Holmes was a different creature entirely. He was not an aristocrat but a “consulting detective,” the first of his kind. He charged fees, kept irregular hours, and maintained a chemical laboratory in his living room. His method was explicitly, almost ostentatiously, scientific. In the very first scene of A Study in Scarlet , he exclaims, “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”—having just developed a chemical test for hemoglobin stains.
Moriarty is a ghost. We see him only twice in the canon (briefly in Final Problem and The Valley of Fear ), yet his presence looms over the entire latter half of the series. He is Holmes’s dark double—a mathematician of equal intellect who chose to organize crime as a “perfect system.” As Holmes says, “He is the Napoleon of crime.” holmes series
The relationship between Holmes and the physical space is symbiotic. He retreats there from the filth of London’s streets; he trashes it when bored; he uses it as a stage for his dramatic reveals. The famous phrase “Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient, come all the same” is an invitation not just to Watson but to the reader. 221B is a sanctuary of rationality. No matter how bizarre the case (the speckled band, the red-headed league, the vampire of Sussex), the hearth of Baker Street promises that a logical explanation exists. Holmes was a different creature entirely
Watson also performs a crucial emotional function. Holmes, a high-functioning sociopath avant la lettre, is incapable of emotional reciprocity. He loves the problem, not the person. Watson loves Holmes. He chronicles his moods, his cocaine use (7% solution), his violin playing at 3 AM, and his profound loneliness. Without Watson, Holmes would be a repellent automaton; with him, he becomes a tragic hero. His method was explicitly, almost ostentatiously, scientific
Eight years later, Conan Doyle capitulated. Holmes returned in The Hound of the Baskervilles (set before his “death”) and was formally resurrected in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” That surrender was not a defeat but a recognition of an immutable truth: Sherlock Holmes had transcended literature. He had become a cognitive ideal, a cultural archetype, and the patron saint of the detective genre.
The significance of Moriarty is existential. Before him, Holmes’s battles were against chaos and stupidity. Moriarty introduced the concept of patterned, intellectual evil . Their struggle is not physical but epistemological: two opposing systems of logic fighting for the soul of London. Moriarty legitimizes Holmes; a detective is only as great as his adversary. In creating Moriarty, Conan Doyle transformed Holmes from a clever problem-solver into a mythic hero engaged in a cosmic war of order against entropy. Few fictional locations have achieved the iconic status of 221B Baker Street. It is a third character—a pocket universe of Victorian domesticity and intellectual chaos. The room is a synecdoche for Holmes’s mind: gas fires, Persian slippers stuffed with tobacco, unanswered correspondence pinned to the mantelpiece with a jackknife, bullet holes in the wall spelling “VR” (Victoria Regina), and a cocaine syringe locked in a morocco case.