what were likely tens of thousands. Mary Doyle was a devout Catholic and for almost the entirety of his education, her son attended Jesuit schools.

Perhaps as early as eight years of age, Conan Doyle would have had his first encounters with anti-Irish sentiment when he went off to boarding school in Lancashire, where many people’s hostility toward the Irish was heightened due to recent Fenian violence in the Lancashire-

Manchester area.27

At home, the young Conan Doyle would have seen the respectability of his own family and close relations juxtaposed against the contempt of those around him towards Irish people living in Britain, likely depicted both verbally and physically, as well as in locally and nationally distributed literature and media. His uncle, Richard Doyle, a journalist, for instance, worked hard to popularize Punch Magazine, a nationally distributed British journal which, interestingly in this regard, regularly published politicized images of dehumanized, simian-like Irishmen and women.28 Several of Conan Doyle’s other close family members and friends on into adulthood, such as colleague Willie Redmond, self-identified as “extreme nationalists,” a phrase which

26 Ibid. 27 One year before eight-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle’s arrival in England, Manchester experienced what would later be known as the “Manchester Outrages,” a series of Fenian-related attacks in the streets in 1867. Most notably was an incident in which three Irishmen were executed for blowing up a police van and killing a Manchester police officer. These three men, William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien, became known as the “Manchester Martyrs.” 28 Wynne, 24. Cook 18

Wynne posits had a largely subjective connotation until the 1916 Easter Rising, when Britain got its first glimpse of extreme Irish nationalism since the Great Famine, and when the standard for the next several decades of Irish nationalism was set.29

All of these factors together created a man with a highly complex and varying, and somewhat contradictory political stance. Conan Doyle identified strongly with his Irish heritage and his “fellow countrymen,” as he proudly referred to the people of Ireland.30 At the same time, he was also a staunch monarchist and imperialist in a time when many Irish (and especially

Irish Catholic) people were not, many of them hailing Queen Victoria as the “Famine Queen” and building strong nationalistic views against Britain and for Irish independence.31 In much of his writing, especially early on, it is clear that Conan Doyle has a respect for the Irish and views them as respectable and potentially valuable members of British society, reflective of many members of his own family; however, many of the popular Victorian perceptions of Irish people show through, sometimes more clearly than others.

In one of his non-Holmesian short stories published in 1891 entitled “A Sordid Affair,”

Conan Doyle wrote of an alcoholic, abusive Irish husband who in almost Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion became criminal and animalistic when under the influence. This character, recently unemployed due to his alcoholism, is described as “a horrid crawling figure, [with] a hatless head, and a dull, vacant, leering face…. His coat was covered in dust and he mumbled and chuckled like an ape.”32 This story could be at least partly inspired by his father, who struggled with severe alcoholism throughout much of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life while in Edinburgh; but

29 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 330. 30 Arthur Conan Doyle, “Great Britain and the New War,” The Fortnightly Review 93 (February 1913):236. 31 Ohlmeyer, “Ireland, India and the British Empire,” 182. 32 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Sordid Affair,” Uncollected Stories: The Unknown Conan Doyle, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1982), 130. Cook 19 the dehumanization and the particular descriptors used for this character were undeniably inspired by nineteenth century racial stereotypes. One such obvious influence was the infamous

“Irish ape,” a simian creature who was often depicted as drunk and violent, especially toward women. These “Irish apes” were a common feature of political cartoons in Punch Magazine, which Conan Doyle had access to from a young age thanks to his uncle Richard Doyle, who helped to popularize the magazine. If Conan Doyle believed that close members of his family like his uncle supported anti-Irish ideologies, and if he saw his father as reflecting certain negative Irish stereotypes, it is possible that he would not want to resemble or purposely emulate, nor even support, many aspects of Irish life, believing based on these things that what popular theorists said about the Irish was the truth.

Figure 2: “The Irish ‘Tempest,’” retrieved from Punch Archives33

33 Punch Archives, “Ireland-Cartoons-Punch-1870.03.19.111.tif,” retrieved from https://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Ireland-Cartoons/G0000tcWkXyP4OHo/I0000tdww8R2mAeg. Cook 20

The association of the Irish with violent forms of nationalism—particularly Fenian nationalism—is also a common theme throughout Conan Doyle’s stories featuring Irish characters. This is culminated in his Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, which presents readers with an organized crime syndicate called the “Scowrers,” who were based on the real-life

Molly Maguires, a secret fraternal organization which was founded in Pennsylvania by Irish

American coal miners.

As the story goes, Conan Doyle met a Pinkerton detective while traveling who told him about a case he worked involving the Mollies, which Conan Doyle then took for his own and adapted into The Valley of Fear.34 One key fact that Conan Doyle omitted from his version of the story, though, was that the detective on the case was himself an Irishman named James

McParlan (renamed “Birdy Edwards” in The Valley of Fear). Conan Doyle’s explanation to his editors for changing the name of the organization could also explain his desire to change the detective’s name. On the matter he said, “I change all names so as not to get into possible Irish politics.”35 This explanation does not appear as strong as Conan Doyle probably hoped it did because while erasing the Irishness of the detective and skirting around the group’s supposed

Irish ties at points, he retained the Irishness of the surnames of nearly all the criminal class characters who appear in this work.

Possibly the most compelling as well as the longest-lasting of Conan Doyle’s Irish characters and narratives is that of Professor Moriarty, a lead villain from the Sherlock Holmes narratives. Moriarty only appears in two narratives, “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” a short story published in December 1893, and The Valley of Fear, a full-length novel whose

34 Wynne, 41–42. 35 Quoted in Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle, 42. Cook 21 individual chapters were published from September 1914 to May 1915. Professor Moriarty, much like the author himself, is implied to be an Anglicized Irishman living on the British mainland, having assimilated into the respectable middle class. Where Conan Doyle was a doctor and a writer, Moriarty was a mathematics professor. Professor Moriarty is never explicitly named as an Irishman, but certain deductions about his origins can be made by examining the clues, including his physical description and his involvement with multiple other

Irish criminals.

