The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Kyle Freeman Page 0,16

example, the story most at odds with all the facts about Holmes and Watson that Conan Doyle had established over nearly forty years, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” It was an adaptation of his earlier unpro duced play about Holmes, The Crown Diamond. When polls of various Holmes Societies are taken about the relative merit of the stories, it regularly places last. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. First, it’s one of only three stories in which neither Holmes nor Watson is the narrator. A third-person narrator works for many kinds of fiction, but not for these stories, which depend so much on their realism that many people thought Sherlock Holmes was alive, and societies now devoted to him self-consciously maintain that whimsical illusion. A narrator like the one in “The Mazarin Stone” accentuates the fictional quality of the story, most unwelcome to many Holmes admirers.

In addition, the story is a rehash of several plot elements that had previously appeared in the Saga. Watson reminds us that the decoy bust of Holmes, in case we’ve forgotten, appeared earlier in “The Empty House”: “We used something of the sort once before,” he says. There, it was used to fool Colonel Sebastian Moran, “the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced,” who carried a new weapon, the air-gun. In “The Mazarin Stone” the bust fools Sam Merton, about whom Holmes says, “Possibly you have heard of his reputation as a shooter of big game.” Sam, as Holmes refers to him several times (another un-Holmesian trait), has just bought an air-gun. Then at the story’s conclusion, Holmes slips the jewel into the pocket of Lord Cantlemere. This plot element of putting a stolen item under a client’s very nose for him to find was used in “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” and again in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

This repetition of plot elements wouldn’t be so suspicious in itself. After all, in many of the stories since The Return, Conan Doyle had recycled plots. “The Mazarin Stone,” however, is also full of details inconsistent with all the other tales. Early in the story we hear of a waiting room and a second exit in the apartment at 221B Baker Street, things Conan Doyle had neglected to mention before. The choice of the name “Negretto Sylvius”—the Italian word for “black” and Latin for “woods”—happens to be the name of a rival magazine (Blackwood’s) that once accepted a submission by Conan Doyle but then never published it. This was not the sort of witty wordplay that Conan Doyle engaged in. The way Holmes talks in this story doesn’t sound at all like the dignified figure we’ve come to know over the previous fifty stories. He’s become a kind of jokester right out of the music halls. And when Holmes sends Watson to contact someone at Scotland Yard, he tells him to see Youghal, as if we’re supposed to know who he is, yet it’s a name we’ve never heard before.

In addition to all this, the plot is perhaps the weakest of all the Holmes stories. It depends on a number of accidents, rather than ingenious deductions or a carefully laid trap into which the criminal inevitably falls. Why, for instance, would any crooks who had stolen a world-famous gem worth a hundred thousand pounds bring it with them to the apartment of Sherlock Holmes, whose address was surely well known among members of the underworld? How could any but the dimmest of bulbs have mistaken one of those early gramophones for a real violin in the next room? Or have failed to notice Holmes exchanging places with the wax bust of himself in the same room? Or attempt to exchange the jewel in Holmes’s apartment, even if he were playing the violin in the next room? The whole thing is preposterous. We might say about this story what Samuel Johnson once said to a man who asked his opinion about a book the man had written: “Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

To give one more example, consider “The Adventure of the Three Gables.” There Holmes taunts a servant, whom he calls by her first name (“Oh, Susan! Language!” and “Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff”), two things a gentleman never does, and Holmes is every inch a gentleman. To make matters worse, he sarcastically refers to her as “the