"Is Moriarty Smarter Than Holmes?"

(Warning: may contain spoilers)

It is always interesting to me to read the "Search Keywords" that direct people to this blog.  Sometimes it involves a question or idea that I wish I had blogged about--and the title of this post is one of them.

To keep it relatively short and sweet this time, I would say, "no".  Two reasons:

1. I'm a biased fangirl.  OF COURSE Holmes is smarter than his nemesis.
2. There is, indeed, evidence to show that Holmes is the brainier of the two.

Obviously, a truly objective analysis is impossible.  If, as Doyle portrays, Moriarty is "the Napoleon of Crime", then Sherlock Holmes is Admiral Nelson.  Holmes was never meant to be anything but the smartest, most brilliant, most idealistic hero, a very romanticized foil to the intellectual darkness of Prof. Moriarty.  Holmes was not written to be anything but the hero, the ultimate winner.

On the other hand, if you read up on the Sherlock Holmes series, you learn that Doyle also did not mean for Sherlock Holmes to come back after his death at the Reichenbach.  It was supposed to be the end.  Does this change his role?  It could be argued that his self-sacrifice is a sort of loss, and that Moriarty, by depriving England of its greatest solitary crime-fighter, dealt society a blow that put it decisively under his power or, at least, the power of evil, in a symbolic sense.

Even considering, though, the idea of Reichenbach as Holmes's final death, Holmes still emerges as the more intelligent of the two, and the real victor.  Though he himself goes to Switzerland, his strategy allows the British police to successfully capture all of Moriarty's gang back home (excepting Col. Moran).  Moriarty is left alone, and with his empire collapsed beneath him, he resigns himself to revenge on Holmes.  Hence Reichenbach, where Moriarty--like many great despots--can think of no way to survive, so he decides to die.

I would make one more point, and that is that Moriarty has trouble improvising.  Of course, most notably there is the train incident, where Holmes makes an unexpected stop that Moriarty did not foresee.  There is also the "sick Englishwoman" fraud, a piece of improvisation by Moriarty that is essentially useless--yes, it gets Watson out of the way, but as Holmes was perfectly aware it was a fraud, it did not really affect his plans one way or the other (and I hardly think Moriarty cared about Watson's safety).

Most people, indeed, consider Moriarty to be a somewhat disappointing villain.  While I wouldn't go that far, I do think Holmes more than matches his intellect, and the fact that a youngish man could singlehandedly battle an elderly math genius has always been one of the things I admire about Holmes.