THE ACES OF CRIME - Part Two

Professor Moriarty: The Birth of the Criminal Mastermind

The Aces of Crime is a series exploring the enduring appeal of criminal masterminds in fiction and culture.

Imagine creating one of literature's greatest villains for your crime series yet allowing him to appear in only one story.

That is exactly what Arthur Conan Doyle did in 1893 when he introduced Professor James Moriarty in The Final Problem. Despite his surprisingly brief appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Moriarty became the template for the modern criminal mastermind: the hidden intelligence orchestrating crime from behind the scenes. Before him, fictional villains tended to commit crimes. Moriarty organised them.

It is difficult now to think of Sherlock Holmes without thinking of Moriarty, yet the Professor’s greatest trick is that he exists largely through suggestion rather than direct action.

The Professor Behind the Web

In the original Doyle canon, Moriarty stands alone as the one criminal adversary whose intellect truly matches Holmes’s in strategy and logic.

Of Irish descent, he is described as a mathematical prodigy who, at the age of twenty-one, wrote a celebrated treatise on the binomial theorem. On the strength of this achievement, Doyle tells us, he secured the Mathematical Chair at one of the smaller universities.

His brilliance extends beyond mathematics. Moriarty also authored The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a work supposedly so advanced that “no man in the scientific press” could adequately critique it. If we consider that, only a few years later in 1905, Einstein gives his own paper on Special Relativity the somewhat imitative title of On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, it becomes apparent just how brilliant a mind we are dealing with.

What makes this particularly interesting is that Moriarty’s intellect is never merely decorative. His academic genius becomes the foundation of his criminal enterprise. Instead of applying his brilliant mind to a career in astronomy, say, he applies it to organised crime.

The Villain Who Barely Appears

Yet, in keeping with his reputation as an invisible power behind the scenes, Moriarty appears directly “on stage” in only one original Sherlock Holmes story: The Final Problem.

There, he grapples with Holmes above the Reichenbach Falls before plunging to his death in the swirling waters below.

Or so we are led to believe.

After all, Moriarty’s body is never recovered, and — antique spoiler alert here — if Holmes himself could survive the fall and make a miraculous return four years later, why not his intellectual equal?

Indeed, it seems one of Moriarty’s defining features is his very absence. He exists most fully not in action, but in suggestion. As Holmes explains:

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city… He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web… He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organised…”

It is one of the great images in detective fiction. The spider does not chase its prey; it waits patiently while the web does the work.

Moriarty’s Literary Descendants

Moriarty’s influence appeared almost immediately.

Only a couple of years after The Final Problem, Guy Boothby introduced another extraordinary villain: Dr Nikola, in the novel A Bid for Fortune. In Dr Nikola, Boothby retains the high intellect and organisational genius of Moriarty but also introduces elements of mesmerism and the occult — pointing the way towards the more psychologically unsettling Aces of Crime, such as Dr Mabuse and Fu Manchu (and perhaps also Ernst Blofeld in the James Bond canon, since Dr Nikola is often found menacingly stroking his cat).

The criminal mastermind was already beginning to mutate.

Was Moriarty Based on a Real Criminal?

One name repeatedly surfaces whenever Moriarty’s origins are discussed: Adam Worth.

In fact, it was Worth who was first given the moniker “The Napoleon of Crime”, by a Scotland Yard detective – but apparently this was as much for his short stature as for his criminal cunning.

Worth was born in Germany in 1844 before emigrating with his family to the United States as a child. He went on to build one of the most sophisticated theft and fencing operations of the nineteenth century, operating across London, Paris, and New York with remarkable organisational skill.

His most famous exploit came in 1869, when, in a carefully executed operation, he stole Thomas Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire from a London gallery and then kept it hidden for years as a personal trophy.

Unlike Moriarty, however, Worth remained very much a hands-on criminal. He participated directly in robberies, was arrested repeatedly, served prison sentences, and eventually died in relative obscurity in 1902.

Would Arthur Conan Doyle have been aware of him?

Almost certainly. Worth was widely reported in British and American newspapers, and by the time Doyle was introducing his arch-villain in The Final Problem, this real-life criminal had already won his place in popular culture.

But Adam Worth is only part of the story.

The Gentleman Criminal

Moriarty also emerged from a broader Victorian fascination with what might be called the “gentleman criminal”: respectable, educated, socially mobile villains who committed crime from a position of intellect rather than poverty. Corrupt officials, society swindlers, doctor poisoners, international con-men – the Victorian newspapers were full of such rogues.

What links these real-life figures with Doyle’s fictional Professor is not simply their ingenuity, but the abstract concept they represent.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, modern life itself was becoming more complicated. Wealth increasingly depended upon banking systems, stock markets, telegraphs, railways, and international commerce. Ordinary people found themselves relying on vast networks they could neither fully see nor fully understand.

Alongside this, crime itself was becoming more complex, more intellectual.

Now, instead of just having to deal with the threat from the more obvious criminal elements such as the violent mugger or the housebreaker, Victorians began fearing something more abstract: the possibility that an unseen intelligence might be manipulating entire systems from behind the scenes.

The First Modern Mastermind

This, perhaps, is Moriarty’s greatest legacy.

He transformed the villain from a visible opponent into an invisible organiser. His web extends beyond the foggy backstreets of Holmes’s Victorian London to become a model for hidden power conspiracy theories.

It is no coincidence that later masterminds would inherit parts of his DNA. Fantômas inherited his elusiveness, Dr Mabuse his psychological reach, and Fu Manchu his mastery of criminal networks.

But Moriarty came first.

He taught readers that the most dangerous enemy might not be the man pulling the trigger, but the one who quietly arranged for someone else to do it.

Next time, in Part Three: Fantômas – When Identity Became the Crime, we'll meet the villain who took Moriarty's hidden menace one step further by making identity itself impossible to trust.

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The Aces of Crime is an ongoing series exploring the enduring appeal of criminal masterminds in fiction and culture. If you'd like to learn more about my research and writing, visit the About page. You can also discover my Piccadilly Noir novels, Midnight Streets and The Devil's Banquet, which bring the darker streets of interwar London to life. Watch for the next instalment of The Aces of Crime, where we'll continue exploring the villains, ideas and myths that have shaped crime fiction for more than a century.