Professor James Moriarty

Professor James Moriarty is Sherlock Holmes's supreme adversary: the 'Napoleon of Crime', as Holmes himself calls him. A first-rate mathematical genius who placed his formidable intellect entirely at the service of criminal enterprise, Moriarty stands as Holmes's dark mirror — equally brilliant, equally calculating, and entirely unconstrained by moral scruple.

Although he appears in only a handful of stories, his shadow falls across the entire canon. He is the hidden architect behind much of London's organised crime, pulling strings from the shadows with chilling precision. His final confrontation with Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls has become one of the most iconic moments in all of fiction, cementing Moriarty as the archetypal literary villain against whom all later masterminds are measured.