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One of my favorite books as a boy, read in translation. Only now have I met Doyle’s clever title-page verse: “I have wrought my simple plan If I give one hour of joy To the boy who's half a man, Or the man who's half a boy." Was the verse there in the Strand serial too?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 14/10/2026

Thank you! Jennifer doesn’t discuss the note itself, but she quotes the 1923 sale catalogue describing the manuscript as “containing about 7,300 words.” and " A small portion of the writing is in pencil." I wonder whether the blue pencil belongs to that sale. A lovely little puzzle either way.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 14/10/2026

One more thing caught my eye right away: the blue-pencil “7300 wds” on the first page of text. Do you know whether it’s thought to be in Doyle’s hand, or added at the editorial stage? Thanks!

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 14/10/2026

I just did, and now I see exactly what you mean. What struck me on the first page of text is how small most of the changes are. More refinement than reconstruction. It feels as though so much of the story was already formed before the pen reached the page. I’ll keep exploring. Thanks for the link!

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 14/10/2026

What a dinner-party answer! The Blue John Gap project especially caught my eye. Has anything in Doyle's manuscript surprised you or changed the way you read the finished story?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 14/10/2026

One of my favorite finds at the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London: Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin, the Soviet Holmes and Watson. They were friends for 23 years. Livanov said friendship can’t be acted. Perhaps that’s why theirs feels so real. Who is your favorite Holmes and Watson? #SherlockHolmes

A museum wall panel on screen Holmeses. The 1979 entry has a black-and-white portrait of Vasily Livanov with a pipe and text on the Soviet series “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson”, his lifelong friendship with Vitaly Solomin as Watson, and its reputation as a faithful adaptation.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 13/10/2026

Took your advice on “The Sign of Four.” The YouTube copy flickered badly on my screen, so I ran a plain ffmpeg deflicker filter over it, no AI (left: original, right: filtered). What struck me: Norwood carries a scene without the facial pantomime of the era. Now I see why Doyle liked him so much.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 12/10/2026

Norwood’s 1923 “The Final Problem” stages the confrontation with Moriarty at Cheddar Gorge rather than Reichenbach, a curiosity @doingsofdoyle.com pointed me to. I haven’t seen it yet. Would you start with “The Sign of Four,” or is one of the shorts a better introduction to Norwood?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 11/10/2026

Photo 2 credit: By Vyacheslav Argenberg from Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation - Waterfall near lake Ritsa (2004-07-045), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3374768]

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 11/10/2026

The real Reichenbach and its Caucasus double. At the top of the funicular, a small screen loops the fight from “Deadly Fight” (1980), where Livanov’s Holmes and Yevgrafov’s Moriarty grapple at the Gega waterfall in the Caucasus (right). Which screen version of the fight do you rate highest? #Holmes

Aleksandr Mazo at a viewing platform opposite the Reichenbach Falls in Meiringen, Switzerland, leaning on a concrete parapet in sunglasses and a short-sleeved shirt. Behind me the falls drop in two white tiers through a narrow cleft between sheer grey and sandstone-coloured cliffs, with trees along the top. A round sign on a post at the left reads “Reichenbachfall.”

The Gega waterfall in the Caucasus: a broad curtain of white water pours from beneath a grey limestone overhang, spreading over rounded rock into a stony stream. A dark grotto opens in the cliff to the left, and a pale streak runs down the rock to the right.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 11/10/2026

Thank you! Holmes and I had a long talk on that same rock. The Falls are worth a second trip: go in early summer, when the snowmelt makes Watson’s “tremendous abyss” live up to its billing.

Sepia photo of Aleksandr Mazo sitting on a boulder beside the bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Meiringen, Switzerland, both deep in thought as if mid-conversation.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 09/10/2026

I was delighted to learn the tribute outlived its story: when "The Cardboard Box" was dropped from the Memoirs, the thought-reading scene was moved into "The Resident Patient."

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 09/10/2026

Holmes was never quite fair to Dupin. In A Study in Scarlet he calls him “a very inferior fellow” for “breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark.” Yet in “The Cardboard Box” he does exactly that to Watson, citing “one of Poe’s sketches.” Was Doyle teasing his own debt?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 07/10/2026

Ah, so the climax comes home to Somerset. I'd misread the listing. A cliff-edge finale at Cheddar Gorge does sound suitably melodramatic. Thanks for the correction.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 06/10/2026

Fitting, too, that the whole Norwood series ends with Holmes's disappearance. What lets the Reichenbach down: the struggle itself, or Cheddar Gorge never quite passing for Switzerland?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 04/10/2026

If these are the same three from the BFI’s “Silent Sherlock” programme, I’m especially curious about “The Final Problem”: Percy Standing’s Moriarty, with Cheddar Gorge doubling for Reichenbach. How does that final struggle play after restoration?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 03/10/2026

This sounds fascinating. In “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes keeps his “brain-attic” for what he uses and puts the rest in “the lumber-room of his library.” It makes me wonder about Doyle’s own shelves: which books did he keep at his elbow, and which went to the lumber-room?