In “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” Moriarty is described in this manner:

He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is…pale, and ascetic-looking…. His shoulders are rounded…, and his face protrudes forward and is for ever [sic] slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.36

This description is undeniably dehumanizing given the fact that Conan Doyle likens the professor to a reptile and more than once exaggerates and accentuates certain features which make him seem to have an unusual appearance such as his “deeply sunken” eyes, protruding face, and large, doming forehead. This physical description is similar in many ways to the aforementioned “Irish ape” imagery common in newspapers and magazines of the time such as

Punch Magazine. Conan Doyle also likens Moriarty to a spider, though this description is used to refer to the vastness and complexity of the crime network of which he “sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, … [which] has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”37

36 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 1:720. 37 Ibid, 1:719. Cook 22

Figure 3: Sidney Paget’s illustration which accompanied Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Final Problem” when it was published in The Strand Magazine in December, 1893.38

38 Ibid, 1:721. Cook 23

In conjunction with this idea of Moriarty as physically different is the idea of his being biologically different. Conan Doyle, through the voice of his protagonist, also has this to say of

Moriarty: “[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 indefinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.”39 That is to say, despite being incredibly intelligent and brilliant, and at one time a respected member of British academia, Moriarty was irreparably and uncontrollably criminal solely as a result of his race. This argument was made against many ethnic minorities in the nineteenth century when racial theory was on the rise, and in particular against the Irish, who as the largest and closest minority living in Britain, as well as one which had proven multiple times they were not above responding violently to mistreatment, were viewed as one of the biggest criminal threats to Victorian British society.

One thing which is never called into question, however, is Moriarty’s intelligence and his ability to function socially. Moriarty is described as having “extraordinary mental powers,” and as being “an antagonist who was [Holmes’s] intellectual equal.”40 As well as having a “criminal strain which ran through his blood” and “hereditary tendencies,” Conan Doyle also describes him as being “endowed by nature with phenomenal mathematical faculty,” by the age of twenty-one publishing an influential book on the area of mathematics which he studied, gaining a chair position at an English university, and working as a private tutor for those taking exams to become officers in the British Army.41 This is reflective, it appears, of Conan Doyle’s respect for the Irish and his high thoughts of them, in addition to his conflicting view that the Irish were inherently barbaric and therefore should not be given enough power to self-govern lest they fall

39 Ibid, 1:718. 40 Ibid, 1:718–719. 41 Ibid. Cook 24 into depravity. Moriarty similarly fell into such depravity when he turned to a life of crime, associating himself with the likes of Sebastian Moran, a British Army sharpshooter of Irish origin who while stationed in India reverted to a primitive sort of criminality, and the Scowrers, an Irish American crime syndicate.42

Because of the vast, international, and untraceable threat which Moriarty posed to not only London, but to Britain and the whole world, as well as the challenge he posed to Sherlock

Holmes, the protector of respectable, Anglo-normative British society, it is possible that

Moriarty could have been an allegory for what could happen if the Irish were allowed to self- govern. This idea is supported by the fact that the professor makes an appearance or at least earns a mention in the Sherlock Holmes canon in times of particular interest in Ireland. His first appearance, for instance, in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” coincided with the Second

Home Rule Bill in 1893, proposed by Prime Minister William Ewert Gladstone. Similarly,

Conan Doyle begins writing and publishing chapters of The Valley of Fear as the Government of

Ireland Act of 1914, another Home Rule Bill, was going through Parliament.

According to Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley, who compiled the author’s letters into a single volume, Conan Doyle took a “lifelong interest” in the question of

Irish Home Rule.43 In both his Parliamentary campaigns (in which he ran as a Unionist), Conan

Doyle spoke strongly against the idea of Home Rule. He did not believe the Irish were capable of self-government, but later reframed this stance in 1911 in a letter written to the Belfast

42 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Empty House,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 2:781–815; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, in The Greatest Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Fall River Press, 2012), 673 –827. Moran is featured in “The Empty House” as Moriarty’s second in command who, after Moriarty’s death, took on the responsibility of ending Sherlock Holmes’s life, and the Scowrers, as previously mentioned, were featured in The Valley of Fear and were based on the real-life secret organization the Molly Maguires. 43 Jon Lellenberg, et al, “Introduction,” in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 3–4. Cook 25

Evening Telegraph, stating that he now believes a “solid loyal Ireland” would be beneficial to the

British Empire.44 He also states that Britain can be assured “that Ireland can never break away from the Union, since South Africa showed that every State of the British Empire would unite against any disruption.”45 Of course, time proved Conan Doyle wrong, but he could hardly have seen that coming, since even the 1916 Easter Rising came as a somewhat of a surprise just five years after this letter’s printing.

Moriarty is mentioned a total of five times aside from his appearances in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” and The Valley of Fear, each key moments of Irish-British history. Two of the most notable mentions post-1916 appear in “His Last Bow” and “The Adventure of the

Illustrious Client.” “His Last Bow” was written in 1917, just a year after the Easter Rising, as

Sinn Féin and other nationalist republican groups were gaining ground in Ireland. In this story,

Sherlock Holmes reminisces almost fondly of Moriarty saying that he would “get level” with him, another possible expression of Conan Doyle’s fear of Irish nationalism and the potentiality of Irish self-government.46 And in “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” Holmes tells a client upon their first meeting that if the suspect of the crime is not as dangerous as Professor

Moriarty of his henchman Colonel Moran, Holmes is not interested in taking the case.47 This story was written in 1924, just three years after the Irish War of Independence, which ended in the formation of the Republic of Ireland and the Partition of Ireland, making all but the six

Northern counties independent from Britain. Perhaps this was Conan Doyle’s final literary nod

44 Arthur Conan Doyle, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle changes his mind about Irish home rule – archive, 1911,” The Guardian, reprinted September 22, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/22/arthur-conan-doyle- irish-home-rule-1911. 45 Ibid. 46 Arthur Conan Doyle, “His Last Bow,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 2:1440. 47 Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Illustrious Client, in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 2:1452. Cook 26 to the Irish on the issue of Home Rule, as both Moriarty and the subject of the Irish fall out of his fictional writing after this point, and Ireland had begun to prove its ability to self-govern.

Cook 27

Chapter 3: Moriarty on the Silver Screen, 1915–1945

As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Professor Moriarty was created by Arthur

Conan Doyle as the negative reflection of the protagonist, Sherlock Holmes. He was Holmes’s only true match intellectually and subsequently his only worthy nemesis.48 It is therefore imperative for us to gain a basic understanding of the ways in which Sherlock Holmes was portrayed in these early decades of Holmesian filmography in order to gain an understanding of why Moriarty was portrayed the ways he was. William Gillette originated the role of Sherlock

Holmes in 1899 in his stage play entitled Sherlock Holmes. This play was much different from any story in the original canon, featuring an original mystery (which was inspired in part by several existing mysteries) with several original characters, including a young, pretty love interest for its titular character, Holmes, who was in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories almost entirely asexual in all but name, showing no interest in either women or men. These canonical diversions stemmed from a letter which was sent by Conan Doyle to Gillette stating that the playwright could, “marry the detective, or murder him, or do anything he pleased with him,” something which Gillette and many other writers and filmmakers for decades to come took advantage of.49

But despite Gillette’s Holmes being a far cry from the original, his interpretation of the character was highly influential in the creation of the image audiences now associate with

Sherlock Holmes. It was Gillette who first gave Holmes his deerstalker cap, his calabash pipe, and his grand Victorian housecoat for instance. Gillette was also the one to coin Holmes’s trademark catchphrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson”—a phrase which Holmes never actually

48 That is, aside from Irene Adler, the American woman who bested Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” 49 Quoted in Barnes, “Sherlock Holmes,” in Sherlock Holmes On Screen: The Complete Film and TV History (London: Titan Books, 2011), 173. Cook 28 utters in the original canon. Because he was the first, as well as one of the longest running actors to play Sherlock Holmes, Gillette therefore exuded a lot of influence on how the main character and the universe in which he lived are visualized by fans and brought to life by more recent actors and filmmakers.50 It is reasonable to presume, then, that he would have likely had some effect as well on other characters’ presentations, including that of Professor Moriarty.

William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes was rewritten from a play previously penned by

Arthur Conan Doyle, but which was deemed “unfit for production.”51 It opened on Broadway in

November 1899 after a short run in Buffalo starting in May of that same year, running off and on until 1929 and making numerous international tours, even being performed for an English monarch, with Gillette in the lead role. It no doubt had gained a significant amount of popularity worldwide and at the same time earned a certain amount of reputability in the world of

Holmesian adaptations thanks to Conan Doyle’s attachment to it and its global viewership, continuing over the next several decades. In 1916, the play was filmed and released as Sherlock

Holmes: A Drama in Four Acts with most of the original stage production’s cast, featuring

Gillette as Sherlock Holmes and French actor Ernest Maupain as Professor Moriarty. Maupain, made up in exaggerated eyebrows and donning a stern expression, was praised by Motion

Picture World as being Gillette’s “stronger opposite.”52 No notes are made, however, about the actor being French, but perhaps with multiple other French actors in the cast and the film’s

French production company, it hardly seemed notable. Nevertheless, the tradition was set, and in

50 Gillette played Holmes on into his eighties, years after his first supposed “retirement” from the role in 1910 and his farewell tour which lasted from 1929–1932. 51 Matthew Bunson, in Encyclopedia Sherlockiana: The Complete A–Z Guide to the World of the Great Detective (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 228–230. 52 Barnes, “Sherlock Holmes,” 174. Cook 29 nearly every Sherlock Holmes adaptation to follow, Holmes was always played by an

Englishman (or by an American donning an English accent), and Moriarty by a foreigner.

Figure 4: Ernest Maupain as Professor Moriarty in William Gillette’s silent film Sherlock Holmes (1916).53

Six years later in 1922 came another film adaptation of Gillette’s play, starring American actor John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes and German actor Gustav von Seyffertitz as Professor

Moriarty. The casting of a German actor in the role of Professor Moriarty follows in line with

Gillette’s casting of a French actor in the same role, and is remarkably timed just three years after the end of the First World War. In this interwar period, Germany’s economy and social standing were left in shambles after it was forced to pay numerous reparations to Britain and

France after the war. Seyffertitz’s Moriarty, however, was different from Maupain’s in that he was made up in a much more grotesque fashion, looking this time almost like a zombified

53 Sherlock Holmes, directed by Arthur Berthelet (Chicago: Essenay, 1916); screenshot mine. Cook 30

Abraham Lincoln—Alan Barnes calls him a “top-hatted, stooped grotesque played with significant authority,” both reflecting the confident manner in which Seyffertitz played him, and the lasting effect this Moriarty had on viewers.54 The effect of Seyffertitz’s Moriarty on audiences and the importance of his role in the film itself actually led to its being billed simply as

Moriarty in Great Britain (rather than Sherlock Holmes, as it had been called in the United

States), as well as to the centralization of the character of the professor as a more equal lead in subsequent Holmesian film, and later television, adaptations—a big shift from his presence in the original canon, which was limited to one novel and one short story.55

Figure 5: Gustav von Seyffertitz’s Moriarty peers around the corner into Holmes’s Baker Street apartment, looking for Holmes.56

54 Barnes, “Sherlock Holmes,” 177. 55 For reference, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels whose focus was Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. 56 Sherlock Holmes, directed by Albert Parker (Fort Lee, NJ: Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, 1922); screenshot mine. Cook 31

Each of these films was also released at crucial times in Irish history, which could potentially explain why Moriarty could not have been portrayed as an Irishman in either one, but was instead presented as other ethnicities which were at the time a source of anxiety for Britain and the United States. William Gillette’s film was made and released in 1916, the same year as the Easter Rising, a major (albeit failed) rebellion in Ireland which set the pace for the Irish

Republican Nationalism of the next few decades. Similarly, Moriarty was filmed and released in

1922, shortly after the end of the Anglo-Irish War of Independence, which resulted in the

Partition of Ireland and the creation of the Irish Free State. At the same time, in the United

States, many Irish people, as well as Jews and African Americans, were advocating fiercely for fair and equal representation in the entertainment industries.57 In such turbulent times, especially when the Irish in America were trying to extend a sense of pride in their Irish identity and sympathy for the Irish (although often not as much so for Irish Catholics) was beginning to gain some traction, it would make sense for filmmakers to be hesitant to portray this particular character, who was in many ways the archetypal villain, as being Irish as he was originally written. Likewise, it could also explain why it would have been a safer bet to go with a French or German villain in this turbulent interwar period.

