The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols
By Nicholas Meyer
Minotaur Books, 2019

Nicholas Meyer, the great director behind movies like Time After Time and one-half the good “Star Trek” movies, also has a prominent place in the pantheon of Sherlock Holmes pastiche-writers, having written not only 1993’s The Canary Trainer, 1976’s The West End Horror, and most famously, 1974’s The Seven-Percent Solution, one of the best-selling and best-known Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels ever written, whose popularity was magnified a thousandfold when it was adapted by Meyer and director Herbert Ross into the 1976 movie of the same title. 

The movie is justly regarded as a terrific Sherlock Holmes novel, despite the fact two of its three main roles are drastically, almost hilariously miscast: Nicol Williamson plays a jittery, hiccuping Holmes who’s entirely unbelievable as a sleuth of any kind, and Robert Duvall turns in a performance as a doltish Dr. John Watson that’s a close cousin to the job done by Nigel Bruce. Alan Arkin’s performance as Sigmund Freud is stellar, but it wouldn’t be enough to save the movie if it weren’t for Meyer’s jauntily energetic scripting. 

That same energy, the perfect combination of narrative momentum and nerdish wonkery, has always animated Meyer’s Holmes pastiche fiction, and it’s on full display in the latest example, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. Since the book’s setting is 1905, history buffs will quickly guess which ‘protocols’ are involved: an agent of the British Secret Service is found dead in the Thames bearing pages from the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and since the British Secret Service has been in any way mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes novel, fans know it won’t be more than a few pages before they get a different Holmes altogether: Mycroft, Sherlock’s corpulent older brother, who works for the British government, is sometimes purported by Sherlock to be the British government, and whose deductive powers, Watson points out, are formidable - only to get a helpful correction from Sherlock:

“Superior powers, you tactfully refrain from saying. Ah, but you forget, my dear doctor, how incurably lazy Mycroft can be. Idleness is his métier. Id he is allowed to remain in his chair, a vast thinking machine, cross-indexing data and sifting through alternatives, my brother is in his element … But if it involves any form of exertion, any physical activity, then no, absolutely no.” 

Mycroft is at first interested in getting his brother to determine just exactly what these Protocols are, where they come from, whether or not they are what they seem to be, the secret plannings of a Jewish cabal to dominate the world. The more Sherlock uncovers (including with the help of famed translator Constance Garnett, who turns out to be Watson’s sister-in-law!), the more determined he is to get to the core of what these “protocols” are, eventually convincing Mycroft to send him (and Watson, of course) to Russia in an increasingly complicated investigation. Long before Sherlock reaches the heart of the Protocols, Mycroft is worried that any investigation, regardless of outcome, will only strengthen the very forces of evil that such an investigation was designed to thwart. 

Meyer knows exactly how to do this kind of pastiche, right down to the book’s chirpy footnotes (“Things seem to have been a lot more casual back then regarding top-secret stuff,” one such footnote comments. “Or were they? Today government officials are always taking home restricted documents, using the wrong email server, or leaking like a sieve. Maybe it hasn’t changed at all”). As readers, we feel a queasy seep of alarm when Watson early on confesses to the Protocols’ coercive sway on his own thinking about the Jews of London. And likewise through Watson we see Holmes’ world in wonderful detail - like the grand old Reading Room of the British Museum, for instance:

The high-domed chamber with its sky-blue ceiling panels, more reminiscent of heaven than St. Paul’s Basilica, larger than Rome’s Pantheon but imagined along the same lines, was clearly designed to stupefy any visitor. The vast, vaulted space emitted an echoing, respectful stillness as I entered the following morning. Innumerable readers and researchers were distributed among its concentric rings of desks, each boasting its own green-shaded lamp, the only sound in the place being an occasional sibilance of whispers, the shuffling of papers, or the faint scratching of pens making notes.

The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols is superb Holmes pastiche fiction, even though the core subject matter in this case can’t help but end up being maddening. Trust this author to let that happen rather than step in to soften it artificially.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.