“It's stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.”

Although only appearing in one story, Moriarty has become synonymous with the great detective. I put this down to a) appearing in the story where Holmes was supposedly killed off, and b) (and for me the real clincher), because Sherlock Holmes actually fears Moriarty, despite the Professor having not murdered anyone himself, though organising it. There are these moments in the Holmes canon where Sherlock is deeply passionate about a certain criminal and it grabs your attention when he uses words like 'evil' or 'disgusting'.

My Moriarty owes far more to the Rathbone/Bruce series. I decided to make him younger than the Sidney Paget illustrations, since it would seem like Holmes threw an elderly man of a Swiss waterfall. Not very heroic. 


"He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.”