Despite not having an Irish actor play the character of Professor Moriarty in this period, there were in fact two Scottish actors, Norman McKinnel (Sherlock Holmes’ Fatal Hour, 1931) and Ernest Torrence (Sherlock Holmes, 1932), and one Welsh actor, Lyn Harding (The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes, 1935; and Silver Blaze, 1937) to take on the role. This could be because of an increase in criminal behavior in those areas, and a decrease in the supposed respectability of

57 M. Alison Kibler, Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). In this book, Kibler discusses the ways in which these three groups fought for several decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America in order to gain fairer treatment and equal representation in media, mainly in theatre and early film. Cook 32 these ethnicities in Britain in the late 1920s and the 1930s during the time of the Great

Depression.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression hit harder in Scotland than in any other area of

Britain, leading to the reemergence and development of certain negative stereotypes about the

Scottish people, whose major cities like Glasgow were reduced to slums rampant with gang activity.58 At the same time in Wales, after a severe drop in the demand for coal, the area’s leading export, in the mid-1920s, many Welsh people were left unemployed, unable to find new means of employment because of their continued usage of the Welsh language and the popular belief that they were unfit for more skilled types of work, leading to a similar sort of situation as the one in Scotland.59

Similarly, other ethnicities and nationalities, many of whom had borne the brunt of the effects of the Great Depression, began to fill this villainous role. After Harding came George

Zucco (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1939), an Italian-British actor. Zucco’s appearance as Moriarty was altered to make him appear more stereotypically Italian through such means as darkening and thickening his hair and beard, and giving him small glasses which would make his nose appear larger, likely to make it clearer to the audience that not only was the actor Italian, so was the character. In the 1930s, Italians had also gained a bad reputation as criminals and disturbers of the peace due to the “Italian mobster” sub-stereotype which was fully fleshed out in the period between Prohibition and the Great Depression due to an increase in organized crime done by Italian immigrants, especially in the United States, where this film was made. With the

58 BBC, “20th Century Scotland – An Introduction (II),” accessed March 13, 2020, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhistory/modern/intro_modern2.shtml. 59 BBC, “Unemployment and the Welsh language in 1930s Wales,” accessed March 13, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/clips/zhytsbk. Cook 33 filmmakers’ knowledge of Moriarty’s large, highly secretive and globally active organized crime syndicate which he had full control over, it probably felt only natural in this period for an

American film company to create a Moriarty who came off as an Italian mob boss terrorizing the streets of London. Nonetheless, academic and cinematographic writers like Pohle and Hart call

Zucco’s Moriarty “suave and egocentric,” but do nothing to allude to his implied Italian mobster status; Alan Barnes does a little more, noting the prevalence of “gaucho music” in certain scenes and the fear expressed by certain characters when confronted with this.60

Figure 6: George Zucco as Professor Moriarty (right), waiting in the rain for Sherlock Holmes (left) outside the courthouse after his acquittal.61

60 Robert W. Pohle and Douglas C. Hart, “The Basil Rathbone Series,” in Sherlock Holmes on Screen: The Motion Picture Adventures of the World’s Most Popular Detective (South Brunswick and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1977), 176; and Barnes, “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” 20; a “gaucho” is a South American cowboy, primarily from Argentina, the majority of the population of which is Italian. 61 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Alfred L. Werker (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1939); screenshot mine. Cook 34

The next two Moriartys, Lionel Atwill (The Secret Weapon, 1942) and Henry Daniell

(The Woman in Green, 1945) were both English, of an upper class variety, thus seeming to imply that Sherlockian filmmakers’ proclivity to play on the audience’s fear of the ethnic “other” was dwindling, and that perhaps a different form of anxiety was coming forward in the era when many countries were coming out of the Depression: a disdain and distrust of the corrupt elite.

Moriarty’s corruption is emphasized in these films rather than his ethnic “otherness”, and it is that corruption which is pitted strongly against Holmes’s virtue (class, in this instance does not seem to play a role as Basil Rathbone uses a similar upper or upper-middle class English accent).

This chapter only focused on a portion of the Moriarty actors of this thirty year period, despite Moriarty’s near-constant presence in Holmesian film adaptations from 1915 to 1945, making no less than eleven appearances. This fact in many ways makes it all the more strange that in the next thirty year period from 1945 to 1975, Moriarty only made a single appearance in any Sherlock Holmes film. In 1963, Moriarty reemerged as the lead villain in the film Sherlock

Holmes und das Halsband des Todes (literally Sherlock Holmes and the Choker of Death; released in Great Britain and the United States as Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace).

This film was a multi-national co-production between West German, Italian, and French film companies. It was also the final film in which Moriarty was used to represent the fear of an ethnic “other” in any serious sense. In Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, German actor

Hans Söhnker took on the role of Moriarty, pitted against an English Holmes, played by Sir

Christopher Lee. This seems to be reflective of the relationship between Germany and the rest of

Europe after the Second World War. The Allied Forces split Germany amongst themselves in order to decentralize its power to better keep the German people from continuing the harm they had done leading up to and during the war. Even two decades after the war, however, and after Cook 35

Germany had successfully been kicked down the world power ladder, Germans still occupied a place of fear in the minds of many other nations because of the atrocities which had been committed in the name of German nationalism. It makes sense, then, that the final Moriarty of this era defined by Moriarty’s representation of the fear of a particular nationality or ethnic group would be German.

Figure 7: Hans Söhnker’s (left) first scene as Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace.62

After the Second World War, it seems that many American and British filmmakers understood the danger of explicitly villainizing those who were ethnically different from themselves—that is to say, at least in a white Euro-centric sense. In the United States, African

Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, among others, continued to occupy the position of “villain” in many films and television series, particularly in Westerns. Playing up the fear of brown and black individuals was not quite as problematic to the American public in the

62 Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, dir. Frank Winterstein and Terence Fisher (CCC Filmkunst, Critérion Films, and Incei Film, 1962); screenshot mine. Cook 36

1950s and 1960s, and filmmakers were much keener to continue this tradition at full force and drop the practice of villainizing non-Anglo whites.

At the same time, the Irish were slowly but surely assimilating into the white majority in the United States, “becoming white,” as Noel Ignatiev described this phenomenon in his book,

How the Irish Became White.63 This process, spanning from the activism of the Irish American theatre rioters of the 1870s who took their inspiration from the Gaelic Revival across the pond to the life and times of President John F. Kennedy who took the media by storm when he became the President of the United States in the early 1960s, gradually integrated and normalized

Irishness and Roman Catholicism in the United States until the Irish were no longer villainized, but in many ways celebrated.

In the next chapter, I will move forward to the period of late twentieth century Holmesian cinematography, spanning from 1975 to 2005, and discuss the ways in which Moriarty was successfully Anglicized, having been stripped of any ethnic “otherness”, and the possible effects of the Troubles in Northern Ireland on this as well as on his singular representation as an

Irishman by Australian comedic actor Leo McKern in Gene Wilder’s 1975 film The Adventure of

Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother.

63 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2009). Cook 37

Chapter 4: The Troubles and Re-emerging “Hereditary Tendencies”: Moriarty in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, 1975–2005

After three decades of absence from the screen, Professor Moriarty reappears in full color in 1975 in what is possibly one of the strangest ways he could have: in a Gene Wilder comedy,

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. Portrayed by Australian actor Leo

McKern, this Moriarty is almost completely unrecognizable from the one written by Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle nearly a century before, and also from his predecessors on the silver screen.

