romancing the Stone

or, "Any regrets, Negretto?"

'The Mazarin Stone' isn't so much an entry in the Holmes canon as a great big monster truck ploughing its way through established precepts of the Great Game. Dorothy Sayers famously said you have to play that Game with all the straight-faced solemnity of a cricket match at Lord's but taking this story on its own terms as a 'Watsonian record' is impossible - its actual effect is that of an out and out comedy.

Nothing about it makes sense. Nothing about it fits with established canon. From the sudden appearance of a bow window at 221b, and a 'magic door' connecting it to Holmes' bedroom (??), to the the very first appearance of Billy the page, introduced to us by Watson's familiar "You don't change, either" as if he's an old stalwart, it's all of a muddle. And although there is a precedent for a story narrated in the third person ('His Last Bow') at least that one had the characteristic touch - this appears as if written by a bunch of monkeys with a typewriter and a half-eaten copy of the Strand. And as for Holmes dogging the Count's steps disguised as an old woman...! Even the dialogue is a lame back and forth joke-fest. And never, at any point, do either Holmes or Watson really sound like their characteristic selves.

Of course there's a 'real' reason for all this, a safe escape route for 'Doylians' not available to strict 'Sherlockians' - its origins as a short one-act stage play 'The Crown Diamond'.

As Lancelyn Green writes, "Wether 'The Crown Diamond' preceded [MAZA] or was a dramatization of that story is not known, though the play is popularly believed to have come first."

We admire Green's objectivity but really, can there be any doubt? The oddities in the dialogue, the single location (221b's sitting room), the physically strange adjustments to 221b itself, all plainly point to the story's origin as the typescript to a play. Robbed of Watson as a narrator we have characters rather chummily providing exposition and exchanging badinage in just the way actors have to do on the stage. One must project to the back of the theatre after all!

Lancelyn Green's book 'The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes' presents that typescript in full, and unlike MAZA it contains a piece of pure stage gimmickry, the safe alarm which turns out the lights and flashes up a 'DON'T TOUCH' sign. This weird device (to enable Holmes' substituting himself for his wax dummy) makes sense on the stage, but would rather complicate the play if copied over in written story form - and indeed was so visual (and 'obvious') to the play's intended audience that no explanation was really required for its use in the plot, with Holmes merely saying:

"The device is obvious but effective; lights off for a moment and the rest is common sense."

*

The 'problems' of the final run of Holmes stories, published as 'The Casebook', are well-known, and numerous - to the extent that some critics have frankly doubted their provenance. One question I've always had is just why Doyle felt the need to recycle his one-act play in the first place? Was he really that short of ideas? ('The Three Garridebs' is basically 'The Red-Headed League' with Americans, so the answer to that might be 'yes'). Did no-one at the Strand dare to raise an editorial finger? MAZA as it stands is a daft, jape-like story totally unlike anything else in the rest of the Holmes canon.

The 'Game' players can try to make sense of it all they wish but any way you look at it, it's a puzzler!