The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols
Page 21
In 1993, a Russian court labeled the documents “an anti-Semitic forgery.”
In 1999, the French newspaper L’Express “definitively” identified the propagandist hack Mathieu Golovinsky as the author of the Protocols. Others have attributed them to Sergius Nilus, and still others to Pavel Krushenev.
In 2000, the Protocols were published in Louisiana. They appeared in Lebanon the same year.
In 2001, they turned up in San Diego, California.
In 2002, Arab TV broadcast the series Knight Without a Horse, derived from the Protocols. Egyptian state TV praised the series, stating the Protocols were a reflection of Israel’s policy.
In 2018, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin obliquely invoked the Protocols, suggesting “Jews” were behind “meddling” in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work, talent, and time of many people helped make this book. Credit must always go first to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, those quixotic adventurers whose perils and characters continue to delight millions of readers around the world. Minus Holmes and Watson, the world is without form and void.
In writing The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, I found inspiration and information in many books about the year 1905, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in particular. I am indebted to The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a graphic novel by the late Will Eisner, and to Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, by Professor Steven J. Zipperstein. I returned again and again to Photographs for The Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii; his pictures must be seen to be believed (and even then, it’s tough—they look like outtakes from Dr. Zhivago, but they’re not).
For Edwardian period detail and European geopolitics, The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman, proved indispensable, and for the Orient Express, Shirley Sherwood’s beautiful and comprehensive history of that remarkable train was a delight. I hope train buffs will forgive my rearranging a few details and adding one carriage that never existed.
For Sherlockiana, the list is endless, but I consulted Sherlock Holmes’s London, by Tsukasa Kobayashi, Akane Higashiyama, and Masaharu Uemura, as well as Michael Harrison’s classic Holmes guides (In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, etc.) and Good Old Index, compiled by Thomas W. Ross.
I have played fast and loose and mushed around several dates during the year 1905. I hope the Bloomsbury crowd and 1905 buffs will forgive me. And Alfred Hitchcock, for his chef d’ouevre, The Lady Vanishes, to which I helped myself.
Lastly, I must thank the many friends who, while doubtless having better things to do, nonetheless stopped to read—and in many cases reread—the novel’s various iterations, after which they were generous with criticisms and suggestions from which I eagerly benefited. These folks include but are not limited to Gerry Abrams, Tom Barad, John Collee, Barbara Fisher, Leslie Fram, Alan Gasmer, Cole Haddon, Steven-Charles Jaffe, Keith Kahla, Susan Kinsolving, William Kinsolving, Les Klinger, Gary Lucchesi, Juliana Maio, Constance Meyer, Dylan Meyer, Madeline Meyer, Paula Namer, Michael Phillips, Greg Prickman (who turns out to be real), Terry Rioux, David Robb, Ron Roose, David Shaw, Charlotte Sheedy, Roger Spottiswoode, Tatiana Spottiswoode, and Robert Wallace.
To all of them, my profound gratitude.
ALSO BY NICHOLAS MEYER
FICTION
From the Memoirs of John H. Watson:
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
The West End Horror
The Canary Trainer
Target Practice
Black Orchid (with Barry Jay Kaplan)
Confessions of a Homing Pigeon
NONFICTION
The Love Story Story
The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOHN HAMISH WATSON was born in England in 1847. After obtaining his medical degree from the University of London Medical School in 1878, he enrolled in the course at Netley for Army surgeons, after which he was attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers and sent to India. He was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand during the Second Afghan War in 1880, after which he returned to England with nine months’ veteran’s pension. In January the following year, he met Sherlock Holmes, who was looking for someone to share his lodgings. Watson found his niche, chronicling sixty cases of his detective friend. He resumed his practice of medicine, was married twice, and died in England in 1940.
NICHOLAS MEYER is the “editor” of three previous Sherlock Holmes adventures—The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The West End Horror, and The Canary Trainer. A screenwriter and film director, he is responsible for The Day After and Time After Time, as well as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, among many others. A native of New York City, he lives in Santa Monica, California. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
A Word of Explanation
PART ONE: ENGLAND
1. A Reunion
2. Lost in Translation
3. Taradiddles Galore
4. Combustible
5. Cain and Abel
6. Mr. and Mrs. Walling
PART TWO: RUSSIA
7. Okhrana
8. Tea
9. Target Practice
10. Unforeseen
11. Budavari Siklo
12. Journey’s End
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Nicholas Meyer
About the Authors
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
THE ADVENTURE OF THE PECULIAR PROTOCOLS. Copyright © 2019 by Nicholas Meyer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: Sherlock Holmes © Larry Rostant; buildings © Lyn Randle/Trevillion Images; woman © Lee Avison/Arcangel Images; texture © donatas1205/Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-22895-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-23711-8 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250237118
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: October 2019
* This would appear to be Watson’s mysterious second marriage.
* During the years of the Great Hiatus, Holmes claimed to have visited Lhasa, which the British captured in 1904.
* Watson appears to have married the sister of the literary critic Edward Garnett, whose wife, Constance, was the first English translator of Tolstoy et al.
* The Diogenes was the original headquarters of what became the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The SIS was formalized as MI-6 in 1920 (the year the old club was razed) and its offices relocated near Piccadilly Circus. It was henceforth familiarly dubbed “the Circus” by those who toiled there.
