Talk:The Final Problem

message: hey wot is this about?
Wait...Moriarty died? i thought that like Holmes, he too didn't fall to his doom.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.185.96.150 (talk) 01:31, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

message: I was surprised to read that Conan Doyle thought of this as one of the best of the short stories. It is not remotely possible. 
Holmes tells Watson about Moriarty for the first time, even though he has confided everything else in his biographer and comrade, and though, it now turns out, Moriarty has been his life-long enemy throughout. 
The whole concept of Moriarty is murky. He is supposed to be an arch-villain, and as intelligent and formidable as Holmes himself. But his activities seem to be those of a simple criminal. Lots of petty heists and so on. One thinks he could have been portrayed as a Mafia Godfather type, in charge of chains of gambling dens, illegal liquor and prostitution, extortion, etc., but this is Victorian England, and such organized crime is not a feature. OTOH, Moriarty could have been an international mercenary, an assassin, a terrorist, or so on, but he does not seem to be any of those things either.
The details of the extremely sudden collapse of his gangs, and the "rounding up" of his henchmen in a matter of days, is, frankly ridiculous, and Moriarty's sole pursuit of Holmes, ending up in a man-to-man fight at the edge of the cliff is absurd, no matter how comforting the notion of such matters of honor between two men, one of them good, the other evil, could be. Holmes should have just shot Moriarty when he had the chance. Why did he virtually choose suicide? 
The answer lies in Doyle's sudden decision to kill Holmes off in order to engage with themes of greater merit. All this shows in this story which is contrived and implausible. 
Of course, Conan Doyle brought Holmes back from the dead, which is just as well, as nothing else Doyle wrote has particularly interested readers, then or now. Most ironical of all is the Doyle, who singlehandedly made a world audience enthusiastic for Holmes's methods of induction and deduction, and forensic inspection at the minutest details, became himself totally gulled by every quack and fraud of spiritualistic seances and the like. In particular, he was taken in by the two girls who took photographs of the "fairies at the bottom of the garden" and wrote a book about them. Of course the fairies, it turned out, were nothing more than cut-outs from a child's book, and the girls were playing a prank. It is astonishing that the man who wrote the Holmes stories was the same man who fell for the pranks of two little girls. Myles325a (talk) 10:49, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  strains credibility 

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thread_title:  External links modified