So let us now consider three Canonical stories of the utmost significance to our discussion: The Final Problem, The Adventure of the Empty House, and His Last Bow. And then let us conclude with a fourth that may well feature the most surprising character in all the Canon. Someone who puts Moriarty and Moran in the shade-Sherlock’s most dangerous opponent, but one without whom he could never have survived the plunge over the Reichenbach Falls. Someone who is, in many respects, the most crucially overlooked figure in the Canon-which is exactly the way Conan Doyle wanted it.
In many ways, The Final Problem is the most straightforward of the lot, and certainly makes an ideal curtain-raiser to this discussion of anti-Hibernianism. I need not recount the story here; suffice it to say that it not only introduces us, in person, to Professor James Moriarty, it also engenders a whole discussion of precisely how many Moriartys there actually are, and whether they are all named James. Certainly, the Professor is an unlovely physical specimen, devisor of a binomial theorem of genius or not. Physically, he resembles a reptile, and upon meeting Holmes he promptly insults him by expressing disappointment in the size of his frontal development. (Of course, we have only Holmes’s word for this, since Watson can only report the hearsay encounter from Sherlock’s testimony.)
But the Professor is the primus inter pares of declared Sherlockian villains, and there can be no question of the mortal danger he poses to Holmes. Holmes, on the verge of rounding up Moriarty’s gang, convinces Watson to travel with him to the Continent, where Holmes has his final confrontation with his now-discomfited nemesis.
And so Moriarty dies. But like his shape-shifting predecessor, Fata Morgana, he is almost immediately reincarnated in the form of his henchman, Sebastian Moran, who (we learn in The Empty House) bombards Holmes with boulders as the Great Detective scrambles away from the Reichenbach abyss. Holmes imagines he hears the late Professor’s voice screaming at him from the bottom of the falls, and then suddenly Moran appears, bent on malevolence, as if summoned from the depths of Hell. His subsequent attack on Holmes from the empty house in London is entirely to be expected, but Holmes outwits him and the “second most dangerous man in London” is captured and charged with the murder of the Hon. Ronald Adair.
Then something entirely miraculous happens. Holmes and Watson are restored to their old rooms in Baker Street, which despite fire and gunshots are found to be in essentially pristine condition, maintained by Mycroft Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, with “all the old landmarks in their places,” including the chemical corner, the acid-stained table, the scrapbooks, the violin, the pipe rack, and the Persian slipper.
And Holmes’s encyclopedia of biographies, where in addition to Morgan the poisoner, Merridew of abominable memory, and Matthews, who knocked out one of Holmes’s teeth, we find Colonel Sebastian Moran, London-born son of Sir Augustus Moran, the former British Minister to-Persia.
By now, it’s clear that the combination of murder and magic, so quintessentially Celtic, is powerfully at play here. Like Conan Doyle himself, Professor Moriarty and Colonel Moran have a patina of Britishness to overlay their Irishness, but Hibernianism in the blood can take the strangest forms, and in this case it took the form of two respectable “Englishmen” who were, of course, really disguised Irishmen. Exactly like Conan Doyle himself.
And so we come to His Last Bow, that moody, mysterious and moving ave atque vale, written in the third person-as if by Conan Doyle himself-in which all of the Literary Agent’s obsessions can at last be viewed in full flower. Secret identities. Irishness as a marker of betrayal. A false identity, as false as that of “Birdy Edwards” during the Pinkerton man’s undercover work in Vermissa Valley. Holmes learned American gangland slang in Chicago, joined an Irish secret society in Buffalo, and got into trouble with the constabulary in Skibbereen as he polished his anti-English credentials. Then (in collusion with Martha, the ever-faithful Mrs. Hudson), he sprang the trap on the German spy, von Bork. And when the imperious kraut vows vengeance, how does Holmes respond? “The old sweet song. How often have I heard it in days gone by”-an allusion to the famous American popular chanson written by the Irish-American James L. Molloy in 1884, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”
Says Holmes: “It was a favorite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it. And yet I live and keep bees upon the South Downs.”
And yet I live. Keep that in mind. We’ll come back to it in our final peroration. And what identity, of all possible identities, does the master of disguise, the man who could impersonate stable hand and wizened bookseller alike, employ? An Irishman. An Irish-American.
An Irish-American named Altamont. As in Charles
Sir Arthur’s father.
The pinnacle of Sherlock Holmes’s career-his greatest service to England-comes as an Irish-American named “Altamont.”
In this valedictory, in which Holmes utters the memorable lines: “Stand with me here upon the terrace…” Conan Doyle sums up all his ambivalence about his own nature and his own family, and seems to reconcile it at the very end. Holmes and Watson, together for the last time, with the proximate enemy, von Bork, vanquished, but an east wind coming, an east wind such as never blew on England yet. God’s own wind… And then, embarrassed by this most un-British display of sentiment, Holmes turns his attention to von Bork’s check for five hundred pounds and rushes off to the bank to cash it before the Kaiser can stop payment on it.
Thus does Holmes’s quintessential Englishness assert itself.
And yet I live. Why does Holmes say this, at this particular moment, and in this particular context? Why would he not live? After all, many years before, he had vanquished Professor Moriarty with his knowledge of baritsu, and dodged Colonel Moran’s rocks and avoided his exploding bullet. By the time of His Last Bow, on the very eve of World War I, Holmes had survived every attempt on his life, every battle, every boxing match, Dr. Roylott’s swamp adder in The Speckled Band, even Tonga’s poisoned dart in The Sign of the Four.
On the eve of World War I… when just across the Irish Sea a storm was gathering that would culminate with the Harp flying, however briefly, above the G.P.O. in Dublin…
When both the British Empire and Conan Doyle himself stood, however unknowingly, not on the terrace but upon the precipice, into which both would soon hurtle. As Britain would lose her Empire, Conan Doyle would lose his faith, and embrace spiritualism; the father of the ultra-rationalist, “no ghosts need apply” Sherlock Holmes, would not only reject the faith of his fathers, he would embrace a far older and more primal faith: the faith in the spirit world.
The faith of the ancient Celts, who could cross over between the dark land of Mordor and the living.
Who knew that Life and Death were and are two sides of the same coin, inevitably twinned, not to be feared but embraced as a necessary duality. Like sun and moon. And: Male and female.
Which brings us to the last and most important story link in our chain: The Sign of the Four.
In which Holmes and Watson meet another “mor” character. Who turns out to be Holmes’s deadliest enemy.
Mary Morstan.
Or, as she was briefly known, Mrs. John H. Watson.