How Did James Moriarty Become Sherlock'S Arch-Enemy In Canon?

After closely reading the canon, I can see why Moriarty is portrayed as Holmes’s arch-enemy in most stories, since he appears in so few of them. Conan Doyle creates the menace in other stories and gives us important scenes in “The Final Problem” and the back-story to “The Valley of Fear.” This is the brilliant mathematician who has become one of the world’s greatest criminals. Holmes dismantles parts of his criminal network over long periods of time and Moriarty takes great vengeance on him using deadly force in all of these situations. The final confrontation between the two takes place on the slopes of Reichenbach Falls in what appears to be the end of the great detective and his greatest enemy in “The Final Problem.”

These three factors mean that Holmes’s arch-nemesis status is firmly grounded in the text of the stories: in terms of the intellectual struggle between them, in the vast extent of the organized crime network which he is ruling with an iron fist that Holmes thoroughly detests, and in their dramatic and fatal confrontation on Reichenbach Falls, where their rivalry is cemented into myth.

I like to think of the Moran/Moriarty character as the only one in the canon who takes Sherlock Holmes seriously in a personal sense. While Conan Doyle has given Moran/Moriarty very few pages of printed story, those few pages, together with the background to The Valley of Fear and the single duel with Holmes in The Final Problem, reveal a most formidable character. A former academic, of great organizational power, Moran/Moriarty is the mastermind behind a number of crimes committed all over the world. For years Sherlock Holmes pursues the scattered clues which he hopes will lead him to the identity of this mysterious individual. As he gets closer to the truth, however, he finds that the enemy begins to fight back. He receives warnings and even attempts are made on his life. The stakes are no longer simply those of solving a single mystery but of his life itself.

The Reichenbach Falls confrontation with Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’ is the masterful crescendo of the canon and stages the incredible and spectacular event of the apparent downfall of both man and villain from the world of London’s Sherlock Holmes stories. That Holmes is back three years later in ‘The Empty House’ to explain to the stunned world just who it is they have read about in newspapers all these years, and how he, Sherlock Holmes, came to confront him in the first place, is a marvel in itself. The mystery man of the newspaper stories of the late 19th century is none other than the most terrifying antagonist to cross the path of the greatest detective the world has ever known. And he is unknown. His impression on the world is everywhere. For me, the emptiness of his presence is even more horrifying than his shape would have been had he been an active, flesh and blood antagonist.

My interpretation is structural, Conan Doyle required an equal to Holmes in terms of intelligence but to be opposite of him morally, and he created the perfect villain in the form of Moriarty who runs crimes in much the same way Holmes runs deductions. Although ‘The Valley of Fear’ gives the reader a glimpse into the origin of the man who became Moriarty, the professor, in ‘The Final Problem’ we learn of the scale and organization of the crimes he commands and we also see personal confrontation between the two men. The reader learns that the only man who can threaten the work of Holmes is the man who could bring an end to all of his good work as a criminal genius.

The primary evidence for the arch-enemy relationship between Holmes and Moriarty comes from a single scene: Moriarty’s organization threatens the social order which Holmes is determined to defend, Holmes in turn threatens that organization by revealing its tenderest fibers, and Moriarty retaliates in kind. The rest of the conflict is contained in the Reichenbach falls confrontation, a beautifully structured and sparse set of scenes which pit the two extremes of human activity against each other – law versus organized crime – and in which both characters meet their end in a dramatic and conclusive fashion. This is how Moriarty becomes the arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes.