Nicholas Meyer's latest Sherlock Holmes novel feels less like a Detective novel and more like spy/political thriller, but I am impressed by his ability to still craft a full-length Holmes novel at more-or-less the same length as the novels by the characters' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Very few authors penning these "pastiche" adventures are able to accomplish this feat; the results are often a 320-page "brick" or longer, depending on the format size of the font.
He's also light on gimmicks. There's a lot of footnotes & self-aware framing sequence business in which Meyer inserts himself as a character, cobbling together a manuscript based upon pages of notes chronicling an unknown adventure within a battered notebook purportedly belonging by Dr. Watson, though all of Meyer's Holmes pastiches follow the same rules: each book is based on some newly-discovered material, which Meyer sets about to make presentable.
Protocols is Meyer's fourth Holmes novel. His first, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, is his most-successful and best-known effort; it was adapted into a successful film starring Nicol Williamson, Robert Duvall and Alan Arkin. It told an alternate history of Sherlock Holmes seeking help from Sigmund Freud to eliminate his drug addiction; his casual use of cocaine (referenced several times in the original stories) had made him drug-addled and corrupted his memories of a past childhood tragedy: his mother was caught having an affair with Holmes' mathematics tutor, Professor Moriarty, and in a jealous rage, Holmes' father killed her, while Moriarty snuck out like a thief in the night...and young Sherlock Holmes - who was only a little boy at the time - saw it all. The appeal came from Meyer's witty efforts to psychoanalyze Sherlock Holmes by teaming him up with the most-famous analyst of all, who needed to be a better detective than Holmes in order to get to the root of the problem.
My personal favorite of Meyer's Holmes novels is The Canary Trainer, which Holmes narrates himself (something Doyle attempted in two of his short stories: "The Blanched Soldier" and "The Lion's Mane") and attempts to retell The Phantom of The Opera with Irene Adler as the diva-damsal and Holmes as the hero. There's no puzzle here, either, but it's a lot of fun.
"Protocols" has fun moments, but it is weighed down by the fact that this is basically about Holmes' encounter with real-life evil and realizing that his best efforts won't lead to a happy ending. We're warned early on that this is a story of failure, so we're reading this book for the air of maturity that we wouldn't get from tacky Sherlock Holmes stories where he's fighting Dracula or Martians..and I think that's what inspired Meyer to write it.
A recurring element of Meyer's Holmes novels is he will feature historical figures in key supporting roles. The one who gets the most to do is civil rights activist Anna Strunsky-Walling, who is reimagined by Meyer as an adventuresome woman in the same mold as "The woman", Irene Adler, but her pictures indicate her to be more of a scholarly-type:
Maybe Meyer fancies her; the picture doesn't quite match his prose; in my mind, as I read all the scenes with her teaming up with Holmes & Watson in Russia, I kept picturing actress Emmy Rossum, with red hair and a twinkle in her eyes:
Yeah, that's more like it.
So, all in all, not bad; more a fact-finding mission than a puzzle, more Dan Brown than Arthur Conan Doyle, but entertaining and well done. Meyer's got another book coming out this year - I'll check it out.
Sherlock Holmes will return in..
