WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 81Lenny Picker is a writer living in New York City.Author Profile
father would write them down.” Eventually, Bernard Meyer
tired of being a stenographer and directed Meyer to write down
his own tales. Meyer, a voracious reader, “loved The Complete
Sherlock Holmes at first read” and began to copy the styles and
characters of authors he liked.
Meyer came up with a different way to make creative use of
Holmes after a fellow student asked whether his father followed
Freud’s methods. Not knowing anything about Freud, Meyer
came home and posed that question to his father. “He told me
that it’s no more possible to discuss psychology without dis-
cussing Freud than it is to discuss the discovery of America
without discussing Columbus.” When the older Meyer explained
that his work involved listening to both what his patients said,
and how they said it, in order to find clues
about what was at the heart of their prob-
lems, Meyer piped up: “That sounds like
being a detective.” When his father con-
curred, a light bulb went off in Meyer’s
head—he realized that Holmes had always
reminded him of his father.
That epiphany led Meyer to learn about
Freud. “His narrative voice was reminis-
cent of Watson’s, and, at one point, Freud
himself described his following the laby-
rinth of a patient’s mind as being ‘Sherlock
Holmes-like.’ ” Given that Freud and
Conan Doyle were contemporaries who
had both written about cocaine, Meyer
wondered whether they had known each
other. Once Meyer learned that Conan
Doyle had studied ophthalmology in
Vienna for six months, he was convinced
he was on to a good idea.
But that idea remained undeveloped for
years, until after Meyer had moved to California to try his hand at
screenwriting. The 1973 Writers’ Guild strike left him with a lot
of free time, and friends encouraged him to get going on the
Holmes-Freud novel he’d been talking about. While Meyer was
convinced he’d produced something worthy of being published,
his agents, who declared that “Holmes was passé,” took a hard pass.
Undaunted, Meyer traveled to New York City, and eventually
garnered the attention of Juris Jurjevics. Jurjevics, a future
founder of Soho Press, was at the time Dutton’s editor-in-chief
and became an advocate for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a position
vindicated by its sales; while its original print run was just
25,000, it has sold more than two million copies to date, according
to Meyer’s website. The book’s success led to a 1976 film starring
Alan Arkin, Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave,
and Nicol Williamson. Meyer wrote the screenplay.
Not all Sherlockians embraced Meyer’s depiction of an
addiction-ravaged Holmes, but Meyer felt that Holmes was
all-the-more heroic for detecting crime and seeking justice
despite the burden of his enslavement to the needle. He followed
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution with 1976’s The West End Horror
(Dutton), another bestseller. Meyer considers that book, which
featured Holmes tracking a murderer among a theatrical
world peopled by such historical figures as George Bernard
Shaw and Oscar Wilde, as a more conventional “Sherlock
Holmes story,” rather than one that would lead readers to look
at the character differently. Meyer’s next Holmes novel was
1993’s The Canary Trainer, which pitted the detective against
the Phantom of the Opera.
Why end a 26-year hiatus since The Canary Trainer with this
year’s The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols? “I get a great many
ideas for stories, but most of them stink,” Meyer says. “I’ve always
been fascinated by forgeries and hoaxes, and I found The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion to be one of the most
freaky and disturbing things I’ve ever read.”
Meyer views the Trump era as “an age of
hoaxes,” and the Protocols as retaining their
virulence; they are still cited by anti-Semites
today, and as Meyer’s afterword to his new
book notes, Vladimir Putin invoked them in
2018 to bolster his assertion that “the Jews”
were behind any meddling in the 2016
American presidential elections. The tract
appeared in the early 20th century, contem-
poraneous with when Holmes was sleuthing,
and Meyer wondered—what if Holmes was
asked to investigate the origins of the
Protocols?
The book falls somewhere between the
straight pastiche of The West End Horror
and the envelope-pushing of The Seven-
Per-Cent-Solution, as the Protocols Holmes
must wrestle with ethical challenges
Conan Doyle never posed for him.
But despite playing a critical role in Holmes’s endurance,
Meyer is proudest of something else. In 1983, he directed the
television film The Day After, which graphically portrayed the
aftermath of full-scale nuclear exchanges between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union. Among its more than 100 million viewers
was President Ronald Reagan, who wrote in his memoir, An
American Life, that it changed his mind about nuclear war. That
shift would lead to Reagan’s active engagement with Soviet
Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating with their signing of
the INF Treaty in 1987.
Remember that Meyer was an obscure screenwriter before The
Seven-Per-Cent-Solution’s breakout success opened the doors for
him that led to The Day After. And it was a casual question from
a fellow student that led to Meyer’s developing Solution’s central
concept. As Conan Doyle wrote in the short story “A Case of
Identity,” “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the
mind of man could invent.” ■