[A Second Optional Addendum to The Pretentious Paper]
by James Bojaciuk
Contact:
powerofthor2011[AT]gmail[DOT]com
The potential presence of other, modern versions of Sherlock Holmes's has been dealt with another place, another time (“There Must Always be a Holmes in Baker Street”). They attended a school, a right old school, and taught to know all the things that would forge a Master Detective. They turned out Solar Pons and Alexandra Machita, among other, lesser detectives—so lesser that they could only be ranked as failures. Some died at the hands of killers on their very first case; some came close to the heaven of Baker Street before winding up dead in Japan. Two of these postmodern Holmes have come to such prominence, and seem to encounter so many canonical characters, that they demand special treatment for such a theory to work.
The first is the man my previous article identified only as B (though we may trust that his birth name is Martin Powell), whose adventures are chronicled by the BBC series Sherlock. He has a Dr. John Watson, he has a James Moriarty (though there’s no chance of him being Professor, and even less that he owns a degree), and he has an Irene Adler. B also has a Mycroft all his own, but that tidbit was dealt with previously.
The second is the man my prior essay identified only as J (though some sources indicate he was born as Bryon Knightley), who finds himself fictionalized by the CBS series Elementary. He was once the VFD’s blessed Sherlock Holmes, until they stripped him of his title and used all the considerable national powers at their disposal to exile him from England. He arrived in New York, where he quickly found himself a Joan Watson and a Moriarty.[1]
And therein lays our problem. It’s all very well to suppose the existence of a secret school pumping out Holmes-level detectives. But similar schools—or rogue schoolmasters—turning out Professor Moriarty clones? Or a school for girls which only takes Little Miss Irene’s and turns them into espionage artists and singers? Or a medical school, which strives to craft young men into Watsons?
Absurd.
But there are other explanations, hidden in plain sight. We see, but we do not observe.
Let us begin with the latest Watsons.
Watson is a sufficiently common surname that we have no need to connect B & J’s Watsons to the Master’s own Dr. John H. Watson. John Watson could be an ordinary Watson, just as Joan Watson could be an everyday Watson. We could stop now, and carry right on to the next topic. But temptation spoils the best of us.
B’s John Watson could very well be the descendant of Dr. John H. Watson. He’s English, and seems in every way to embody the Watson ethos. The Watson family tree after the birth of the forename-less Watson to Dr. John H. Watson and Nylepthah in 1917 is utterly blank.[2] This grants us ample genealogical space for B’s John Watson (assuming that, after all this legwork, he’s still not an unrelated Watson).
Joan Watson, however, represents a unique challenge. She’s the daughter of first generation immigrants. One must wonder how they picked up such a distinctively English surname as Watson. Despite the fact that Dr. John H. Watson boasted of an “experience of women which extends over many countries and three separate continents,” it seems unlikely that this Watson family is in anyway related to him. Certainly, the original Watson could have taken a Chinese wife while at war in Asia, but she died and—knowing he could not support the child—allowed the child to be cared for by his/her deceased wife’s family. But we haven’t a scrap of data to support that. Not at all. Which makes it distinctly unlikely.
Joan Watson is simply an ordinary, everyday Watson. Her pedigree is her personality and actions, just as it was so very long ago when the Master met the good doctor.
The Moriarty’s are a mystery. The James Moriarty who confronted B (as recorded in Sherlock) and the Irene Moriarty who confronted J (as recorded in Elementary) are not the descendants of the Professor James Moriarty who cradled London (and Europe and America and slivery bits of Asia) on his fingertips. Even at one hundred years removal, they lack the signs the Professor’s children and grandchildren so clearly had: The genetic disease affecting the spine, neck, and head. Holmes likened it to the hypnotic oscillations of a cobra. Sal Paradise, semi-biographer of the Professor’s grandson, Dean Moriarty, described it thusly: “You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand ‘Yeses’ and ‘That's rights.’"
(Some have speculated, with evidence that varies from the nearly-convincing to the red herring, that Rasputin was Professor James Moriarty’s son. Rasputin himself suffered from similar seizures, perhaps offering the best evidence of their relationship.)
So who are James and Irene Moriarty?
The true Moriarty’s organization was imploded, fully and utterly, by the efforts of Sherlock Holmes. Save a few (i.e., Sebastian Moran and the infamous hotel boy) every member was captured or killed, every plan imploded, everything dismantled so thoroughly that all which remained was a vacuum.
Something did rise from the ashes.
In 1895, at the Northumberland Hotel, the remains of Moriarty’s organization met; presiding were Colonel Sebastian Moran and Station Master James Moriarty. From there, they bound themselves to a new organization, the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity, i.e., THRUSH, the greatest terrorist organization of the coming age.
THRUSH, however, is not likely to have respect for persons named Moriarty. But that matters little, for THRUSH has gone the way of its predecessor. They are utterly shut down, destroyed twice, inside and out.
Let us backtrack.
;
Could James and Irene Moriarty have come to us through another line of descent? From either Colonel James Moriarty or James Moriarty the Station Master, “popularly” known as the second Professor Moriarty?