McKern’s Moriarty is neither physically nor mentally or intellectually the same man; in spite of this, many similar arguments are made about him—namely that his Irishness is the primary reason for his criminal behavior and madness.

During a mock-confession between Professor Moriarty and a toy coin-operated priest, the professor quotes Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” almost verbatim when he discusses the

“hereditary tendencies” which drive his hatred for Sherlock Holmes and for England, and which are the sole reason for his inability to do good. He takes it a step further, however, stating that he has an “urge to do something absolutely rotten every twenty-four minutes.”64

By writing the character in this way, Wilder conforms to the Victorian British notion of the Irish as inherently criminal, and the popular idea of the Irish as intellectually and mentally inferior; and while this is in a way accurate to the beliefs of the period, it is surprising for several reasons, the most obvious of which being the period in which the film was produced.

64 The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, directed by Gene Wilder (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, 1975). Cook 38

Figure 8: Leo McKern as Professor Moriarty in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, and his coin- operated confession booth.65

In the 1970s, Ireland was at the peak of the Troubles, an armed conflict between Irish

Republican nationalists (the Irish Republican Army, or IRA) and the British military, concentrated mostly in the six Northern counties, which were and still remain under British rule.

By 1975, this conflict had been going on for about seven years and had been broadcast on news stations across the Western world. In Britain, the conflict seemed to have reawakened a certain amount of anti-Irish sentiment among non-Irish Britons.

One letter to the editor from Thursday, 18 December, 1975 in the Birmingham Daily Post refers to the Northern Irish as “men of violence…who continue to seek power through the bomb and bullet.”66 This writer, who signs their letter “D.L. Goulden,” also complains that thoughts of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are “constantly [kept] at the forefront of our minds.”67 Goulden goes on to say that while many of the people who write in to the paper complain greatly about

65 Ibid; screenshot mine. 66 D.L. Goulden, “Our Army in Ulster,” The Birmingham Daily Post, December 18, 1975. 67 Ibid. Cook 39 the struggle in Northern Ireland, none of them truly know the struggle faced by those who have to be there in the middle of the uproar and violence because all that is reported in English newspapers are body counts of dead and injured—a “clinical tabulation of life and limb,” in this writer’s words.68 Goulden’s language is convoluted, and it is difficult to tell where their sympathies lie, but based simply on the language used to describe those in the North of Ireland, it is evident that it is a somewhat common belief in Britain that the Irish are prone to violence and that they are the ones lashing out on the British out of a desire to gain “power” over them, neglecting to acknowledge the fact that by this point of the conflict, a lot of the violence done by the Northern Irish was done in retaliation.

In the United States, the tone was generally much more openly sympathetic, with Irish

Americans lobbying for U.S. involvement and for aid for the people of Northern Ireland, which was culminated, according to Adrian Guelke, in the Clinton administration’s involvement in the peace process.69 Why, then, would Wilder have returned Moriarty to his Irish roots—and in such a negative way—at such a sensitive time in Irish history? Why break the tradition of an English- accented Moriarty now? It is difficult to know for sure, since he never spoke publicly about this character or his motives for writing him this way, and spoke very little about this particular film in general. There is no way of knowing what political motives or influence he might have had, if any, but it does seem to have been a comedic risk, something for which Wilder was known. By this time, he had made several films with borderline racist motifs, some of which were more obvious with their political motives than others, like Blazing Saddles (dir. Mel Brooks, 1974), which was clearly an anti-racist parody of the racism presented in Western films of the 1950s

68 Ibid. 69 Adrian Guelke, “The United States, Irish Americans, and the Northern Ireland peace process,” Ethnicity and International Relations 72.3 (1996): 521–536. Cook 40 and 1960s.70 Blazing Saddles parodied racist tropes by presenting them to viewers head-on, blatantly throwing about racist slurs and presenting the audience with racist stereotypes as a way to bring attention to these issues. Another such film was The Producers (dir. Mel Brooks, 1967), which parodied the presence and lives of Jewish individuals who worked on Broadway theatre productions.71

This kind of film, which confronted issues of racism and other types of prejudices by forcing the audience to become blatantly aware of the behaviors associated with them, usually in a very blunt or ridiculous way, were not uncommon for this period (the late 1960s and into the

1970s). In many ways, too, Wilder’s career reflected a second wave of the activism by Jewish,

Irish, and African American citizens for better representation in media and fairer treatment by fellow Americans.72 But rather than organizing obvious formal protests and speaking out about mistreatment and misrepresentation, Wilder and the small crowd of actors and filmmakers with whom he frequently associated himself fought negative representation by latching onto it and accentuating it as much as possible in order to show their audiences just how harmful—and frankly ridiculous—certain stereotypes can be.

Perhaps in writing a Moriarty who was rife with Irish stereotypes, Wilder was trying to recreate what these other films had done, but the idea simply did not come across as effectively.

By the late twentieth century, American audiences were hardly aware anymore of anti-Irish sentiment. Being Irish in America at this time was almost fashionable despite the growing reemergence of an anti-Irish sentiment across the pond. Matthew Frye Jacobson refers to this

70 Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks (Los Angeles: Warner Brothers, 1974). 71 The Producers, directed by Mel Brooks (Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Columbia Pictures, 1967). 72 M. Alison Kibler, Censoring Radical Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890 – 1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Cook 41 phenomenon as the “white ethnic revival,” which occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century, after the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.73 In this period, many white

Americans began to associate themselves with their ancestors’ country or culture of origin rather than recognizing themselves as privileged white Americans.74

For Irish-Americans, this sense of almost nationalistic pride—for a nation many of them had never seen—increased during and after the administration of President John F. Kennedy, a

Catholic Irish-American who encouraged a working relationship between the United States and

Ireland, and whose presidency led by extension to the illegal immigration of a number of Irish citizens to the United States.75 These immigrants were not given the same “alien” status, however, which is so often gifted to immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, because of this Kennedian resurgence of Celtic pride, as well as because of Irish immigrants now being perceived as white.76 Interestingly, the increase of Irish-American identity and pride also led to some Americans actually supporting the Irish Republican Army (or the IRA) during the Troubles through programs like the Irish Northern Aid Committee (or

NORAID), who raised funds to aid the IRA, who were widely recognized as a terrorist group for the violence they perpetrated in Northern Ireland.77

Wilder likely would have been more keenly aware and comprehensive of the growing tension and anti-Irish sentiment in Britain than the average American not only because of his frequent visits to Europe as an actor, but also because he tended to look for this sort of thing and

