Books: High on Holmes

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION by NICHOLAS MEYER 253 pages. E.P. Dutton. $6.95.

Half a century after his final bow, Sherlock Holmes remains the best-known character in English fiction. With the possible exception of Hamlet and Don Quixote, he may be the most recognizable creation in all literature. The man in the deerstalker cap is the subject of a full-length biography (Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, by William Baring-Gould), the center of a club (the Baker Street Irregulars) and a palpable presence wherever police congregate, from Scotland Yard to Watergate. Less than two months ago, Samuel Rosenberg probed the sources of Sir Conan Doyle’s imagination in Naked Is the Best Disguise (TIME, June 24).

Now Novelist Nicholas Meyer (The Love Story Story, Target Practice) has seen fit to bring back Holmes himself in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, coyly subtitled, “Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.” The publisher thought enough of the book’s potential popularity to order a first printing of 25,000 copies. In brief, Sherlock lives. Why?

To Ellery Queen, it is the very inimitability of the master—hardly a Holmesian exists who has not mentally attempted to compose a further adventure of the world’s first consulting detective. To Critic Edmund Wilson, it is “the wit and fairy-tale poetry of hansom cabs, gloomy London lodgings and lonely country estates.” Meyer views the basis of Holmes’ immortality simply as the story of a friendship: the intellectual rationalist and his immortal physician-confidant, a man of infinite joust, the stolid, substantial, late great doctor… Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud?

Rudimentary, says Meyer. Holmes was mainlining cocaine (cf. The Sign of the Four); Freud, at the same period, had effected some dramatic drug cures. What could be more logical than a meeting of the two most original minds of the Victorian epoch? The notion is at once revolutionary and traditional. Two decades ago, in A Study in Terror, Ellery Queen affected to find a fugitive manuscript of Dr. John H. Watson, M.D. It told of Holmes’ pursuit of one John the Harlot Killer, also known as Jack the Ripper. For The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Meyer “uncovers” another manuscript, detailing the adventures of the stately Holmes of England in his struggle against the temptations of “nose candy.” He also trots out all the old Baker Street regulars: Toby the relentless mongrel; the world’s longest-suffering landlady, Mrs. Hudson; Myrcroft, Sherlock’s corpulent elder brother; and Dr. James Moriarty—in a new role as innocent bystander.

No Choice. Careering about Vienna, Holmes and his cadre become involved with that cornerstone of Victoriana, the Amnesiac Lady in Distress, played by the breathtaking Norma Osborne Slater. When she is kidnaped by Warmonger Baron Von Leinsdorf—who plans to blow up Europe—Holmes has no choice. With his faithful M.D.s, Watson and Freud, the sleuth engages in a transcontinental chase scene, holding the fate of Western civilization in the calm of his hand.

Unhappily, a few technical errors tend to glare in this splendid postscript to the Holmes legend. The detective would surely have known how to pronounce Dostoyevsky; Freud sends Plattdeutsch telegrams (“Services were to the great English detective gratis offered”) but speaks in person like a cultivated Anglophile. Moreover, Watson tends to shine in this pastiche while Holmes appears rather dim, slow to deduce and loath to act. It may be the result of all that dope.

On the other hand, the mental lethargy may have a more elementary cause. After Doyle had killed off his creation at the Reichenbach Falls, public demand forced a resurrection. For years thereafter, Sir Arthur delighted in quoting a Cornish boatman who mused: “I think, sir, when Holmes fell over that cliff he may not have killed himself. But he was never quite the same man afterwards.”