The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle
Quick answer: The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle: full summary with the Reichenbach Falls ending, Moriarty explained, themes of sacrifice, and the craft of killing a hero.
Sherlock Holmes arrives at Watson's consulting room with his knuckles bleeding, the shutters drawn against air guns, and an announcement: there exists a Napoleon of crime, and within three days either Holmes will have him or he will have Holmes. The Final Problem appeared in the Strand in December 1893, written for one purpose its author freely admitted: to kill Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle had come to feel the detective was devouring his serious work, and he built this story as an execution with honours. It introduces Professor Moriarty fully formed, compresses a continental chase into a few pages, and ends at a Swiss waterfall with the most famous empty ledge in literature. Below: the complete plot including the ending and the letter, the characters, the themes, and the craft of writing a hero's death.
The story in brief, ending included
Holmes explains to Watson what he has never told him: for months he has been unpicking a criminal organisation that sits under half the undetected crime in London, and at its centre is Professor James Moriarty, a mathematical genius, author of a treatise on the binomial theorem, turned consultant to the underworld. Holmes's web is ready; in three days the police will take the whole gang. Moriarty knows it. He has called at Baker Street to say so, in a scene Holmes recounts with something near admiration, each man telling the other precisely what he will do, and attempts on Holmes's life have followed within hours: a rushing van, a falling brick, a rough with a bludgeon. Holmes asks Watson to come to the Continent with him until the arrests are made, and the flight is conducted with full tradecraft: coded instructions, luggage sent ahead, a change of carriages, a decoy. At Canterbury they leave the train and watch a special engine, hired by Moriarty, thunder past in pursuit. In Strasbourg comes word: the gang is taken, all but its leader, who has escaped. Holmes urges Watson to go home; Watson refuses.
They wander into Switzerland, walking the Alps toward the village of Meiringen, and Holmes is calm in a way Watson has not seen, remarking that if his account were closed that night he could review it with equanimity, for the air of London is sweeter for his presence. On an excursion to the falls of Reichenbach, a dreadful cauldron of black rock and roaring water, a message overtakes them: an Englishwoman dying at their hotel begs for an English doctor. Watson goes; the message is false. Returning hours later, he finds Holmes's alpenstock against a rock, two lines of footprints leading out along the muddy path above the fall, and none returning. Under the alpenstock lies a letter, written in Holmes's steady hand while Moriarty waited: the professor has courteously allowed him to leave a few lines; Holmes tells Watson the end was inevitable and the price fair, directs him to the papers that will convict the gang, and sends his greetings to Mrs Watson. The evidence at the ledge tells the rest: two men went out, locked together they went over, and any attempt at recovery is hopeless in that boiling shaft of water. Watson closes his account by calling Holmes the best and the wisest man he has ever known. Doyle intended it to be final; the public's decade of mourning eventually forced the sequel.
The characters and what they want
Holmes wants completion: the destruction of Moriarty's organisation is presented as the summit of his career, worth his life at par, and his serenity in the last days is the story's quiet astonishment. Moriarty wants survival first and symmetry second; Doyle gives him Holmes's own intellect with the sign reversed, and their mutual professional courtesy, culminating in time allowed for a farewell letter, is the strangest and best touch in the tale. Watson wants to guard his friend and is removed by the oldest trick imaginable, a false appeal to his doctor's duty, which is why his grief carries a permanent note of self reproach.
Themes and meaning
The themes: the doubled self, hero and villain as mirror intellects, explicitly matched and mutually admiring; sacrifice, Holmes trading himself for a criminal system's destruction, the individual death purchasing a public good; and friendship, since the story is finally Watson's, an account written in mourning, its last line an epitaph. The duel is also framed as reason against reason, with no moral advantage of intelligence on either side, an idea darker than the series usually permits.
The sharper observation is that Doyle stages the climax as an absence. No fight is shown; Watson, and therefore the reader, arrives after everything, and the ending must be assembled from tracks, an alpenstock and a letter. The choice was practical, a survivable ambiguity Doyle later exploited, but its effect is profound: the reader performs the death by deduction, the story teaching us its hero's method one last time at his grave. The most famous death in detective fiction is, technically, an inference.
The craft: engineering an exit
Killing a beloved character without breaking faith requires the death to be purchased, chosen and witnessed correctly, and this story is the template. Purchased: Moriarty is built to Holmes's exact scale in a single expository scene, so the trade of life for life feels arithmetically fair. Chosen: Holmes speaks his willingness twice before Reichenbach, converting ambush into acceptance. Witnessed: the death happens off stage, through evidence, in the voice of the person who loved him most, which transforms sensation into grief. Remove any of the three and you get either melodrama or a cheat.
The technique worth stealing is scaling your antagonist late and fast: Moriarty appears in this story for the first time, is certified by the hero's own fear, and needs no prior instalments to feel enormous, proof that an opponent's size is a function of the protagonist's reaction, not of accumulated pages. Note also the farewell letter as device: it lets the dead man narrate past his own death, close the plot's practical threads, and speak to the mourner directly. Writers preparing an entry for a judged contest can take the broader lesson: an ending's emotional force is engineered in the scenes before it, and the five-part rubric Writory publishes for its story prize scores exactly that preparation under structure and emotional impact.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, describe how Moriarty is established in one scene: credentials, the web metaphor, and Holmes's own fear.
- Note that the death is shown only through evidence, footprints, alpenstock, letter, and name the effect of that absence.
- Quote Watson's closing tribute as the story's epitaph and the proof that this is Watson's story, not Holmes's.
- Writers: scale an antagonist through the hero's reaction rather than through accumulated appearances.
- Use a farewell document to let a character speak past their own exit and close practical threads.
- Buy a character's death with choice and fair exchange before you spend it; ambush alone reads as cheating.
Try it yourself
Write the story of a rivalry's last day, told by the person who was lured away before the ending. Your narrator may show the reader only what remains afterward: marks, objects, and one letter. The confrontation itself must never appear on the page.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Final Problem?
Lured away by a fake medical emergency, Watson returns to find footprints leading to the ledge above the Reichenbach Falls and none coming back, with Holmes's farewell letter under his alpenstock. The evidence shows Holmes and Moriarty went over together, locked in struggle, and no bodies can be recovered.
Who is Professor Moriarty?
A mathematical genius turned organiser of crime, described by Holmes as the Napoleon of crime, sitting motionless at the centre of a web whose radiations he knows perfectly. He appears fully formed in this story, built as Holmes's intellectual equal with his morality inverted.
Why did Conan Doyle kill Sherlock Holmes?
Doyle felt the detective was consuming the attention he wanted for his historical fiction and resolved to end the series at its height. Public mourning, cancelled subscriptions and a decade of pressure eventually brought Holmes back, first in The Hound of the Baskervilles and then in The Adventure of the Empty House.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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