30
Popular Culture Review
struggle,” between Holmes and Moriarty—is not witnessed by Watson! He later
deduces the events said to have transpired, by reading the existing physical
evidence via sheer Sherlockian surmise.
As Conan Doyle’s original readers would not come to learn for almost
another decade. Holmes takes advantage of Watson’s failure to witness the
confrontation, in order to fake his own death. So, after almost ten years, when
the Great Detective reemerges to reveal to a fainting Watson “what actually
happened” at Reichenbach, we as readers are, once again, left with only
Holmes’ own representation of events. This has led, as Leslie S. Klinger notes in
his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, to numerous theories as to what ""actually,
actually” transpired at Reichenbach Falls. Among the conspiracy plots
elucidated by Klinger, all but one involve Moriarty; these various “revisions of
‘The Final Problem’” (Klinger 745), include the idea that the professor is either:
imaginary; innocent; murdered by Holmes, who has intentionally lured him to
his death at Reichenbach; not murdered by Holmes, who has killed the wrong
man by mistake; or, that he, like Holmes, has survived the infamous falls
(Klinger 745-8). Since the canon never confirms these theories, popular culture
has taken the liberty of doing so, again and again, often in outlandish—yet
almost-always entertaining—ways.
In his introduction to what Conan Doyle had intended to be the last of the
Holmes tales ever, Leslie S. Klinger explains, “Moriarty, who has achieved
near-legendary status as the arch-nemesis of Holmes, appears only in ‘The Final
Problem,’ ‘The Empty House,’ and The Valley o f Fear, and so the information
about him in this tale has been carefully mined by scholars” (713). Present in a
mere three canonical stories. Professor Moriarty has nonetheless come to be
perceived as—as Klinger so aptly terms it—the “arch-nemesis” of Sherlock
Holmes. But why?
Certainly, this must be due originally to Holmes’ own attitudes toward the
man. The fact that Sherl