of Fear, vaguely dismisses Wild as “someone in a novel.” Holmes, of course, noting that Wild was real, adds that “The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up.” In “The Final Problem” he calls Moriarty “the Napoleon of crime.” The title is apparently borrowed from the sobriquet of another real-life criminal, Adam Worth (1844–1902), best known for the 1876 theft of a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by Thomas Gainsborough from a London gallery. His story is told in The Napoleon of Crime by Ben Macintyre (1997).
Moriarty is presented as a professor of mathematics, formerly of “one of our smaller universities,” dismissed as the result of “hereditary tendencies” which led him into unspecified wickedness. “At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue,” Holmes says, referring to one of the basic principles of algebra. More ominously, he elsewhere refers to Moriarty’s work on The Dynamics of an Asteroid, which has been interpreted as having to do with space travel or even atomic energy (and may in fact be a study of the notoriously complicated three-body problem of gravitational attraction). Sherlockians have sometimes compared his academic career with that of Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), an astronomer and author in other fields who worked at the Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere and is known as the rival of logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Of Moriarty’s personal life the only information provided in the Canon is that one brother was “a station master in the west of England” and another, also named James, a colonel. The professor’s physique was remarkable, as Holmes describes it in “The Final Problem,” as he was “extremely tall and thin,” with a great domed forehead, rounded shoulders, and a habit of oscillating his face “from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.”
Some close readers of the text have suggested that Moriarty never existed — that he was a fantasy of a drug-addicted Holmes, or at least that he was an innocent man, all his crimes imagined by Holmes in some paranoid delusion. Nicholas Meyer used that idea to good advantage in his highly successful novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), and Jeremy Brett’s play The Secret of Sherlock Holmes (1989) offers a variation on it. That extreme is no more reasonable than the popular Sherlockian belief that everything evil has Moriarty behind it, and the vague impression among the public that the Holmes stories are about one struggle after another between the detective and the professor, rather as Denis Nayland Smith endlessly battles Fu Manchu in the writings of Sax Rohmer. A particularly well-rounded picture of Moriarty the master criminal is provided in a trilogy of novels by John Gardner: The Return of Moriarty (1974), The Revenge of Moriarty (1975), and, much delayed, Moriarty (2008).
IRENE ADLER. “She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet,” Holmes reports in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” before setting eyes on Irene Adler. No matter: the description has been generally accepted, as has Watson’s report that Holmes characterized her as “the woman.” She is mentioned in one or two other stories, but only in reference to the adventure of which she is the central figure, “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
Early in that story, Holmes looks her up in a reference book and reports that she is an operatic contralto, born in New Jersey and now retired from the international stage. He patronizingly calls her a “young person”; the King of Bohemia, who feels the threat of blackmail from her, calls her a “well-known adventuress.” Holmes is engaged to recover the compromising papers from her clutches, and quite fails to do so. By the end of the tale, having seen the lady in person, he is so impressed — perhaps with her courage and intelligence, perhaps with her beauty — that he asks for her photograph as a souvenir, and allows Watson to record that he had been “beaten by a woman’s wit.”
Irene Adler lives in St. John’s Wood, the fashionable London neighbourhood in which wealthy men did typically install their mistresses. She is presumably modelled on the women known as adventuresses, grandes horizontales, or “pretty horsebreakers” — courtesans more realistically associated with the 1860s, such as Laura Bell, Cora Pearl, Catherine Walters, and Caroline Otero. Fanfare of Strumpets (1971), a non-Sherlockian book by that venerable Sherlockian Michael Harrison, is full of anecdotes about them. In Irene Adler there may also be a whiff of the scandalous Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) and of Lillie Langtry (1852–1929), “the Jersey Lily” who became a mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. Yet another original is clearly Lola Montez (1818– 61), whose intrigues with Louis of Bavaria had been notorious five decades earlier. At a less exalted level, Sherlockians associate Irene Adler with “Aunt Clara,” the spoilt heroine of a 1940s comic song, the full story of which is told in We Always Mention Aunt Clara (1990) by W.T. Rabe.
There is little in the text of the story to justify attaching to Irene Adler either the social standing or the morals of such women. A feminist interpretation of her life (as put forward, not surprisingly, by some of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes) makes her an early career woman, misused and cast aside by a snob of a Bohemian prince. The American mystery novelist Carole Nelson Douglas interprets her in that way with particular sensitivity and conviction in a series of eight books:
• Good Night, Mr. Holmes (1990)
• Good Morning, Irene (1991), also published as The Adventuress
• Irene at Large (1992), also published as A Soul of Steel
• Irene’s Last Waltz (1994), also published as Another Scandal in Bohemia
• Chapel Noir (2001)
• Castle Rouge (2002)
• Femme Fatale (2003)
• Spider Dance (2004)
But most readers, it seems, have preferred to see her as the woman Sherlock Holmes loved and lost (or, in a minority view, loved and later won). Belden Wigglesworth celebrated her in a poem in the Baker Street Journal in 1946, one of many such apostrophes:
I wonder what your thoughts have been,
Your inmost thoughts of him, Irene, Across the years?....
Did you forget?
Did Baker Street quite lack a Queen? I wonder.
These and other imaginings are discussed at length, as are all aspects of Irene Adler, in chapters of my book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes (1984). There is much to say about her, and much that has already been said, but the Canon provides little basis for either sentimental or prurient speculation about a Holmes-Adler connection.
MYCROFT HOLMES. The brother of Sherlock Holmes, older than he by seven years, figures in two cases, both of which he brings to the detective’s attention. One is “The Greek Interpreter,” in which the client, Mr. Melas, happens to lodge in the same building as Mycroft. The other is “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a government affair in which Mycroft, on behalf of the highest authorities, demands his brother’s assistance — for Mycroft, who “audits the books in some of the government departments” in the first case, turns out in this later one to have a much more crucial position. “Occasionally he is the British government,” Holmes tells an astonished Watson:
We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other.... Again and again his word has decided the national policy.
Such a description foreshadows the computerized “expert systems” of modern times, and indeed Robert A. Heinlein (in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966) found it appropriate to name an omniscient computer Mycroft. In more
