Professor Moriarty the Criminal Genius

Professor James Moriarty was a criminal mastermind and the arch nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. In the nineteenth century up to his death at the Reichenbach Falls on the 4th May 1891, Moriarty was the head of London's underworld with a vast and subtle criminal network extending into Europe. As Holmes describes at the time:

"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. 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."

Moriarty makes two appearances in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective stories; "The Final Problem" and "The Valley of Fear". However, he is mentioned in five of his other stories, including The Empty House, The Norwood Builder, The Missing Three-Quarter, The Illustrious Client, and His Last Bow. Moriarty is described as a man of good background and education, with phenomenal mathematical abilities which won him a seat at a university aged just twenty-one. Sherlock Holmes gives us a glimpse into Professor Moriarty's nature during those years when he commented:

"But 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 infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the University town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and come down to London..."

Moriarty's attempts to eliminate his enemies would often involve arranging "accidents" such as falling masonry or a speeding horse drawn carriage. He would also sometimes take care of business personally using a silenced rifle cane to snipe targets with relative anonymity.

Real life inspirations for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's criminal genius are believed to include the master criminal Adam Worth, and also the Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb, who would ruthlessly seek to destroy the careers and reputations of his rival scientists.