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 30/09/2026

The trail panel in Meiringen (photo 1) takes Holmes and Watson from the Channel steamer straight to Geneva. Watson does not: “We made our way to Brussels that night and spent two days there.” I've stood in four places on Watson's route: London, Brussels, Interlaken and Meiringen. #SherlockHolmes

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 28/09/2026

The white star at Reichenbach marks the spot traditionally identified by Sherlockians with Holmes and Moriarty’s struggle. Doyle never named a precise spot. By 1951 Anthony D. Howlett was exhibiting a photograph of “the actual spot”. How did he work out where it was? #SherlockHolmes

Aleksandr Mazo standing on a narrow path beside the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, one hand on a metal railing. A white star fixed to the rock wall beside him marks the traditional spot of Holmes and Moriarty's struggle. The upper fall drops through the gorge some distance behind him.

Sidney Paget's 1893 black-and-white illustration of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty grappling at the edge of a narrow cliff path above the Reichenbach Falls, Moriarty's hat falling into the chasm, the waterfall plunging beside them.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 28/09/2026

That fits The Illustrious Client, published a few years later but set in 1902, where Holmes speaks of “the living Colonel Sebastian Moran”. ACD keeps him alive but offstage. Thanks for the reply, and for a great episode.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 27/09/2026

Really enjoyed your comparison of the play and the story. If the one-act Sherlock really dates from 1912, Moran was still Doyle's villain of choice two decades after Reichenbach. I wonder whether he became Sylvius partly because readers had last seen Moran taken into custody in The Empty House.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 27/09/2026

Meiringen, 3 May 1891. Holmes and Watson put up at the Englischer Hof, “then kept by Peter Steiler the elder.” The next day, a false note bearing the hotel’s mark called Watson back from the Falls, leaving Holmes to face Moriarty alone. I had to see the place for myself.

Aleksandr Mazo seated on a wrought-iron bench beneath a bronze plaque at the Parkhotel du Sauvage in Meiringen. The plaque identifies the hotel with Doyle's Englischer Hof, where Holmes and Watson spent the night of 3/4 May 1891, and says Holmes left from here for the fatal encounter at the Reichenbach Falls with "Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime."

Aleksandr Mazo outside the Parkhotel du Sauvage in Meiringen, the hotel bearing the plaque that identifies it with Doyle's Englischer Hof. A carved lion stands at the foot of the entrance steps beneath a canopy with gold lettering.

Aleksandr Mazo leans over a marble-topped table to sign the guestbook in a corridor of the Parkhotel du Sauvage in Meiringen. A gilt-framed mirror, a wooden "Gästebuch" sign and red flowers stand beside him, and a parquet floor leads down the hallway to a crystal chandelier and glass doors.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 26/09/2026

This month I was promoted to black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In "The Empty House", Holmes says he survived Reichenbach thanks to "baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling." Every grip and throw in the Moriarty books was written by someone who trains. With Shihan Gene Dunn.

Aleksandr Mazo in a blue gi and a black belt embroidered with his name, smiling beside Shihan Gene Dunn, owner and head instructor of Dunn's Dojo in Brooklyn, who wears a white gi, has an arm around his shoulder and raises a fist. They stand in front of an American flag on the dojo wall.

A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt promotion ceremony at Dunn's Dojo in Brooklyn. Aleksandr Mazo, in a blue gi, bows as Shihan Gene Dunn, in a white gi, presents him with a bouquet. A black belt in a blue gi applauds beside a table of bouquets. Students in blue and white gis sit on the mats, seen from behind, and the dojo's banner and balloons fill the wall.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 25/09/2026

The Victorian Moriarty Saga begins three years later, when Holmes hands Watson the journal he recovered from Moriarty’s coat at Reichenbach and asks him to read Moriarty’s version of events before hearing what Holmes discovered afterwards. Follow the saga: moriartybook.com

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 25/09/2026

Photographs cannot convey the sound. This is Reichenbach from the path itself: the roar, the spray, and the sheer scale of the place Doyle chose for Holmes and Moriarty’s confrontation.

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Aleksandr Mazo @moriartybook.com · 25/09/2026

Reichenbach Falls, Meiringen, Switzerland. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem”, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty confront each other beside these falls on 4 May 1891. I came here while finishing Moriarty: The Napoleon of Crime. These are photographs from that research trip.

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