** This is as
it appears in Watson’s original ms.
* Holmes must have owned one of the first editions of this invaluable reference.
* This refers to cricket, a game beyond the comprehension of Americans.
** So far as I know, this is the only reference to Martha Hudson’s brother.
* Lord Beaconsfield, aka Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Queen Victoria liked to call him “Dizzy.”
* In A Study in Scarlet, Watson characterizes Holmes’s knowledge of politics as “feeble.”
* Six years earlier, during the Boer War, a then twenty-five-year-old Winston Churchill had made a daring prison break, whose successful outcome he had cleverly parlayed into a parliamentary career, while Watson, by contrast, badly wounded at the Battle of Maiwand during the Second Afghan War (1880), was invalided out of the service with a mere nine months’ soldier’s pension.
* Cassel was to become the grandfather of Edwina Ashley, who, as Lady Mountbatten, was the last vicereine of the Raj and as such enjoyed a passionate love affair with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
* In July 1904 in Edlach, a village in Reichenau an der Rax.
* Things seem to have been a lot more casual back then regarding top-secret stuff. 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.
* For details of Brownlow Sr.’s disappearance, the reader is advised to consult an earlier Holmes case, “The West End Horror.”
* Highgate Cemetery, also a nature preserve in North London, is, among other things, the final resting place of Karl Marx.
* Turgenev visited Oxford in 1879.
* Conrad? First name? Surname? Not clear.
* These notes in the same hand I found on a different sheet of paper slid at this point between the pages of the diary. I’m not sure this is where Watson intended them to go, or even if he inserted them here, but I hesitate to move them elsewhere.
* Louis Napoleon, an unscrupulous adventurer with luxurious tastes, was the self-styled nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who in 1851 undertook a coup d’etat, proclaiming himself Napoleon III. Defeated by Prussia, he fell from power in 1870.
* The mutiny appears to have been prompted by maggot-ridden rations.
* Diathesis = a preexisting medical condition.
* After the death in 1939 of one of the principals involved, Watson chronicled the case, which he labeled “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.”
* In 1949, Professor Chaim Weizmann became the first president of Israel.
* Graustark, like Ruritania or Lilliput, is one of those fictitious countries where novelists are pleased to indulge all manner of over-the-top costumes and customs. Napoleon III and his court definitely fall into such comic-operetta territory.
* The following year, 1906, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was formally exonerated and reinstated with full rank in the French army.
* As the result of the slaughter and its ensuing notoriety, Kishinev changed its name to Chisinau.
* Richard D’Oyly Carte, who built the Savoy Hotel and adjacent opera house of the same name.
* In England, civilian surgeons are typically titled Mr., not Dr.
* Mycroft was prescient. Holmes would eventually spend two years in America, working undercover for his brother in the run-up to World War I.
* Those details may be found in the aforementioned “The West End Horror.”
* That would be Irene Adler, referred to by Holmes as “the” woman in the case Watson dubbed “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
* The book, published in 1908, was titled Russia’s Message.
* Watson, I believe, is noting what he heard phonetically. I think Walling was referring to W. E. B. Du Bois, American civil rights activist and author.
** The NAACP was founded in the New York apartment of William English Walling and his wife, Anna Strunsky, in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois was among the founders.
*** Yasnaya Polyana today is a museum.
* It was not until 1964 that the University of Glasgow developed a test of human hair to detect the presence of excess arsenic in the body, suggesting, among other possibilities, the poisoning of Napoleon on St. Helena.
* The “business car” (car number 3557) was short-lived, being discontinued in 1908. The staff, originally male, was quickly changed to female typists, who appeared more amenable when summoned at odd hours.
* The route of the fabled train varied over the years. Some versions later went to Constantinople, aka Istanbul, while others finished up in Athens.
* Holy cow. Where are those missing pages??
* An ecclesiastical title in the Greek Orthodox Church. A metropolitan typically ranks above an archbishop and below a patriarch.
** Holmes’s violin was allegedly a Stradivarius. Watson, whose judgment in such matters is questionable, deemed the detective an accomplished player.
* Consumption or tuberculosis.
* In his 1925 epic, Battleship Potemkin, director Sergei Eisenstein staged the slaughter on the unending steps, one of the most famous sequences in all cinema.
* Miss.
* Watson accounted Holmes a master of this Japanese mode of self-defense, introduced in England in 1899 by E. W. Barton-Wright.
* The French translation of the Protocols from the Russian has subsequently been attributed to one Mathieu Golovinsky, a hack propagandist living in Paris, in the pay of the Okhrana.
** Carbon or “carbonic” paper was first invented around 1806, but its use was not fully popularized until the advent of the typewriter. Places such as rural Russia were unlikely to have any in 1905.
* This sentence appears to have been added later.
* Watson, the diarist, appears to have been unaware of this pun.
* If the Russian is speaking truthfully, he attended the same university as Holmes. Though they appear roughly the same age, it would be too improbable to discover they were classmates.
* Sergius Yulyevich Witte (1849–1915) became Russia’s prime minister in 1905 and designed Russia’s first constitution. He was loathed by the Okhrana.
* The funicular opened in 1870 and was in continuous operation until bombed by the Allies in World War II. It was restored after the war and continues to function.
* Women in England did not get the vote until 1918; in the United States they got it in 1920.