It is tempting to see here an attempt to put himself in a situation that called for tolerance, understanding, and compassion, then imagining to himself how he would like to think he would react.

When he began writing the stories for this second series, Conan Doyle made a fateful decision. He would exercise the ultimate godlike power in his created world. He had given life and now he would take it away: Sherlock Holmes would meet his end. So when he began writing the first of what he thought would be the final twelve adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he had the ending already in mind. Just before starting the series, during a trip to Switzerland with his wife, Conan Doyle visited Reichenbach Falls. Its grandeur impressed him so much that he concluded it was the perfect setting for the finale. He wrote that the Falls “would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him” (Memories and Adventures, p. 92).

That ending included one last character who has also achieved immortality: Dr. Moriarty. Conan Doyle waited until what he thought would be the final Holmes story to introduce him. It seems a natural idea that Holmes should meet his mirror opposite, his doppelgänger, somewhere in the stories. The trouble with this conception is that Moriarty’s presence can’t be sustained for very long: Either Holmes catches him, and he’s put away or killed, or he escapes by outwitting Holmes. Since the latter can’t be allowed, Moriarty is going to have to make a one-time appearance. So the final story is the right time to unveil the master criminal. Moriarty serves a further purpose by providing Holmes with a worthy adversary for his final bow. You don’t want just any old crook to do in the world’s greatest detective.

So before introducing Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle did something curious in the stories leading up to it. Knowing that the Professor was due to appear at the end of the second series of twelve Holmes stories, Conan Doyle included the following passage in the second story, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”:a “He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumor or suspicion of unsolved crime.” Then in “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle describes Moriarty in this passage: “He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre 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” (p. 559). These passages are quite similar. It’s clear that the being at the source of the outstretched filaments, though undescribed, must be a spider; the second passage only makes more explicit what was already implied in the first one. The first passage, I neglected to state, describes Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle could hardly make an explicit link between Holmes and so repulsive a creature as a spider, but his language has made that link despite his reticence. This is the first in a series of parallels Conan Doyle set up between Holmes and his nemesis. It was necessary for Moriarty to have as exalted a stature in the criminal world as Holmes has in his. Holmes himself says, “I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal” (p. 560). When Holmes continues, “My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill” (p. 560), he expresses more than just respect for an adversary. His admiration is a kind of self-approval as well.