![]() While Meyer was convinced he’d produced something worthy of being published, his agents, who declared that “Holmes was passé,” took a hard pass. 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. ![]() Once Meyer learned that Conan Doyle had studied ophthalmology in Vienna for six months, he was convinced he was on to a good idea.īut that idea remained undeveloped for years, until after Meyer had moved to California to try his hand at screenwriting. “His narrative voice was reminiscent of Watson’s, and, at one point, Freud himself described his following the labyrinth 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. That epiphany led Meyer to learn about Freud. “He told me that it’s no more possible to discuss psychology without discussing 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 problems, Meyer piped up: “That sounds like being a detective.” When his father concurred, a light bulb went off in Meyer’s head-he realized that Holmes had always reminded him of his father. Not knowing anything about Freud, Meyer came home and posed that question to his father. 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. Meyer, a voracious reader, “loved The Complete Sherlock Holmes at first read” and began to copy the styles and characters of authors he liked. “I’d dictate these stories about our dog fetching the newspaper and transporting it from the store to our home, and my father would write them down.” Eventually, Bernard Meyer tired of being a stenographer and directed Meyer to write down his own tales. ![]() Meyer grew up in New York City, the son of a psychiatrist, Bernard Meyer, who supported the six-year-old Meyer’s initial attempts at becoming a writer. Its popularity encouraged other writers and publishers, leading to a boom in Sherlock Holmes books that began in the mid-1970s and continues today. The book struck a chord with readers, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks. Meyer, whose fourth Holmes novel, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, is being published by Minotaur in October, told PW that he had originally set out all those years ago to write a “story about Sherlock Holmes, not a Sherlock Holmes story.” In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, he had the inspired idea of having Watson trick a cocaine-addicted Holmes into traveling to Vienna in pursuit of Professor Moriarty, so that his addiction could be treated by Sigmund Freud himself. And Holmes’s status as a firmly ensconced popular culture icon accounts for the publication of dozens of new novels and short stories year after year.īut it wasn’t always so, and many believe that Holmes would not be as present in print as he is today if not for Meyer’s 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Dutton, 1974). and Benedict Cumberbatch alternating their portrayals of superheroes with appearances as Sherlock Holmes, a legion of fans eagerly await the next installments in their respective series. ![]() nuclear weapons policy?Ĭausation is, of course, complicated, but it’s possible to connect the dots from that query to Meyer’s role in Sherlock Holmes being a commercially lucrative property in 2019-and in Ronald Reagan’s shift away from believing that nuclear war could be winnable. Could that question, which 13-year-old Nicholas Meyer was asked in 1959, really have initiated a chain of events that ended up breathing new life into two classic fictional franchises-and even affecting U.S. ![]()
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