Editor’s Afterword

For readers seeking more background on the two major figures featured in Dr. Watson’s manuscript, I offer the following suggestions: The cases involving Sherlock Holmes that are most relevant to The Final Page of Baker Street are “The Adventure of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.” Both are easily found in comprehensive collections of Watson’s work. I would also encourage readers to peruse two articles by G.B. Newton: “Concerning the Authorship of ‘The Mazarin Stone’” and “Billy the Page.” As Watson implies, it was Newton’s pioneering efforts that suggested the true authorship of “The Mazarin Stone.” Both of Newton’s essays appear in The Sherlock Holmes Journal, the former in the Spring 1959 edition, the latter in Summer 1955.

As far as Raymond Chandler is concerned, readers will discover many references in Watson’s account of Chandler’s early years that made their ways in various forms into Chandler’s own writings. The town of Marlow (later Marlowe) and the name Steynwood (Sternwood) are but two examples. Less obvious are fundamental events in Chandler’s life that for whatever the reason found expression in his fiction. The nude model that so scarred his adolescence reappears in the guise of Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. The tantalizing pendant worn by Mrs. Sterne suggests the Brasher Doubloon in The High Window. Lord Steynwood’s home, Idyllic Vale, obviously gave rise to the Idle Valley of The Long Goodbye. Even the compositional advice provided to the young Chandler by Dr. Watson is echoed in Chandler’s own list of literary rules, “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story.” But the most significant detail is young Chandler’s vow to tell the true story of Terrence Leonard even if required to disguise the tale in fiction. It may have taken Chandler more than forty years to fulfill his pledge; but faithful to his word and character, he published The Long Goodbye in 1954, and in its complementary plot arcs involving Terry Lennox and Eileen Ward, we recognize the origins of the actual stories involving Terrence Leonard and Elaine Sterne. Thanks to the benefits of hindsight, we can now also better trace the evolution of Chandler’s aesthetics, how the righteous themes of his early romantic poetry and cynical criticism could evolve through his exposure to detective work at Baker Street into the hardboiled tone of his much later fiction.

For further reading about Chandler, I recommend the aforementioned The Long Embrace by Judith Freeman, The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane (a former professor of mine at UC Berkeley), Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney, and the recently published Raymond Chandler: A Life by Tom Williams. Be advised that all four books were published before the appearance of Watson’s manuscript and thus make no reference to it. “A College Boy: Raymond Chandler at Dulwich College, 1900 to 1905,” a booklet written by Calista M. Lucy, The Keeper of the Archives at Dulwich, provides brief but fascinating information and photographs of Chandler’s early years in England, and Chandler Before Marlowe, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, contains all of Chandler’s early short pieces cited by Watson. For contemporaneous background on the Boer War, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Great Boer War offers significant resonance.

The best introduction to the mature Raymond Chandler, of course, is his written works (see, for example, the two volumes of novels published by The Library of America and his complete short stories, which appear in Collected Stories published by Everyman’s Library). There is obviously much that can be learned about Chandler’s views of the world from reading his fiction. But only by studying such works in connection with Watson’s newly found text can we fully appreciate Chandler’s maturation. Watson’s account of the early life of Billy the Page reveals many of the social and psychological forces that helped form the writer Billy was to become. The boy in London, who had trouble composing an account of a missing diamond, evolved into one of the most accomplished narrators of murder and mayhem in American literary history. Thanks to Dr. Watson, we now know why.

One final point of interest: In 1903 Charlie Chaplin made his first appearance on the legitimate stage. It should be noted that, featured in William Gillette’s production of Sherlock Holmes, the young Chaplin played the role of “Billy the Pageboy.”