Getting Level with the King-Devil: Moriarty, Modernity and Conspiracy

TY - CHAP

T1 - Getting Level with the King-Devil

T2 - Sherlock Holmes: Past and Present

AU - Poore, Benjamin

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - Arthur Conan Doyle’s decision to kill off his wildly popular detective by belatedly introducing a mysterious arch-enemy to lure him to the Reichenbach Falls, has long been a focus of intrigue for readers, fans and adapters. Holmes’s account of Moriarty, and Watson’s account of Holmes’s disappearance in ‘The Final Problem’ is so self-contradictory, so unreliable, that it has inspired dozens of books and films attempting, on the one hand, to explain Sherlock’s nemesis as an innocent victim of the detective’s paranoid fantasies, or else, on the other hand, to flesh out the sketchy details of Moriarty’s criminal career.In attempting to solve the mystery of ‘The Final Problem’, to turn it into a whodunit, Holmes aficionados are engaging - quite knowingly, and with tongue in cheek - in a form of conspiracist thinking which seeks to demonstrate that everything in the Sherlock Holmes universe is significant and connected. In doing this they are, of course, following Holmes’s own example, and indeed his own account of Moriarty shows many of the hallmarks of conspiracist thought. Playing the Grand Game, the game of subtextual secrets and conspiracies, is fun precisely because the detective genre is full of redundant detail and misdirection.What players of the Grand Game are also doing is modelling the kind of storytelling that is now the norm for serial television and film franchises. Narrative twists are carefully seeded, web resources are made available to provide complementary information, repeated viewings are expected and encouraged. The two recent films directed by Guy Ritchie, Sherlock Homes and A Game of Shadows, and the Mark Gatiss/Steven Moffat BBC series Sherlock both place their villains at the centre of conspiracies that are seeded from an early point in the narrative sequence, the conspiracy at the climax/season finale making sense of what seemed inexplicable before.

AB - Arthur Conan Doyle’s decision to kill off his wildly popular detective by belatedly introducing a mysterious arch-enemy to lure him to the Reichenbach Falls, has long been a focus of intrigue for readers, fans and adapters. Holmes’s account of Moriarty, and Watson’s account of Holmes’s disappearance in ‘The Final Problem’ is so self-contradictory, so unreliable, that it has inspired dozens of books and films attempting, on the one hand, to explain Sherlock’s nemesis as an innocent victim of the detective’s paranoid fantasies, or else, on the other hand, to flesh out the sketchy details of Moriarty’s criminal career.In attempting to solve the mystery of ‘The Final Problem’, to turn it into a whodunit, Holmes aficionados are engaging - quite knowingly, and with tongue in cheek - in a form of conspiracist thinking which seeks to demonstrate that everything in the Sherlock Holmes universe is significant and connected. In doing this they are, of course, following Holmes’s own example, and indeed his own account of Moriarty shows many of the hallmarks of conspiracist thought. Playing the Grand Game, the game of subtextual secrets and conspiracies, is fun precisely because the detective genre is full of redundant detail and misdirection.What players of the Grand Game are also doing is modelling the kind of storytelling that is now the norm for serial television and film franchises. Narrative twists are carefully seeded, web resources are made available to provide complementary information, repeated viewings are expected and encouraged. The two recent films directed by Guy Ritchie, Sherlock Homes and A Game of Shadows, and the Mark Gatiss/Steven Moffat BBC series Sherlock both place their villains at the centre of conspiracies that are seeded from an early point in the narrative sequence, the conspiracy at the climax/season finale making sense of what seemed inexplicable before.

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781783202058

T3 - Fan Phenomena

SP - 135

EP - 146

BT - Fan Phenomena

PB - Intellect

Y2 - 21 June 2013 through 22 June 2013

ER -