77. The Crown Diamond and The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (1921)

Alfred Gilbert's illustration for The Strand Magazine, October 1921.

This episode, we bring you two gems of a sort: Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes play 'The Crown Diamond' and its short story equivalent ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’ (both 1921).

You can read the play here and the story here.

Listen to the episode here:

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Synopsis of the short story

Following his departure from Baker Street, Dr Watson, although busy with his medical practice, decides to call upon his old friend, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’s page, Billy, informs the doctor that the over-worked detective is actually asleep in his room, although curiously there is a life-size wax dummy of his old friend positioned by the sitting room window. In the midst of this odd scenario, Holmes appears to explain that he is investigating a baffling and perilous case involving the disappearance of one of the crown jewels, the famed Mazarin stone. At this point, Holmes’s principal suspect, Count Negretto Silvius, calls at Baker Street and Watson is hastily dispatched to fetch Inspector Youghal from Scotland Yard. In the meantime, Holmes proposes to detain the elegant and dangerous jewel thief himself… 

Writing and Publication History

‘The Crown Diamond: Or, An Evening with Sherlock Holmes’ was first staged in May 1921 but most likely had its origins almost a decade earlier. According to Jon Lellenberg, in late 1912 ACD told his mother he had written a “one-act Sherlock”. It was not staged and, as Andrew Lycett suggested, it most likely languished, half-forgotten, in a drawer. 

Nine years later, the Stoll Films starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes were appearing in British cinemas. ACD, returning from a spiritualist tour of Australia, must have been struck by their popularity. It seems likely that, with Sir Oswald Stoll, he hit upon a means of promotion that involved dusting off the play for performance in Stoll’s network of theatre. 

On 18 April 1921, ACD’s agent signed a contract with the Daniel Mayer Company, a theatrical agency who managed the production. The play premiered at the Bristol Hippodrome – a Stoll venue – on 2 May and played twice daily for week before it transferred to the London Coliseum and thereafter embarked on a fourteen month provincial tour. 

The short story ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’ – originally titled ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Diamond’ - appeared in the Strand Magazine in October 1921, a month after Conan Doyle appeared as guest of honour at the Stoll Convention Dinner.

The short story was included in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. The play was printed in small run by Baskerrette Press of New York (a BSI imprint) in 1958, and later included in The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes in 1983. 

The MS of the play survives and has been digitised by the Toronto Public Library. It was rediscovered in 1947 in a cardboard hat-box that ACD had deposited at a bank in Crowborough in 1922. The story MS is in private hands.

Authorship

‘The Mazarin Stone’ is one of only two stories in the Canon written in the third person (the other being ‘His Last Bow’). Those who play “The Game” have suggested that it was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and not Dr John Watson. D. Martin Dakin was an advocate of the claim in A Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1972), although earlier champions include Christopher Morley who suggested the story was written by Mrs Watson (nee Morstan), with tongue firmly in cheek. The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1974) by Nicholas Meyer opens with Watson disavowing ‘The Mazarin Stone’ and other stories which he claims were written by another hand. 

On a more serious point, pre-existence of ‘The Crown Diamond’ has often been overlooked, largely as it was out of print and relatively unknown for so long. Intended as a curtain-raiser, it was actually staged as part of a variety show. The tropes and characteristics of the music hall performance transferred into the short story, which ACD authored with apparently little care.

The Play - Production

Dennis Neilson-Terry

The copyright performance took place at the Bristol Hippodrome on 2 May 1921, and the play ran twice a day for a week. It then moved to the Coliseum on 16 May for a week. The subsequent provincial tour for three months taking in the major provincial towns, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, etc. It was back in London on 30 August, then off to the Bristol for another leg of the tour, mostly playing Stoll theatres. The play toured for 14 months, with only a few weeks’ break and concluded around August/Sept 1922.

The play was generally well received, and there was praise for Dennis Neilson-Terry (nephew of Ellen Terry) as Holmes, although The Westminster Gazette (Thursday 19 May 1921) felt he was too young. Nevertheless, the review shows how the perception of Sherlock Holmes as a middle-aged man had been cemented by the 1920s, perhaps in large part thanks to William Gillette. Neilson-Terry’s Watson fared less well: Rex Vernon Taylor was arrested in June 1921 and convicted of petty larceny for which he received a fine and a suspended sentence. 

The principal differences between the play and story are threefold: the Colonel Sebastian Moran of the play becomes Count Negretto Silvius in the story; the Crown Diamond becomes the Mazarin Stone; and the short story adds a coda, probably to extend the word count.

Continuity 

The Baker Street set is re-established but with changes reflecting the stage mechanics of the play. There is now a second exit from the suite of rooms, a door that connects Holmes’s bedroom to the bay window, and a curtain across the window that conceals a life-size wax dummy of Holmes.

It is often thought that Billy was created by Gillette for the play, but a page character (unnamed) existed in some of the earlier stories. Famously, Gillette’s Billy was played by the young Charlie Chaplin in one of his first stage roles. Here, Billy might be a tidied up version of Wiggins, and takes much of the Dr Watson role at the beginning of the story.

Negretto Silvius retains much the same CV as Moran, albeit he shot lions in Algeria and not tigers in Africa. 

The story re-establishes Holmes’s facility for disguises, which have been a popular aspect of adaptations including, notably, the Stoll-Norwood films. ‘Mazarin’ references three such disguises of which that of an elderly woman is the most interesting, fooling Silvius up close and apparently Watson too at a previously undisclosed moment… 

Holmes at times feels like a pastiche of the familiar character. The line ‘I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix’ seems to betray a lack of understanding, or an over-simplification, of Holmes’s more rounded personality. ACD reverted to a more rounded view of the Great Detective hereafter. 

Illustration by G. Dutriac

Silvius and Gruner?

Much of the Holmes-Silvius encounter is a re-hash of previous scenes, notably the Morairty-Holmes confrontation in Baker Street from ‘The Final Problem’. But it may be that ‘The Mazarin Stone’ also anticipates what is to come. Holmes tells Silvius of a book he keeps in which he has recorded the full details of Silvius’s crimes – much as Baron Gruner collects women in his Lust Diary. Like Gruner, Silvius is a European nobleman – half-Italian in this case. While the similarities end there, there is a sense that some elements of Silvius are revisited more successfully in ‘The Illustrious Client’ (1924).

Gramophone

The gramophone trick is one that doesn’t stand up to a great deal of thought, but it is clear that Silvius, and his monstrous side-kick Sam Merton, are not very intelligent. A gramophone from the early 1900s would have been hissy, tinny and sound unlike a person playing in another room. Yet, the device is one that ACD had used twice before: in ‘The Voice of Science’ (1892) and ‘The Japanned Box’ (1898).

Lord Cantlemere

The story ends with a coda added most likely to reach the minimum word count. The scene is a combination of the encounter with the politicians in ‘The Second Stain’ and Holmes’s ribbing of the Duke of Holdernesse in ‘The Priory School’. It nevertheless shows Holmes’s sense of humour, in sharp contrast to the earlier ‘brain/appendix’ line.

The importance of Stoll for the Case-Book

Watson (Hurbert Willis) and Holmes (Eille Norwood)

In September 1921, ACD was guest of honour at the Stoll Convention Dinner for distributors and renters of their films. In it, he gave an interesting speech that indicated a growing affection once again for Sherlock Holmes. We suspect that Stoll’s success had rather more influence on the origins of The Case-Book than has previously been supposed. ACD had previous on this, having brought back Holmes for The Return after the success of the Gillette play and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We begin our exploration of Conan Doyle’s breakthrough novel, Micah Clarke. 

Acknowledgements 

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Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 

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