Strangely, Professor Moriarty and his brother have the same name.

Sherlock Holmes mentions his nemesis seven times in “The Final Problem,” but always as “Professor Moriarty” — he gives no first name (“My dear Watson, Professor Moriarty is not a man who lets the grass grow under his feet”).

But at one point Watson refers to “the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother,” who was killed after his dramatic struggle with Holmes atop the Reichenbach Falls.

But in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes remarks to Watson, “[I]f I remember right, you had not heard the name of Professor James Moriarty, who had one of the great brains of the century.”

So “the Napoleon of crime” and his brother are both named James, it appears. One explanation that’s been suggested is that “James Moriarty” is a compound surname — in which case the first name of each man remains a mystery.

Sydney Smith to Miss Lucie Austin, July 22, 1835:

Lucy, Lucy, my dear child, don’t tear your frock: tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius; but write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts; be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest; and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import.

And Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know, in the first sum of yours I ever saw, there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who never understood arithmetic; by the time you return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you; therefore I now give you my parting advice. Don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year; and God bless you, dear child.

Sydney Smith

In September 1780 Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward exchanged letters “in the name of their respective cats.” Darwin’s Persian cat Snow wrote to Miss Po Felina at the Bishop’s Palace:

Dear Miss Pussey,

As I sat, the other day, basking myself in the Dean’s Walk, I saw you in your stately palace, washing your beautiful round face, and elegantly brinded ears, with your velvet paws, and whisking about, with graceful sinuosity, your meandering tail. That treacherous hedgehog, Cupid, concealed himself behind your tabby beauties, and darting one of his too well-aimed quills, pierced, O cruel imp! my fluttering heart.

Ever since that fatal hour have I watched, day and night, in my balcony, hoping that the stillness of the starlight evenings might induce you to take the air on the leads of the palace. Many serenades have I sung under your windows; and, when you failed to appear, with the sound of my voice made the vicarage re-echo through all its winding lanes and dirty alleys. All heard me but my cruel Fair-one; she, wrapped in fur, sat purring with contented insensibility, or slept with untroubled dreams. …

Permit me this afternoon, to lay at your divine feet the head of an enormous Norway rat, which has even now stained my paws with its gore.

He received this response:

I am but too sensible of the charms of Mr. Snow; but while I admire the spotless whiteness of his ermine, and the tyger-strength of his commanding form, I sigh in secret, that he, who sucked the milk of benevolence and philosophy, should yet retain the extreme of that fierceness, too justly imputed to the Grimalkin race. Our hereditary violence is perhaps commendable when we exert it against the foes of our protestors, but deserves much blame when it annoys their friends. …

Marry you, Mr Snow, I am afraid I cannot; since, though the laws of our community might not oppose our connection, yet those of principle, of delicacy, of duty to my mistress, do very powerfully oppose it. …

The still too much admired Mr Snow will have the goodness to pardon the freedom of these expostulations, and excuse their imperfections. The morning, O Snow! had been devoted to this my correspondence with thee, but I was interrupted in that employment by the visit of two females of our Species, who fed my ill-starred passion by praising thy wit and endowments, exemplified by thy elegant letter, to which the delicacy of my sentiments obliges me to send so inauspicious a reply.

(From Seward’s Memoir of the Life of Dr. Darwin, 1804.)

Hemingway said, “The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.” Yet the International Imitation Hemingway Competition attracted more than 24,000 entries in its first 10 years, as well as celebrity judges including Ray Bradbury, George Plimpton, and Joseph Wambaugh. The annual contest started when owners Jerry Magnin and Larry Mindel sought a way to promote their tavern, Harry’s Bar & American Grill in Century City, Calif. From there the competition passed from sponsor to sponsor until United Airlines adopted it for its in-flight magazine, Hemispheres. The final winner, in 2005, was “Da Moveable Code,” by Illinois cardiologist Gary Davis:

Paris could be very fine in the winter when it was clear and cold and they were young and in love but that winter of 1924 they quarreled badly and she left for good. Paris, the city of light, turned dark and sodden with sadness. But it was still a damn fine place and he hated to leave it so he sat in the cafés all day and drank wine and thought about writing clean short words on bright white paper.