73 Matthew Frye Jacobson , Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 74 Jacobson, “Introduction: Beyond Hansen’s Law,” in Roots Too, 1–2. 75 Jacobson, “Coda: Ireland at JFK,” in Roots Too, 389–390. 76 Ibid. 77 Jacobson, “Hyphen Nation,” in Roots Too, 27, 28, 50. Cook 42 must have done some research on the issues he intended to tackle in this film.78 With the

Troubles going strong in Ireland in the early-to-mid 1970s, and Irish-British relations being at such a shaky point, comedy and caricature were likely the only safe routes which could have been taken to portray this particular Irish character as being Irish. Had The Seven-Per-Cent

Solution (dir. Herbert Ross, 1976) or Sherlock Holmes in New York (dir. Boris Sagal, 1976), which both came out within a year of The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother and which were both considered much more serious Holmes films, featured an Irish Moriarty, there certainly would have been some kind of outcry about unfair or negative representation, or blatant anti-Irish politicization. It was likely due to Wilder’s use of comedy to sweeten some of the heavier political undertones which made this one, and many of his others, more palatable and led them to relative success.

But despite the success of The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother at the box office and among critics, and McKern’s Moriarty “[stealing] the show,” as Alan Barnes claims, this film and its Irish Moriarty left seemingly very little impact, and the film was quickly and easily forgotten by fans of Wilder and Holmes alike.79 This lack of impact is made even more evident by the complete lack of acknowledgement of Moriarty’s Irishness after this point, as well as by portrayal of the next ten Moriartys as English or, in one case, American.

With the exception of McKern, every Moriarty of this era is portrayed as being English, except for John Huston, who plays the Professor in Sherlock Holmes in New York as a high- strung American criminal who has kidnapped the son of Irene Adler, an American opera singer

78 A more easily recognizable issue acknowledged in this film was that of the role of women in society, and especially women’s agency and women’s sexuality, something which Wilder cared very much about and paid particular attention to in his other films as well. 79 Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (part of The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series) (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 257; Alan Barnes, Sherlock Holmes on Screen: The Complete Film and TV History (London: Titan Books, 2011), 13. Cook 43 and actress known for having gained Holmes’s favor in the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” for having been the only person, male or female, to manage to outsmart Holmes.80 Despite representing a borderline “other,” as an American criminal going up against a British detective,

Huston’s Moriarty easily blends in with the other Moriartys of this era, fading into the crowd of

English-assumed villains in an Anglo-centric narrative. Even in the series of the mid-1980s starring Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, which despite being the adaptation which was most accurate to the stories, had an English Moriarty.

Only one of these Anglo-presenting Moriartys stands out above the rest. Daniel Davis, who played Moriarty in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, stands out not because his Moriarty plays the role of the traditional ethnic outlier—though arguably, he does do that on several accounts on this show—but because even as a computer hologram, he is intelligent enough to gain sentience, enough to recognize that he is on more than one level a fictional character, created by someone who existed centuries ago purely to destroy another fictional character, Sherlock Holmes.81

Because he is given this sentience and this level of understanding of the situation, and because Holmes and Victorian England do not exist in the world of Star Trek and are therefore not around for him to want to destroy, Moriarty is allowed to turn from evil and to simply be.

The thing which he was created to hyperfixate on no longer exists, his purpose in life has lost its meaning without Holmes, and he is able to stop and think more deeply about things. He begins

80 Sherlock Holmes in New York, dir. Boris Sagan, 1976; Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 5–40. 81 “Elementary, Dear Data,” in Star Trek: The Next Generation, directed by Rob Bowman (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1988); “Ship in a Bottle,” in Star Trek: The Next Generation, directed by Alexander Singer (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1993). Cook 44 to realize he is fictional, and with the help of his powers of deduction (much like Holmes’s) and the help of the Holodeck computer, he learns where he came from.

Figure 9: Daniel Davis as Professor Moriarty in “Elementary, Dear Data,” in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.82

When speaking with the crew of the Enterprise about his realizations and recent decisions, he says, “My past is nothing but a fiction—the scribblings of an Englishman dead now for four centuries. I hope to leave his books on the shelf, as it were.”83 This statement is rather interesting because it shows that, now, not only has Moriarty’s status as an Irishman been erased or overlooked, now so has Conan Doyle’s. It is impossible to say whether or not this was intentional for the series, to show that perhaps in the twenty-fourth century, Conan Doyle’s

82 “Elementary, Dear Data”; screenshot mine. 83 “Ship in a Bottle.” Cook 45 background is forgotten in favor of the nationality of his hero, or whether it was unintentional, and even in the late twentieth century, such a thing is no longer common knowledge.

This goes to show that perhaps, Moriarty’s Irishness is not being overlooked or intentionally erased, but merely that it has been forgotten over time except by those who have done their research. In a more positive light, it also seems that by this point, it is no longer acceptable or necessary to use a villain to represent an ethnic or national outlier. There are no more Italian American Moriartys, German Moriartys, French Moriartys, or even Welsh or

Scottish Moriartys because Hollywood filmmakers have simply moved away from the practice of using him to represent society’s fear of an ethnic “other.” He has become English by default because the world in which he was written and continues to exist is English. The implications here are mixed. On the one hand, this shows that the world of film has progressed beyond the point of feeling the need to represent a villain as an ethnic or national outlier; but on the other hand, a character’s ethnicity has been erased.84 Racial prejudices and stereotypes have been erased, but in the process, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

84 In this instance, I specify Hollywood filmmakers rather than society in general because historically and even today, the world of Hollywood remains significantly more liberal than the rest of American society. While filmmakers may have recognized the dangers of representing such a notorious villain as being a member of a marginalized group, racial bigotry did not cease to be a social issue. Cook 46

Chapter 5: “A Good, Old-Fashioned Villain”: Andrew Scott as “Jim” Moriarty in Sherlock,

2010–2017

Nearly a hundred and twenty years after the start, over a century after Moriarty’s creation, and after more than twenty-five film and television adaptations, we are brought full circle, and in the most fascinating of ways. The BBC’s modern-day television adaptation,

Sherlock, returned Moriarty to his Irish roots by casting Irish actor Andrew Scott in the role, something which Irish Times reporter Peter Crawley notes, “Twenty or [thirty] years ago” would have put Irish viewers “up in arms” due to the level of violence on the part of Scott’s Moriarty, who committed merciless and “indiscriminate” murders and attacks, but has instead become something of a “source of pride for a nation.”85

Twenty or thirty years before this interview, of course, Ireland was seated firmly but precariously amidst the turbulence of the Troubles, so such a reaction would have been understandable. For an Irish character to be portrayed as “blowing things up and killing indiscriminately in the UK on a prime-time BBC show” would have been politically unacceptable, and definitely would not have been conducive to achieving the peace Britain would have liked in Ireland.86 So, what sorts of things might have led to the portrayal of such a character as Irish being so unproblematic, and, as Crawley claims, a “source of pride” for Irish viewers of the series?

