I guess no Sherlock Holmes fan is ever too old to learn something new. In advance of the May 2023 meeting of The Parallel Case of St. Louis, I have just finished reading “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” for probably only the second or third time in my life. For whatever reason, this particular story has never really been on my Sherlockian radar. So as not to usurp the lively discussion that I hope will occur at our meeting, I will refrain from any restatement of the plot. Instead, I will mention the two looming factors that I am sure all of you are already more than familiar with. The first is that the story is one of only two Holmes adventures written in third person, the second being “His Last Bow.” The other factor is that the entire story takes place in one small corner of Holmes’s rooms at 221B Baker Street.
I found myself curious as to why, and this is when I realized that I have not amassed nearly as much Sherlockian trivia as I sometimes like to think. As it turns out, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” was adapted from a stage play, hence the one-room setting. The play, titled The Crown Diamond, was first performed in May of 1921, and "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" was published in October of that same year. There is general agreement that both the play and the short story are set in the summer of 1903. That, however, is where most of the agreement stops, as opinions differ wildly as to whether the play was written just a few months before the story was published, or whether there was instead a gap of many years between the two works. This argument is further complicated by the fact that, in the play, the villain is Colonel Sebastian Moran, the deadly big game hunter who falls into Holmes’s trap in “The Adventure of the Empty House," rather than Count Negretto Sylvius, Sherlock’s adversary in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.”
For me, the temptation to dive into the timeline here was simply irresistible. “The Adventure of the Empty House" is one of 13 stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The story was published in both England and America in 1903, but the adventure detailed therein is set nine years earlier, in 1894. As every Sherlockian knows, Moran is bested by Holmes in that story, unwittingly playing the part of the tiger lured to his doom, rather than the role of hunter that he thinks he is playing. He is then led off by Lestrade and his men and his fate is in the hands of the court. Holmes seems relatively confident that the second most dangerous man in London will trouble the world no more. Whatever the court may have decided in terms of Moran’s sentence, he was not put to death, as Holmes refers to him as still among the living in “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client." That means Moran was still above ground in September of 1902, even though he was probably not a free man. While pondering his enemy list at the end of his career, Holmes once again refers to Moran in “His Last Bow," and once again Moran is still alive, at least according to Holmes. That places Moran on our side of the grass as late as 1914 or so, even though “His Last Bow” was not published until three years later.
If we take the long view, we can assume that Doyle was telling his readers that Moran remained alive until at least 1917, just four short years before The Crown Diamond was first performed in 1921. That year would have marked the 27th anniversary of Moran’s arrest in “The Adventure of the Empty House." If we accept the rather lengthy biography that Doyle provides for Moran, he was born in 1840. That means he was already 54 years old when he attempted to murder Holmes, and he would have been 81 when the play was released in 1921. In fairness, he would only have been 63 in 1903, the year in which both the play and the short story are set. Still, two factors must be considered here. The first is that our villain wasn’t getting any younger. That second is that, even if we arrest the aging process for the infamous Moran, his scant mention in the years since 1894 would have made him an unlikely choice for the antagonist in a play written as late as 1921.
All of this is, of course, only my perspective. However, I feel that the timeline works very strongly against the notion of the play and the short story being written within months of one another, given that Moran was the villain in the stage version. I think it far more likely that the play was written shortly after “The Adventure of the Empty House," when Moran’s character would have been far fresher in the minds of Doyle’s readers. There are still a few hiccups in my theory, the primary one being that the play is still set nine years after Moran’s arrest in the empty house across from 221B Baker Street. But after all, it is the stage we are talking about here, so we must allow for some poetic license where the canonical timeline is concerned. So I leave it to all of you. Are we dealing with a renamed, 63-year-old Moran in “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone," or are the two works thought to be mere months apart simply because of the proximity in their respective release dates? You have until May 13th to make up your minds😊
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