Two men grapple at the very edge of a narrow mountain path above a roaring waterfall; one has an arm flung up, and a hat tumbles into the spray. Rock walls rise on either side, ferns cling to the ledge, and the artist's signature and the date 1893 are at lower left. Sidney Paget drew it for Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem" in The Strand Magazine of December 1893, where it ran as the issue's frontispiece under the caption "The Death of Sherlock Holmes." It shows the struggle Watson can only reconstruct from the evidence: Holmes and Professor Moriarty reeling over the Reichenbach Falls, locked in each other's arms. It was one of nine Paget drawings for the story, and that month Doyle wrote "Killed Holmes" in his diary. The picture served again as the frontispiece of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in 1894.

It was Paget, not Doyle, who gave Holmes his deerstalker: Doyle wrote only of a close-fitting cloth cap and an ear-flapped traveling cap. Paget's original, in pen and ink and wash heightened with white, is one of only about thirty Holmes originals known to survive, and it was offered at Sotheby's in New York in 2024. The story first appeared in The Strand Magazine in December 1893.