The Final Page of Baker Street

by Daniel D Victor

“I need to let my thoughts evolve,” Billy said. “Maybe they’ll take me in a new direction. I’ve got to put all this rotten reality behind. Terrence Leonard and Elaine Sterne tore me up inside. Maybe writing fiction is the answer. I remember reading Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper when I was at Dulwich. Those mixed identities spoke to me even then. I am both English and American at the same time: two personalities in the same human being. Mark Twain himself embodied this duality; after all, he was both Sam Clemens and Mark Twain. I have no doubt that he could have written my story as well. He understood. I’m willing to wager that the freer society in America will suit me better than the rigid code it has taken so many centuries to petrify in England. Even language is affected. Modern English is decaying here; it’s become too formal, too rigid. What’s more, with all our linguistic pretensions, very few of us - present company excepted, of course - even talk ‘good grammar’.”

  Billy chuckled at his own solecism.

  “It’s as if all that British formalism in language can do is to produce a criticism of form and manner. In America, I expect more unrestricted opportunities.”

  Holmes pulled on his pipe. “I am pleased to see how certain you are in your decision,” he said. “That should make your leave-taking easier.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Not even the beastly news of the Titanic can thwart me. I have already vowed to pay my uncle every pound I’ve borrowed from him. Plus interest. And, as I’m sure Dr. Watson has told you, I’ll be sending for my mother once I find a home in the States. She deserves nothing less for all she’s done in raising me.”

  Still close to his mother, I remember thinking. But all that I said was, “There is indeed much to praise in the wisdom of older women.” Who could forget all those years ago when Billy’s mother would not be put off by Holmes’ initial refusal to help find her lost boy?

  Billy held up his glass of port.“To older women,” he said.

  Holmes and I joined him in the salute: “To older women.” And we all drank heartily.

  “Where do you plan to settle then?” Holmes asked.

  Billy shrugged. “Who knows? New York? I’ll be arriving there. Chicago? Nebraska? I spent my early years in the Midwest. My mother told me I was conceived in Wyoming. Maybe that’s why I remember liking those wide-open spaces. To be sure, there was always the chance you’d step in a puddle of tobacco that had been spat on one of the wooden walkways, or be haunted by a dead body that had come floating down a muddy river.” He smiled. “You see, I was just a child, but I haven’t forgotten.”

  Billy paused as if to reformulate his future. “Then again,” he said, “maybe I’ll travel farther west. To San Francisco. I’m open to anything. Maybe even Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles?” I scoffed. “After London?”

  “Sure,” he said. “One city’s no worse than any other. Cities are all full of themselves - and empty at the same time.”

  “To cities,” Holmes said, holding up his glass, “full of mean streets and crimes waiting to be solved.”

  “Mean streets,” Billy echoed, “I like that.”

  And the three of us clinked glasses.

  “Just one last thing,” Billy said. “You’ve got to believe me: whatever I end up doing - whatever kind of work I get myself into - one way or another, sooner or later - I’m going to make public what happened to Sylvia Leonard. You can bloody well count on it. I still have my notes. I’m not going to forget. Even if I have to cloak the facts in fiction, I will tell the true story to the world.”

  “To Truth,” Holmes said.

  “To Truth,” we echoed and clinked glasses again, each of us aware that this was the last drink the three of us would ever have together.

  It took but a few minutes for Billy and me to offer our farewells to Holmes and Mrs. Hudson. Then we traced our journey back to Eastbourne and finally to London.

  We agreed to separate at Waterloo - I, heading to my home in Queen Anne Street; Billy, to his mother’s in Forest Hill. Yet once we returned to London, despite the cool wind blowing at our backs and the shrieks of train whistles punctuating our unspoken thoughts, we stood together for many minutes in the darkness of the deserted railway platform.

  At last, the silence between us began to nag. Looking for something - anything - to say, I noted the starless sky barely visible beyond the concourse roof. “Shakespeare calls it ‘husbandry in heaven’,” I said mindlessly.

  “The French call it ‘noir’,” he replied.

  Then we could delay no longer, and we clasped hands for the last time. As I looked into his deep and defiant eyes, I couldn’t help noting the metamorphosis: I may well have journeyed to Sussex earlier that day with the very British “Billy the Page”, but it was every bit the American Raymond Chandler to whom I was now bidding this final long good-bye.

  THE END

  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 Wa
r 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.”

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