The Reichenbach Falls

"You will change your course. You will try to elude me. But whichever way you turn, there will be eyes that see and wires that tell. I shall meet you there. And you know it. And when I fall, you will fall with me." ~Professor James Moriarty from William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes

Illustrated in Deleter #3 Black Drawing Ink with inkwash and crow quill pen and brush on Strathmore 9x12 Smooth Bristol Board.

This illustration depicts the famous and final confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and his arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in the story The Final Problem first published in December of 1893.

I don't think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could have picked a better location for this scene.

This was originally to be the end of Sherlock Holmes. He and Professor Moriarty were to have fallen to their almost certain death on the rocks below. Watson never sees this confrontation and only imagines what it might have been like and how it must have ended from the note Moriarty allowed Holmes to leave him.

I'm not sure if Sir Arthur realized this at the time but he actually did something very clever by not having Watson witness this struggle. It gave him that loophole to be able to return Sherlock Holmes and make it believable. At the time he had finished writing the story I'm sure he felt that Holmes was as good as dead and that was it. He had grown weary of his creation and wanted to move on to other things.

What he didn't count on was the public outcry over Holmes's death.

I was inspired by Sidney Paget's original depiction of the two locked in combat as the sounds of the waterfall pounded mercilessly behind them. I was also inspired by the scene in which Alan Moore wrote a more detailed version of the confrontation in his stellar graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Which I felt was one of the best illustrations of Holmes I've seen in comic art in some time. Holmes's costume was inspired by a cross between the one Jeremy Brett wore in the adaptation of The Final Problem as well as the tweed costume William Gillette wore for the play Sherlock Holmes.

The illustration is available for bidding on E-Bay. Click on the E-Bay link on the left hand link bar.