The Mazarin Stone: Through the Mazarin Looking-Glass

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Canon Story: The Mazarin Stone
Rating: G
Author's Note: Among its many irregularities, this story presents some difficulty for those trying to recreate the floorplan of 221b. Most notably, the location of Holmes's bedroom.

“I don’t understand, Holmes.”
“Watson, you’re being exceedingly tiresome. From the beginning, Count Sylvius—“
“No, this! All the curtains! And your bedroom has moved! And the two street-facing windows have become one large bow window. Really, it’s all quite mad.”
“Watson, answer me this.”
“What?!”
“Why is a raven like a writing desk? Oh, it’s six. Time for tea!”

Comments

[scfrankles.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's just perfect ^____^ Poor Watson's bemusement - and that last line from Holmes ^__^

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

It's like waking up in a dream. Everything's the same, but somehow NOT.

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

A case of Holmes Through The Looking Glass.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Precisely.

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

Simpson's yesterday and Simpson's tomorrow, but never Simpson's today.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Hee, hee. That's a brilliant line!

[debriswoman]

And thus ACD published his own AU...

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Very true. That seems to be the undercurrent of the later stories of canon.

[sanguinity]

I LOVE Case-book for exactly that reason: it screams of ACD relinquishing his last fuck about Holmes, and writing nothing but AUs and common fanfic tropes.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he was tired and it shows. Holmes, shmolmes, MOAR FAIRIES!!

[sanguinity]

Hah! I read a claim on tumblr once that ACD was SO CONSISTENT in his description of Baker Street that one could draw the floorplan of the place. I should have laughed and moved on, instead of spending the next hour looking up references to cite chapter and verse at them.

[okapi1895.livejournal.com]

You, no doubt, know better than I, but my understanding is that The Mazarin Stone is the outlier and that otherwise it is pretty consistent (or at least not contradictory), but to include this story in the mix, you have to allow for some significant changes in where Holmes's bedroom is and doors.

In an AU of my own life, I make a doll-house version of 221b and then a model train based on Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. And then, of course, in a horror version of my own AU, I fall into them and Things Go Horribly Wrong.

[sanguinity]

You give my memory too much credit! But it seems to me that MUSG puts Holmes' bedroom on level with the sitting room (because of the way the box of old cases is dragged), while either STUD or SIGN has Holmes' room upstairs from the sitting room? But either way, MAZA is definitely the distinct outlier, with its apparent secret passages and back exits from the bedrooms and whatnot.

I hope there's also a Narnia/Oz-esque version of that AU, in which you fall in and have Wonderful Adventures.