The Dark Herald Recommends: Moriarty The Patriot
Professor Moriarty was secretly the good guy all along, huh? Thank you but no, was my immediate response.
Deconstructed villains who are secretly in the right has become as cliche as heroes who are akshually the real monsters. I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out that Sherlock Holmes was, in fact, Jack the Ripper and it was Moriarty who was hunting him down for it. Then the good professor was defamed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Although Conan Doyle didn’t really do all that much defaming. Moriarty only appears in two of the original stories, although he is mentioned in five others. It was all the other Sherlock Holmes pastiche writers who turned the “Napoleon of Crime”* into a supervillain.
I had expressed these reservations about Moriarty the Patriot, to Eldest Darkspawn who said, “You got it all wrong. It’s like Death Note.”
On the basis of that, I decided to give it a look. Death Note is head and shoulders above this but that doesn’t mean Moriarty isn’t worth a look.
The setting is 19th century London (as you would expect). We are first introduced to a young, blonde and androgynous professor James Moriarty, (most of the men in this are androgynous. The manga-ka is a woman) and his two brothers Albert and Louis Moriarty. A copyrightable legal distinction of a work in the public domain is now firmly established.
Moriarty is investigating the murder of a series of boys that are just prepubescent. All of them either had families or were employed in professions that will put them in direct contact with the aristocratic classes. We meet the father of one such boy, a tailor who is deeply agonized over the loss of his child. It establishes the human cost of these crimes. Moriarty eventually deduces who the murderer is, and he is titled nobility. The Moriarty brothers kidnap him and then, here is the twist to it, leave him tied up in a room with the tailor. And his big-ass shears.
At first I thought this was just rough justice for a special case but it turned out to be a modus operandi. Moriarty describes himself as a Consulting Criminal. He doesn’t commit these crimes himself, he finds a wrongdoer, then he locates a victim of the evil man and enables that person to take revenge. He doesn’t do the dirty work himself, you understand, he is just a consultant. Moriarty’s goal is to overthrow the unjust society that he lives in. For the most part, this involves proletariat workers revenging themselves on aristocrats for hideous crimes they commit. He is much more of a Trickster than an outlaw hero.
He does indeed come across as a character very much in the same vein as Light Yagami from Death Note.
Darklings: There was a detective in Death Note. Is there a detective in this one? I bet you nickel I can guess his name.
It does take a while for Sherlock to show up. In fact, it was taking so long I was starting to wonder if he was going to be a student of the professor when Moriarty reaches middle age. But no, in this version they are about the same age. The writer was just taking his time exploring the characters of Moriarty’s family and compatriots.
We then get a rather different Sherlock. While he is obsessed with mysteries, his character is significantly different from previous iterations. No, deerstalker hat or Inverness cape. He has a man-bun and never buttons his shirt. Miss Hudson refers to Sherlock as a Bohemian, and he is one that is clearly broke all the time, hence his need for a flatmate. Miss Hudson wants her rent first-of-the-month damn it on-time. Watson is pretty much just Watson.
The creators Moriarty the Patriot were Hikaru Miyoshi and Ryosuke Takeuchi.
Miyoshi is well known for her detailed art as a Manga-ka. While the costuming and character design are over the top. She balances it out with intricate minutea of the period. When you see the inside of a carriage’s door, the mechanism that raises and lowers the window is lovingly laid out in detail. Moriarty is full of little touches like that. It’s kind of a Japanese thing, you are allowed to get a few big things wrong, just so long as you get all the little things right. If you don’t believe me, look at how much they loved Shōgun (2024).
Ryosuke Takeuchi was the writer, one of his stories was eventually turned into Edge of Tomorrow. The characters are excellent and they are what drive this story. However, it’s not without flaws. The biggest is just how absurdly evil the aristocracy of 19th Century is in this series.
Some of the villains were so over the top I asked Eldest Darkspawn, “When do we get to the Earl who hunts men for sport?”
She replied, in some embarrassment, “I think that’s the next episode.”
It was.
It was also the big thing Takeuchi got wrong. The British aristocracy didn’t take any kind of active interest in grinding down the lowest of the low. The oppression was carried out by the highest of the low. The people just above lowest on the ladder were the ones that kept the rest beneath them. However, I’ll give it a pass due to the quality of the storytelling. There was a need to balance out the extremism of Moriarty’s justice with equally horrific actions that cried out for an outlaw’s justice. However, he was never the one carrying them out, it was always the victim that exacted the coin that could be most ill-afforded. Moriarty was just the Consulting Criminal.
In summary, Moriarty the Patriot will be of interest if you enjoyed Death Note. It’s always intriguing to see a story of a detective hero pitted against an outlaw hero.
The Dark Herald recommends with confidence (3.9 / 5)
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*Conan Doyle lifted that title from real life career criminal Adam Worth, who was most famous for stealing Gainsborough’s “Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire,” and keeping it hidden for 25 years. Worth’s son became a Pinkerton detective.