Please, a Moratorium on Moriartys 0

It is often said that some girls are attracted to bad boys.

If that is the case, it’s not just some girls. It’s also film and television folks.

Nothing else accounts for the tongue-dragging slavering over Professor Moriarty.

Frankly, they should get over Moriarty already.

He was a minor character invented for only one purpose: to facilitate A. Conan Doyle’s plan to assassinate Sherlock Holmes. He was not a criminal genius; he was a tool and hit man.

The story is a sordid one.

Doyle had decided that Sherlock Holmes was overshadowing his more “serious” fiction (anyone who has read his more “serious” fiction realizes overshadowing it was not difficult) and must be done away with.

Doyle spun the tale of a mysterious shadowy criminal mastermind so he–Doyle–could pitch Holmes over the cliff at Reichenbach Falls. Moriarty never actually appears in the story, being merely an invisible red herring to distract the reader from the true assassin, Doyle himself.

Moriarty appears, again only by name and never in person, in only two of the other 59 tales of the Canon: The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes, defying the malevolence of his creator, reappears, rounds up the last of Moriarty’s (that is, Doyle’s) henchmen, and resumes his career at 221B Baker Street, and The Valley of Fear, again as a mention in what is quite possibly the worst of the Canon–it’s the only one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories I have not been able to re-read, though I’ve read the rest of the Canon five? six? seven? I forget how many times.

Yet movie makers and television broadcasters keep returning to Moriarty.

(Spoiler Alert)

Even Elementary* spent the better part of this season building up to a Moriarty, quite ignoring that Irene Adler was, in actuality, Nero Wolfe’s mother, having borne him after an interlude with Holmes during Holmes’s travels following the incident at Reichenbach and before the return to London.

Please, enough with the Moriartys already.

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*Although, I must say, they pulled it off, and did so more stylishly than I expected. But for Pete’s sake, it’s “I-REE-nee,” not “I-REEN.”