This will most likely be a short one. It might also serve as a dropped pin on some map. I might use it to find my way back to it, or I might just not. In the case of the latter, hopefully, it'll at least serve as food for some thought.
A handful of days ago, give or take a finger, I sat in (via Zoom) on a Baroque Lone Star (DFW area Sherlock Holmes literary society) meeting. During this meeting Bob Katz M.D., BSI mentioned in his talk, a thing that caught in my crop like a carbuncle. A thing I had previously missed. It was off-handedly said while discussing Moriarty descriptions. "His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion." [FINA]
Reptilian. Sure, reptiles are cold-blooded and many a mind conjures 'snakes' when its ears hear 'reptile' and snakes are evil everywhere you look from the Garden of Eden to 'arry Pottah. They seem quite calculating, aloof. Cold-blooded. They eat their prey in a gulp. They also aren't furbabies. Personally, I don't fear them but I wouldn't touch one on a dare. I had a pet snake once. It didn't end well, but at least it ended. I'm thinking of all this devilish symbolism & etc., while sitting muted, puffing on a cigar.
Then I think (in a leap of thought) of another Sherlockian villain given the snake-treatment by Arthur Conan Doyle. One Charles Augustus Milverton. "Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me." [CHAS]
Back to Moriarty. A character created by Doyle as an out. A yang to his hero's yin and a hastily prepared high-note to ride off into the sunset upon. Except that Doyle is good, damned good. Too good. Those descriptions. The characters he can draw up so well and so minimally-so. Look at Irene Adler, "The woman." A small-bit player with legs to her story that Secretariat would envy. He did it again with Moriarty, "The Napoleon of crime." What the heck does that even mean? We only kinda know. We only vaguely read of his misdeeds in broad strokes. But they all stuck--each roller-brush stroke.
Then, Doyle brings back his creation from The Reichenbach Falls. Professor Moriarty stays dead but looms large, as an idea, an ideal. Batman's Joker. Papa Smurf's Gargamel. A man with his slithery fingers in all the no-goodnik behavior of the London under-belly. His is a character too big to fail, once introduced. A role (beyond M.) too large to leave empty once created. But it is, nonetheless, until we meet Milverton, seven stories into Holmes' resurrection. ACD is settled back in (with 25 [short] stories still to tell) but still, for the ability to tell those stories without begging a new and over-shadowing Moriarty-figure, the idea of M. must again die.
In a way, Milverton can scan as a more fleshed-out Moriarty. Remember, we actually get finer points as to Milverton's evils than we do Moriarty's. And then Holmes kills Milverton, Watson covers for him, and some flimsy story about a disappearing lady is bandied about and sold. A bloody deed done in effigy or by proxy--whichever is more correct. Whatever and then the void is no longer. The door, closed.
To wrap it up daringly redundantly, Moriarty was created solely to kill Holmes. Moriarty became almost as famed and also invented a role in the stories. Holmes did not stay dead. The role was out of the bag. MUST CLOSE BAG AND THROW IN RIVER. This, by nipping the idea/l at the bud by introducing it again for a second time, in order to decisively kill it. Melodramatically over-kill it.
Or maybe it's just snakes are creepy af.
A final loose thought on Moriarty. On the character's legacy. When titling this piece, I didn't feel the need to shoe-horn in 'Sherlock Holmes,' because Moriarty is just as well known. An amazing feat (in this context or any) for such a fleeting character.
::: very :::