All that can be offered is a scholarly shrug. The accounts of them which have survived outside the canon are contradictory, a conflicting babble of alternate takes and descriptions which mark the second Professor Moriarty as everything from a young, active man to a crippled old man to a young man masking himself as an old man to a teenager to a woman to an alien. Whatever he may have been, he was one of the voices present at the founding of THRUSH, and, until his own death, served them. If he left us James and Irene, they did not inherit his underworld position. And if they did, UNCLE would watch them every day of their lives. There’s nothing riskier than a Moriarty who has lost everything.
Colonel Moriarty, at least, seems to have survived to a natural death—and to have strayed from the path which THRUSH set. Perhaps James and Irene are the eventual result of his seed. Or perhaps not.
The modern James Moriarty, may he rest in pieces, may be a piece so unkind as to belong to another puzzle. He was a lunatic, with the spark of a hustler. He had no gang, he had no support, he had nothing but a diseased brain, a girlfriend, and gun. He was a “fan” of B’s performance as Sherlock Holmes. Watched his career, toyed with him, arranged a fall in homage to the originators of their roles. Aside from toying with B, he had no goals or profession.
One must wonder if he had a fixation on B (much as many unhinged individuals have for a celebrity) which carried him along as he set up a trap. Most likely, he stole his name from the Professor. It was one more trick to worry at B and drag him down, for the great-great-grandson of Holmes’ worst foe had come t
Irene Moriarty still represents a problem. She has a network, even now that she’s in prison. It seems to be nowhere near the complexity of Professor James Moriarty’s. She is certainly not a Napoleon of Crime, who “sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and [s]he knows well every quiver of each of them.” She is a freelance criminal. A talented one, certainly. But not a godfather, not a consulting criminal, not a Napoleon; she’s a (murderous) Arthur Raffles.
It is this researcher’s theory that she is indeed the distant descendant of Colonel James Moriarty. There was nothing for her to inherit. Certainly not a criminal empire. Fed on stories of her ancestors, she built her own: An empire for beginners, specializing in murder.
And so, out of curiosity, she met J, the then-current Sherlock Holmes of London; and so they romanced, with her as Irene Adler, because some stories must forever be retold; and so she faked her own death with an unnecessary amount of blood; and so she returned as Moriarty; and so they clashed, as a Holmes-in-name and a Moriarty must until she took a symbolic fall.
For those who wish to converse with her, Attica Maximum Security Prison has visiting hours every weekday from ten to three.
And, finally, just who is this Irene Adler whom B met?
Irene Adler, the true one, was long dead. If she had children, none of them were likely to carry on with her name or legacy (they were male, the two of them, if they existed, and bore surnames which did not reflect either her own or their fathers; they themselves do not seem to have had children, thus ending the line) [3]. Perhaps this new Irene is a lady with a very different name whom the BBC decided to rename in their dramatization. Perhaps, like the James Moriarty B battled, she assumed the name Irene Adler as a psychological warfare tactic. Perhaps it was her birth name, a lucky coincidence of the kind that plagued Tarzan and John Carter through their entire lives. “Perhaps” can be spun into any number of conjectures which we cannot support. Her single appearance in the BBC’s dramatizations offers us no clues.
She must be laid to rest as an open question, for like the Great Detective himself, we cry out, "Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay."
FOOTNOTES
[1] For those wondering why I’m not dealing with B’s Inspector Lestrade or J’s Captain Gregson, I consider them non-issues. They are either characters chosen by the latest incarnation of the Great Detective for their very name—which is extremely easy to picture B doing—or descendants of the originals. One of my best friends in high school comes from a family whose last six generations have been Philadelphia cops—and, in a few months from this writing, he’ll be the seventh. I hail from a similar family. Police-work stays in the blood. And, 100 years on, it is easy to picture the men of the Lestrade and Gregson clans sticking to the family profession.
[2] The upcoming Sherlock Holmes-inspired film House of Thought features an Inspector Irene J. Watson. It’s set in the 1950s, meaning that should she be related, she would be Dr. John H. Watson’s granddaughter by way of ---- Watson. However, as this film is still in production at this writing, we cannot yet ascertain if it belongs in the WNU.
[3] This article will not delve into the relations between the true Sherlock Holmes and his Irene. Mostly because the author holds a vast array of heretical notions: In short, that Holmes and Irene did not have a romance; that Holmes did not father Nero Wolfe; that Holmes’ non-interest in sex was not a ruse, or a general disposition, but something which emerged from witnessing the death of his poor, lost Elizabeth; that Holmes’ last word was not “Irene,” and that Holmes has indeed had a last word (It was “Elementary,” for those who are playing along at home—though some insist it was “Fetch me my slipper,” but certainly not “Irene”); that Holmes most definitely did not marry the insufferable Mary Russell; that Holmes did not father Raffles Holmes; that Holmes kept it in his pants and fathered absolutely no one; that Holmes died in 1965, an interminably cranky 112-year-old; that Holmes did not take up Buddhism, nor Islam, nor Atheism, and was, rather, an indifferent Anglican from womb to grave; and that save the changes of names, places, and dates, Watson’s accounts are entirely accurate.
I am a purist, and for that I almost apologize.
For other purists, worry not, this entire article is an intellectual exercise based off a friend’s comments about my upcoming book The Pretentious Paper. You’re even more free than usual to reject everything above, and everything hidden in this article’s prequel.