Got to thinking about this trope which has become pretty much ubiquitous in adventure stories nowadays (like most of the stories told in movies) , but doesn’t exist in any pre modern story AFAIK. It basically involves this:
A hero spends most of story striving against a single “bad guy”. Older stories have “baddies” (e.g. monsters or someone with whom the hero has a beef) but they aren’t spending the whole story fighting the schemes of one dude.
The bad guy has a plan to, if not literally destroy or take over the world, do something that (it’s understood) will be calamitous for the whole world (kidnap the president, steal the crown jewels, etc).
The hero doesn’t overcome the bad guy (and foil their plan) until the end of the story, if he meets him earlier in the story the hero doesn’t come off best.
The antagonists the hero meets, and usually defeats, earlier in the story are working for the bad guy
So obviously super hero stories and James Bond helped cement this trope in popular culture. But I don’t think either one invented it. Who did? Maybe Conan Doyle with Dr Moriarty (though I haven’t actually read the original stories featuring Dr Moriarty. Do they conform to that trope or only the later films and TV based in them?)
Flash Gordon is an earlier one. I don’t feel like Moriarty is a great fit.
Bast or Bastet is an Egyptian Goddess that protects the Sun and her Father, Ra, who drives it every night from the serpent Apep who tries to devour the sun. In at least some stories Apep has lesser monsters they fight through.
Apep is described as a giant serpent or even dragon. If he succeeded in destroying/eating the sun, all life would perish on earth.
That seems like classic “hero (,or heroine) slays monster” trope. Less of a villain and his minions deal.
True. Though that is also comic book hero (it not technically a superhero as that’s a marvel trade mark) and Buck Rogers is older, though I don’t know if he featured that trope.
I dunno looking up the plot synopsis it seems a fairly close fit:
Holmes reveals to Watson he has been tracking Moriarty and his organisation for months, who are responsible for most of the crimes orchestrated in London. As Holmes is close to snaring them all and delivering them to the police, Moriarty visits Holmes at 221B Baker Street earlier that day and warns him to withdraw from his pursuit of justice against him. Holmes admits that Moriarty could thwart his plans given his great mind that could rival his, and plans to flee to Europe while the police capture Moriarty and his gang.
I guess the single great “take over the world” or equivalent crime is missing but it has all the other components. I don’t know if later stories have that.
If Professor (not Doctor, sorry prof ) Moriarty doesn’t count I think that is probably the front runner. Hopefully something at least a little less racist beats it out though
Moriarty wasn’t the Bond Villain that Sherlock (or other adaptations) would have you believe, since Sherlock Holmes stories were all nice, short, self-contained vignettes.
For this trope to work the villain has to have the power to threaten/destroy the world. I think that dates the concept to the first science fiction novels. Maybe Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World, or one of Wells’s stories such as The World Set Free.
As I mention in the OP, I recon doing something that is acknowledged in the book to be terrible for “the world” (even if it would actually just be fairly noteworthy for people in the US or UK, like stealing the crown jewels or kidnapping the president) would count.
I’d not heard of these they would count but it doesn’t sound like (based on Wikipedia synopsis) that Robur has much of an evil plan beyond having a cool vehicle? (Or even the first novel, be evil at all)
The biggest problem with Moriarty, I think, is that he’s not even so much as mentioned until very late into the stories. The character was created because Conan Doyle was tired of Holmes and wanted to kill him off (he got better), and needed a worthy adversary for him to be able to manage that. So in that story, Holmes tells us that Moriarty is the mastermind behind most of the great crime in London, but he wasn’t even the first such mastermind (that would be the villain in “The Red-Headed League”), nor did all of Holmes’ cases involve Great Crimes (he picked his cases based on how interesting they were, not on any petty considerations like monetary value).
The Poirot story collection The Big Four didn’t come out until 1927, but it has it all - FOUR supercriminal masterminds working together, thousands of minions, and a plot to rule the world.
Featuring a French scientist who is a woman, a Jewish-American businessman, a sinister and hard-to-figure-out (shall we say) Chinese master criminal, and another guy (I’ve read it). The recent tv adaptation tried to finesse the various issues with the book in a clever way, if I recall correctly (I may be misremembering)
The scientist, the businessman and the elderly Chinese fellow were innocent - the fourth guy was framing them to cover his own plots
It’s funny, we’ve seen that one, but what mainly stuck in my memory was that they dropped the character of Countess Vera Rossakoff, who was entertaining in an Irene Adler way.
I would add another vote for Fu Manchu. He was everything that we imagine a supervillain to be. He had spectacular plans to take over the Western world, various sinister henchmen, seemingly limitless funds, an endless supply of bizarre death traps for Smith and Petrie to blunder into, even a beautiful seductress associate who ultimately betrays him because she’s fallen for one of the heroes.
Unlike Moriarty, who we never really saw in action–as mentioned, he was created specifically to kill Holmes off, and we don’t meet him or even hear of him until after Holmes has brought down his organization–Fu Manchu was an active threat throughout his (many) novels. I sometimes think that Sax Rohmer took the basic idea of Moriarty and thought, what if we actually saw him when he was still in business? Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie do bear more than a passing resemblance to Holmes and Watson. Fu Manchu is what Moriarty is in the popular imagination, if not in reality. With huge heaps of Yellow Peril racism added, of course.
) Moriarty doesn’t count I think that is probably the front runner. Hopefully something at least a little less racist beats it out though