It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Those words end the introductory paragraph of 1894’s The Final Problem, the story wherein Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes as he valiantly went up against the man whom literary history would dub his greatest nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Interestingly enough, Dr. Watson mentions a few sentences before that the professor’s brother, a Colonel James Moriarty, “recently published” a defense of his brother, but now Watson feels that he must set the record straight. Perhaps this is why so much has been made of the relationship between Holmes and Moriarty: they’ve always been the focus of dueling narratives, of different people trying to get to the bottom of what they insist is the “real” story.
Obviously the “real” story is what…