He preferred Café des Amateurs, on the Place St-Michel. The waiters in their long aprons respected him and he did good work there, defeating them all in the arm wrestling and the drinking and the dominoes and the boxing. They told him timeless stories of love and cruelty and death. That was good, because his Michigan stories had dried up, his jockeys and boxers had worn out, and sometimes he worried his oeuvre might be over.

One afternoon in late autumn two gypsies came into the café, a ragged old man and his daughter. She carried a crystal ball between her arms. They went table to table telling fortunes. Soon they came to him. Dark eyes stared at his palm, then into the ball. Two fair arms well cradled it in her lap.

‘Guapa, I am not one for whom the ball tells –‘ he started, but she put a finger to his lips. She studied his face. Her dark eyes were like deep forest pools where trout the color of pebbles hang motionless in the cool flowing eddies, waiting for the good larvae, the tasty larvae. Sun-burned, confident, loving eyes the color of the sea. He wrote that down.

‘Inglés, my ball shows what you must write.’

‘Americain.’ It was like saying hello to a statue. He wrote that down, too.

‘Picture this,’ she started, ‘First I see a corpse in the Louvre, by the Mona Lisa. A gruesome ritual murder. The police suspect you, an obscure professor. You flee, through the Tuilleries, then across the river.’

‘Into the trees?’

‘Murders in churches, arcane symbols and codes, Opus Dei, Swiss bankers, split-second escapes, powerful sects …’

‘Powerful sex?’

She paused. ‘I see a mysterious redhead at your side.’

‘Powerful sex?’

Her eyes found his. ‘I see a major motion picture.’

‘No,’ he shook his head earnestly. ‘Not now. I must master the art of narration in the best and simplest way. Lean hard narrative prose.’

She rolled her eyes, sunburned eyes. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so …’

‘I write terrific stuff here, guapa,’ he said, writing that down. ‘True sentences. Not the words above the urinal.’

‘Don’t call me guapa, Papa.’

‘Drop the Papa, guapa.’

‘Whatever,’ she sighed and turned to the ball again. ‘Try this, loser Americain. An old fisherman loves baseball. He catches a big fish, but sharks eat it.’

He slapped her hard across the ear. It was a good ear, sunburned and confident. And just like that, the old man and the seer disappeared.

To celebrate his win, Davis said he was “toying with the idea of growing a beard and fishing Lake Michigan for marlin.”

Disguises adopted by Sherlock Holmes:

• “Captain Basil” (“The Adventure of Black Peter”)
• “a common loafer” (“The Beryl Coronet”)
• a rakish young plumber named Escott (“Charles Augustus Milverton”)
• a venerable Italian priest (“The Final Problem”)
• an elderly, deformed bibliophile (“The Empty House”)
• a French ouvrier (“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”)
• a workman looking for a job, described as “an old sporting man” (“The Mazarin Stone”)
• an old woman (“The Mazarin Stone”)
• a “drunken-looking groom” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)
• an “amiable and simple-minded” Nonconformist clergyman (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)
• a sailor (The Sign of the Four)
• an asthmatic old master mariner (The Sign of the Four)
• a doddering opium smoker (“The Man With the Twisted Lip”)
• Mr. Harris, an accountant (“The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”)
• a registration agent (“The Crooked Man”)
• a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson (“The Empty House”)
• an Irish-American spy named Altamont (“His Last Bow”)

In 1895 the Brooklyn Chess Club sent young Harry Nelson Pillsbury to England to compete in the great tournament at Hastings. He took first prize but never matched this early success and died in 1906. “Nobody can understand this sudden flash of greatness,” wrote New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg. “A twenty-two-year-old unknown licked the cream of Europe’s experts, trouncing such formidable masters as Lasker, Tarrasch, Tchigorin, Gunsberg and Mieses.” Schonberg suggested that the mystery is easily solved if the victor at Hastings was not Pillsbury but “the finest analytical mind in Europe, the mind of one who had genius, infinite capacity for concentration, and a brilliant insight into chess. Suppose that it was Sherlock Holmes, the master of disguise, who impersonated Pillsbury at Hastings, letting Pillsbury, on his own after that, sink to his normal level.”

(From The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 1975, and The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2007.)