The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols by Nicholas Meyer

Published by Minotaur Books on October 15, 2019

In 1905, just after Sherlock Holmes’ 50th birthday, Sherlock’s brother Mycroft gives him several pages copied from a document. The document is the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purported to discuss a Jewish plot to subvert Christendom. Russian scholars revealed the document’s fraudulent nature in the 1920s, well after the British government, via Mycroft, asked Sherlock to take a look at it.

The sister-in-law of Watson’s wife is fluent in French and Russian. She translates the document from French, observing its similarity to a document produced 30 years earlier. With the help of Sherlock’s deductive reasoning, they conclude that key differences in the two documents can be attributed to the original’s translation from French to Russian and back to French.

That should be enough to discredit the document, but Sherlock nonetheless sets off for Russia, Watson in tow, on a mission of ill-defined purpose. Sherlock apparently wants to find the document’s creator and induce a confession that the document is fraudulent.

Nicholas Meyer introduces actual people from history into his Sherlock novels (Freud most memorably in The Seven Percent Solution), and he does so here by making NAACP co-founder Anna Strunsky Walling a character. With Walling’s help, Sherlock finds the publisher of the Protocols, then gets himself into hot water that endangers Walling’s life. Such action as the novel offers unfolds near the end as Sherlock and Watson share a perilous moment with Anna on a funicular in Hungary.

Compared to The Seven Percent Solution, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocol is disappointing. The novel is constrained by history, so there is little that Sherlock can do to change the public perception that the Protocols were genuine. The novel’s greater disappointment lies in the absence of significant detection. Sherlock’s deductive skills, apart from an occasional “elementary” followed by an obvious observation, play almost no role in the story. The novel has the advantage of brevity; any longer and I would have condemned it as boring.

Perhaps Meyer wrote the novel to make a point about the dusty Protocols, a document that is occasionally resurrected by anti-Semites of the far right despite being discredited for nearly a century. If so, an essay would have done the job. As a Sherlock Holmes story, the novel falls flat. It is always good to see Sherlock and Watson and Meyer’s prose is lucid, but the lackluster story is unworthy of Conon Doyle’s iconic creation.

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