By Nicholas Meyer
It is hard for me to remember a world before Holmes. I was eleven when my father presented me with the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. What I do remember, as if it were yesterday, was how I inhaled those 60 stories, the wonder and bewildered happiness with which I consumed the deceptively simple prose of Arthur Conan Doyle.
When I showed an inclination to write, I began my efforts by attempting to imitate the stories I loved. As adolescence overtook me, I forgot about Holmes, but in high school, I was teased, “Your old man’s a shrink, is he a Freudian?” When I asked my father, he demurred. “I listen to what a patient says, how they say it and what they do not say. I look at how they’re dressed, are they punctual, what their body language is. I am in short, searching for clues as to why they are not happy.”
I said, “That sounds like detective work.” He thought about this and agreed. Suddenly I knew who my father had always reminded me of and began wondering how much Holmes’s creator knew about the life and writing of Sigmund Freud. The answers were startling. Both Doyle and Freud were doctors who wrote. Both died in the same city, within nine years of one another. Both knew and wrote about cocaine. Later, I learned that Freud’s favorite bedtime reading were the Sherlock Holmes stories.
These coincidences and connections fermented for over a decade, during which I was trying to make it in the movie business. I moved to Los Angeles and was enjoying some incremental success when, as happens every chance we get, the Writers Guild, of which I was now a member, went on strike and screenwriting was verboten. “Now you can write that Holmes-Freud book you’re always talking about,” my girlfriend said. She was right. Aside from picketing outside the Goldwyn studios three hours a day, I had nothing else to do. I was stunned by the runaway success of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, even more so by the film and my Oscar nomination that followed. It never occurred to me to write another Holmes story but it certainly occurred to my publisher. I was ambivalent about repeating myself but friends and colleagues pointed out that an artist’s calling is an uncertain one. “Think of it as fuck you money,” one advised. Another said, “this would give you a cushion to experiment with other stuff and fail.” Thus, The West End Horror, Holmes two.
After that book came a two decades’ hiatus from Holmes. Time After Time and the Star Trek films followed, but a series of fortuitous events combined to produce a third Holmes volume. A film deal that had taken a year to prepare fell apart and I needed to supplement my income. I was in a London bookstore at the time and chanced upon The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Realizing I’d never read the book (who knew there was a book?), I read the introduction in which the author remarked how curious it was that Holmes had never encountered the phantom, the dates being right, etc.
I stood frozen, the book in my hands, hairs prickling on the back of my neck. Victor Hugo said, there was nothing so irresistible as an idea whose time has arrived. Was this idea occurring to anyone else at this minute? Addressing my financial imperative and succumbing to a gut instinct, The Canary Trainer was an idea that sent me scurrying home to return to Sherlock Holmes for the third time.
There followed another decade or more during which I wrote and directed more films and produced a volume of memoirs.
On one occasion, speaking of my Holmes books, a reporter asked me how it felt to be a successful forger. I had not thought of myself as a forger, but the man had a point. Thus I became interested in the subject of forgery. Once you start learning about forgery, it’s only a matter of time before you come across the biggest, baddest, most vicious forgery of all, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, my fourth Holmes novel, had a ten-year gestation period before I was able to work out how to interweave Sherlock into the sordid history of the Protocols.
The next three books followed in comparatively short order. Once an idea gets its hooks into me, I seem to have no choice but to write it. My agent said to me, “What about Holmes in Egypt?” which was all I needed to produce a gusher. The Return of the Pharaoh is appropriately dedicated to him.
And now we come to my penultimate Holmes. Forty years ago, (it helps writers to have good memories), I had read Barbara Tuchman’s enthralling account of the telegram that catalyzed America’s entry into World War I. Once again, the dates and the fact that Holmes had worked undercover in America as a British agent, enabled an idea that held me in its grip. Holmes six, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, will appear August 27.
As it happens, my publisher asked for a two-book deal. Remembering Dr. Johnson’s dictum that a man is a blockhead who writes for any reason other than money, I accepted, having not the least notion what the second book was to be about. Ideas do not as a rule come easily to me, but, following another of Johnson’s dictums: that nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the knowledge that one is to be hanged, it was mere hours (not years!) before I had figured out Holmes number seven, Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing. If we’ve not blown ourselves to kingdom come by then, stay tuned.
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