Firstly, and most importantly, the Irishness of this character is never mentioned. There are no discussions of “hereditary tendencies” or “criminal strains” in his bloodline. There is no

85 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. 86 Ibid. Cook 47 grand confession scene in which Moriarty admits that maybe if he was not Irish, he would not have the urge to do the terrible things he does. There are not even any offhanded remarks about his accent or his background. What we are given is this: this Moriarty was brought up much the same as Holmes. He grew up in London, went to an English boarding school, and was bullied for his intellectual and social diversions, but rather than using his super-intelligence for good, he decided to use it to dedicate his life to crime instead, starting by killing one of the boys who made fun of him while he was still a child.87

In terms of casting, Moriarty’s being Irish is never mentioned as having played any kind of role. According to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the writers of the show, Scott was chosen because of the unique manner in which he delivered his lines during the audition process.88 It was not until the second to third season that the writers began to acknowledge that they found his accent and his “look” interesting as well, and that interviewers began to ask Scott about the implications of his being an Irish actor playing an Irish criminal.89 When asked by Peter

Crawley of the Irish Times, Scott responded that he “had never thought of [Moriarty’s being

Irish] before.”90 To Scott, his Moriarty was only Irish because he, the actor, was Irish, and that had nothing to do with the character’s presentation or portrayal, at least in his mind; he says, “I don’t think about the Irishness of Moriarty any more than I think about blowing somebody up on my way home.”91 Whether or not the writers intentionally cast an Irish actor in the role knowing that the character had initially been coded as an Irishman is not clear, but Scott seems to believe it was merely a coincidence that Sherlock’s Moriarty is even Irish at all.

87 “The Great Game,” in Sherlock, directed by Paul McGuigan (Cardiff: BBC Wales, 2010). 88 “Sherlock Uncovered: The Villains,” in Sherlock, directed by Andy Smith (Cardiff: BBC Wales, 2014). 89 Ibid; and Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott.” 90 Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott.” 91 Ibid. Cook 48

Figure 10: Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes (left) and Andrew Scott as Jim Moriarty (right), mirrored in adjacent jail cells in the Sherlock series 2 finale, “The Reichenbach Fall.”92

It is important to note as well that Scott’s relationship with his own Irish identity is very difficult to trace and pin down. He has played some somewhat politicized Irish roles besides

Moriarty, and has therefore been interviewed about them; he has also been asked about his religious upbringing, his sexuality, and his political beliefs, and though he answers the questions as prompted, his answers are not always consistent. In the Irish Times interview, he spoke at some length about the then-upcoming vote on marriage equality for people of different sexual orientations and gender identities, which he felt very strongly and very positively about at the time as a gay man living in Ireland.93 However, just a few years later, when being interviewed for a recent Amazon series, Fleabag, Scott changed his tune, stating that he does not want to be defined as an actor or an Irish person or a gay man, or “whatever the fuck it is.”94 This particular change in stance came as the result of Scott’s being fed up with being typecast as always either a

92 “The Reichenbach Fall,” in Sherlock, directed by Toby Haynes (Cardiff: BBC Wales, 2012); screenshot mine. 93 Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott.” 94 Simon Hattenstone, “Interview: Andrew Scott on being Fleabag’s new crush: ‘This is uncharted territory,’” The Guardian, Feb. 16, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/feb/16/andrew-scott-fleabag- sexy-priest-uncharted-territory. Cook 49 villain or a queer person after his performance as Moriarty, but it is interesting that he would link his Irish identity with the others in this circumstance. Rather than saying, “I do not wish to be typecast any longer as a villain or a gay man,” he said that he does not like being “defined as”

“being Irish” or “being gay.” This could have been a mistake, or perhaps a misinterpretation on this reader’s part, but this verbal slip or mere substitution comes as an interesting one.

Another contributing factor to the popularity of such a corrupt and violent Irish criminal mastermind is absolutely the vast improvements seen in Irish-British relations in the last few decades. Since around the time of the Second World War, Britain and Ireland have had a fairly peaceable and friendly relationship; the Irish, though neutral during the war, tended to lean more towards the side of the Allies, making such an impact with their efforts and cooperation that

King George VI mentioned his gratefulness to the Irish people for this and for their “neighbourly ties” in his letter to Irish President Sean O’Kelly on the day that Ireland became an independent

Republic in April 1949.95 Simultaneously, per the Ireland Act of 1949, Britain holds Ireland at a higher status by stating that though it is separate from the United Kingdom, it is not considered a foreign country.96

The Troubles, which lasted approximately from 1968 until 1998, but whose impacts have lasted in many places until the present day, proved to be a bit of a rough patch to say the least in

Irish-British relations, but after the ceasefire and the subsequent Good Friday Agreement (also known as the Belfast Agreement), Britain and Ireland slowly began to return to a state of peace.97

And by 2010, just twelve years later, the peace had returned and spread to such a level that there

95 George VI to President Sean T. O’Kelly, The Times, Apr. 18, 1949. 96 Ireland Act 1949, Legislation.gov.uk, accessed Dec. 9, 2019, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/41. 97 The Belfast Agreement, Gov.uk, accessed Dec. 9, 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/136652/agreement .pdf. Cook 50 was seemingly nothing questionable or problematic about one of the most famous and violent villains of all time being played as Irish by an Irish actor.

But as Peter Crawley said, Scott’s Moriarty was not merely acceptable or unproblematic; he was adored—“a source of pride for a nation.”98 The reason for this is not easy to explain, nor is it easy to even guess as to why. Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly true because the episodes which featured Moriarty had higher ratings and a larger viewership than the ones that did not

(with the exception of “The Final Problem,” the final episode of the fourth season, which was by far the most unpopular episode of the series based on these same statistics).99 It was obvious that the fans wanted to see Moriarty. He was a fan favorite, and the writers and producers quickly caught on to that trend, and began grabbing at straws and trying to find ways to write him back in at the end of every season, even after his very much fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, as a means to keep the viewers coming back for more.

