Joining me today is multiformat storyteller Nicholas Meyer, whose latest novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing, is out now. There’s a lot to chew on in this new adventure featuring the famous detective—the concept of art, forgeries, and authenticity is something I’ve always found fascinating—and this would make an excellent cozy read this fall.
Read on for my interview with Nicholas, in which we discuss art, publishing, the author’s voice, and more.
Connect with Nicholas on Instagram, Bluesky, and his website. Grab a copy of Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing from your retailer of choice here.
Welcome, Nicholas! Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing introduces the famous detective to the world of art forgery, as he investigates a missing artist and a slippery art dealer. What themes or ideas—perhaps authenticity, AI, perceived versus actual value—inspired this storyline? How did you research and prepare to write about the historical art world?
I first became interested in forgery during a book tour for my novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution in (I believe), early 1975, when a reporter at the Pittsburgh airport greeted me by asking how it felt to be a successful forger. I was taken aback by this question but realized that night, trying to fall asleep in a strange hotel room, that the man had a point. This inaugurated my interest in forgery and I began reading and collecting books on the subject. Forgery raises a host of bewildering questions of a legal, ethical, aesthetic and cultural nature. E.g., What’s the difference between a forgery and a copy? Answer: something you can’t see—the intention. And so on.
Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing is the product of a lifetime contemplating the questions raised by forgery and its variants. If you can’t see the difference, what is the difference? I realized that over time I’d learned a lot about this stuff and was intrigued to put some of it into a novel.
This is your seventh book featuring Sherlock Holmes, with your first published in 1974. What do you find most important when crafting your own image of Holmes? To what extent do you prioritize emulating Doyle’s voice versus your own?
This is a great question. I’ve come to realize over time that, while my original intention was to replicate Doyle’s Holmes as much as was within my power, the truth is that over time Holmes has become a kind of avatar, in which I can express feelings and ideas of my own through the detective’s mouth. This was largely unconscious and I only became aware of what I was doing over the course of many years. I couldn’t always make Holmes into a version of myself, but within certain self-circumscribed limits, I could make him a semi-mouthpiece.
Doyle himself faced similar temptations and dilemmas. To his credit, for example, while the detective definitely espouses many of Doyle’s convictions, theories and opinions, Doyle never turned Holmes into a proselytizer for spiritualism—Doyle’s own preoccupation. It turns out there are limits for avatars and they apply to me, as well as Doyle.
As a screenwriter and director, you have experience with multiple forms of storytelling. How do your different creative pursuits inform your novel writing? For example, what aspects of filmmaking are most influential on writing prose? (Or, the other way around?)
Movies and novels are different dramatic forms, yet it would be pointless to deny that by this point they have influenced one another. It is impossible for me to write a novel without inevitably infusing it with aspects of my own cinematic sensibility, whether visual or “Aristotelian,” meaning subject to the demands of drama as Aristotle observed them. Film is constrained by limitations (though, thanks to “series,” the narrative possibilities have opened up—War and Peace as a series can delve far more deeply into characters and events than even such six-hour epics as the Russian film version).
Novels are not affected by budgets; films and television are. For a filmmaker who is also a novelist, the process, if not the result, becomes a kind of balancing act; you want your film to be “cinematic” and your novel to be “literature.” These are vague terms but they are a kind of shorthand that I hope makes sense. Inevitably—at least in my case—they cross-fertilize. Novels have cinematic aspects and movies, perhaps to a lesser extent, have been influenced by the possibilities inherent in various formats of the novel, narration, multiple perspectives, etc.
What have you learned over your writing and publishing career? What advice would you offer new writers—about writing, and/or about the business of publishing?
This is a discouraging topic. The Washington Post recently ran an article to the effect that with shortened attention spans, reading books has fallen off something like 40 percent over the last twenty years. I would hate to think that novels are dying, but I’m aware that fewer people say they “find time” to read them. They listen to them or they prefer shorter narrative forms. Curiously in bookstores, I note that many books seem to grow longer and longer. I wonder how this can work! Who finds time to read some of these doorstops, which, by the way, are frequently lacking the input of serious editing? (Another vanishing item—editors are now just deal-makers.)
The advice I give to aspiring writers or filmmakers is the same: Be prepared to put ten years into your attempt. If, at the end of that time, you’ve made no appreciable headway, it may be time to reconsider your aspirations. That said, there are no hard and fast rules. Maybe after eleven instead of ten years, you turn out a bestseller.
Lastly, what’s next on your horizon? How are you celebrating this release, and/or is there anything else you’re working on that you’d like to share?
I believe this will be my last “discovered” Holmes manuscript. Too many and I worry about veering into self-parody. (I’ll run out of Victorian locutions!) I continue to work on television series and the occasional film in another medium that is also reconfiguring itself. First and last, I see myself as a storyteller and I cling to the belief that though the delivery system may evolve, a good story will never go out of fashion.
Thanks so much to Nicholas for the interview. Detectives, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.