He would become known as the "Napoleon of Crime", a label Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would borrow when creating the character Professor Moriarty, whom Doyle loosely based on Worth.
He played "with chilling authority" in the words of writer David Stuart Davies, Professor Moriarty in The Baker Street Boys (1982), and "with great panache" Inspector Lestrade in the Granada Television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes).
He is mentioned as being the great-grandson of The Devil Doctor (because of the Doctor's creator, Sax Rohmer) and fights against Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Paradise and Dean Moriarty (who is the great-grandson of Manchu's rival and Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty).
Professor Moriarty, fictional character and the archenemy of the detective Sherlock Holmes
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The English Opening is used by Professor Moriarty in the film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows as he and Holmes discuss their competing plans over a game of chess.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson cross the pass on their way to Meiringen, where Sherlock Holmes has his famous meeting with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
Like Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes books, Parsloe-Parsloe is the chief villain in Lord Emsworth's life, having first sustained a bitter rivalry in the raising of pumpkins for the Shrewsbury Show.
This novel also features many other fictional characters from Arthur Conan Doyle works, as Fred Porlock and Parker (two Moriarty Gang Members), Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow, Rudyard Kipling’s Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and an ancestor of C.C. Beck’s Doctor Sivana (misspelled “Sivane” in the novel), among others.
George Zucco played Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), while Henry Daniell would portray him in the subsequent Holmes film The Woman in Green (1945).
The story concerns a 1901 confrontation between Holmes and his old arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty; Moriarty's brilliant daughter Bella proves to be an even more determined (and beautiful) foe than her father.
Jealous of his more famous brother, Sigerson teams up with a Scotland Yard records clerk (Feldman) and a would-be opera singer (Kahn) to solve a case that Sherlock is unable to attend to, putting him up against both Moriarty (McKern) and a blackmailer (DeLuise).