Author Anthony Horowitz takes a page out of Moffat and Gatiss’s book, giving readers a

Moriarty who appears to have survived the Fall, as it were, who resembles Scott’s Moriarty in many ways, and who is also canonically Irish. Horowitz, however, tackles Conan Doyle’s descriptions of Moriarty from “The Final Problem” head-on, and gives his Moriarty the opportunity to defend himself. This Moriarty has conveniently read Doctor Watson’s story about him and knows how Holmes described him, and he tears those characterizations to the ground, saying that his father, a respectable Galway barrister, and mother would have been “mortified had they read” Holmes’s description of his “hereditary tendencies” and the “criminal strain”

98 Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott.” 99 Ben Cowell, “Sherlock records its lowest ever overnight audience with 5.9m tuning in to series four finale,” Radio Times, Jan. 16, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170117143919/http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-01-16/sherlock-records-its- lowest-ever-overnight-audience-with-59m-tuning-into-series-four-finale. Cook 51 which “ran in his blood.”100 He does, however, also mention that his father was a member of the

Irish Republican Brotherhood, a militant radical nationalist group which emerged in Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century, a fact which is both unique to this story and not something that seems like it would help his case. Regardless, it is in a way period accurate, since many respectable Irishmen and women could be found among the radicals in the period leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent Anglo-Irish War in the early 1920s, but were not well thought of among non-Irish Britons.

Horowitz’s Moriarty also dismantles Conan Doyle’s (or Holmes’s, or Watson’s…) physical description of the professor as being “extremely tall and thin” with a large, doming white forehead and dark, sunken eyes by stating that he was in fact in a disguise when he met with Holmes for the first time at Baker Street so that the detective would not have an accurate physical description to give to the police.101 Thus, the racist imagery behind the image we have of Moriarty is rendered null and void, transformed merely into a trick by an Irishman playing on stereotypes to fool the hero.

This Irish Moriarty, like Scott’s, was also met unproblematically, with raving reviews from sources like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The New York

Times, and was also given a spot on the New York Times Bestseller List and an endorsement from the Conan Doyle Estate.102 This further establishes that by the early-to-mid 2010s, Ireland,

Britain, and the diaspora had reached a point at which a supervillain whose life’s purpose was to destroy respectable British society could feasibly be Irish without either his Irishness or the writers’ motives for making him Irish being called into question. The Irish at this point have

100 Anthony Horowitz, Moriarty, (New York: Harper Perennial: 2015), 329–330. 101 Anthony Horowitz, Moriarty, 339. 102 Anthony Horowitz, Moriarty, cover and title page. Cook 52 officially become white, in Noel Ignatiev’s words, and have reached such a position of equality, or, I would argue, romanticization, that they are not negatively viewed as an “other” any longer, and therefore no longer threatened by the idea of being representative of a social threat.103

103 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2009). Cook 53

Conclusion

As we have seen, Professor Moriarty has gone through many iterations over the last one hundred and twenty-seven years. In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote “The Adventure of the

Final Problem,” which he hoped would in fact be the solution to his problem: Sherlock Holmes, the hero whose fame and cultural significance he resented. Conan Doyle truly believed this story would prove to be the end, but in many ways, it was only the beginning. For our purposes, that is the case as well because in his attempt to destroy Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle in turn created a character who could be called the archetypal villain, and whose legacy would last just as long as Holmes’s, despite his apparent end being much more final.

Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, designed as the darkened mirror opposite to Holmes, was created with the simple goal of destroying Holmes, the representative and protector of the respectable, Anglo-centric British middle class. It makes sense then that the only worthy opponent and the only true threat to Holmes would be an Irishman in a time when the Irish were viewed as the greatest social and criminal threat in Britain. Later writers took this idea, and molded and shifted it to fit the changing times and the changing points of view. The period after the First World War gave us a French Moriarty and a German Moriarty. In the early years of the

Great Depression we saw two Scottish and one Welsh Moriarty, in a time when Scotland and

Wales were hit the hardest of any other nations in the United Kingdom. The late 1930s presented us with an Italian mob boss Professor Moriarty, in a time when, at least in the United

States, the idea of the Italian mobster was alive and well. Espen Gabrielsen put it best when he said, “The adaptation history of the character [of Professor Moriarty], then, is one of changing Cook 54

Otherness in the face of a changing world.”104 Moriarty’s presentation in early film changed over time to fit the role of whomever the society of the filmmaker(s) viewed as an “other,” and a potential danger or threat.

This changed in the later part of the twentieth century, when Moriarty, for one reason or another, became fully Anglicized. Not only was his Irishness erased, so was any notion that he had even been used as a representative of any kind of ethnic “other.” This was fully epitomized by Daniel Davis’s Moriarty who appeared in two episodes of the series Star Trek: The Next

Generation, whose own Irishness was not only erased, but so was that of his creator, Arthur

Conan Doyle, whom this Moriarty remembered as an Englishman. It was not until 2010, when the creators of the modern-day adaptation Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, cast Irish actor Andrew Scott in the role of Moriarty that the character’s Irishness was realized, and in an altogether unproblematic way, becoming what one journalist called “a source of pride for a nation,” something that would have been unheard of in recent decades.105 Perhaps this just goes to prove that we have come so far as a society that we can better understand the dangers of blatantly villainizing marginalized groups of people (at least in mainstream entertainment media), and that perhaps Irish-British relations have reached a point at which an Irish actor can play an incredibly violent and criminally insane villain without that even being considered to be an ethnic trait any longer.

In many ways, this paper has not simply been the story of the evolution of Moriarty and his connection to various areas of Irish—as well as British, American, European, and world—

104 Espen Gabrielsen, “The Lives and Times of Professor Moriarty: Investigating the Otherness of Sherlock Holmes’s Arch Enemy,” Master’s thesis, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (2015): 49. 105 Peter Crawley, “A thrillingly intimate 30 minutes with Andrew Scott,” Irish Times, Feb. 25, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/a-thrillingly-intimate-30-minutes-with-andrew-scott-1.2111245. Cook 55 history, but also the story of how Moriarty became Irish. Beyond that, too, it is the story of how the Irish became white, because if the Irish had not become white, if they had not gained a more equal status in British and American society, it is not likely that Moriarty would have ever been able to become unproblematically Irish as he was in the BBC’s Sherlock.

Moving forward, it is difficult to say what Irish-British relations will look like in the near future, or how peaceful things will remain. The issue of Brexit certainly has caused significant confusion and upset in Ireland, particularly in the six Northern counties, which are still under

British control. Many news sources have speculated as to whether the anxieties surrounding

Brexit could reawaken the Troubles, or even result in the reunification of the island of Ireland.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is also causing a bit of tension in the British Isles, as in many other parts of the world. Just where these major current events will take us, and what the future holds for British-Irish relations, will be of extraordinary interest.

Cook 56

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