Victorians - Professor Moriarty

Professor James Moriarty (1835 - 1893) first appeared in the Sherlock Holmes short story "The Final Problem" written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published under the second collection of Holmes short stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, late in 1893. Moriarty was also featured in the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, but never made a direct appearance in the story. Apart from that, Holmes mentions him in five other stories: "The Adventure of the Empty House", "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder", "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter", "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" and "His Last Bow". Moriarty is a Machiavellian, consulting criminal mastermind who does not commit crimes himself,[citation needed] but instead uses his intelligence and network of resources to provide criminals with strategies for their crimes and sometimes protection from the law, all in exchange for a fee or a cut of profit. Holmes likens Moriarty to a spider at the center of a web and calls him the "Napoleon of crime".