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Nicholas Meyer's THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, published in 1974, is one of the more famous Sherlock Holmes spinoff novels. Since then, Meyer has written five more: THE WEST END HORROR (1976), THE CANARY TRAINER (1993), THE PECULIAR PROTOCOLS (2019), and now, THE PHARAOH'S CURSE. While not the most prolific of Sherlockians, Meyer deploys a language not unlike Doyle's with ease and humor. His Sherlock is ascerbic and his Watson employs description both retentively technical and decadent, much like the original. He doesn't dwell on the men's relationship, just as Doyle doesn't. He keeps things rooted firmly in Watson and Holmes's lost world--but he does so in order to show how that world has, for better or (frequently) worse, built ours. This is particularly true of THE PECULIAR PROTOCOLS, with its investigation into the origins of modern anti-Semitic misinformation, and of his newest installment, THE RETURN OF THE PHARAOH.
In THE RETURN OF THE PHARAOH, Watson's second wife, Juliet, has contracted a pernicious case of tuberculosis. Hoping that a warmer climate will arrest the progress of the disease--he wisely hopes for no cure--he takes her to Cairo. There, he finds himself mixed up in the mysterious disappearance of an English aristocrat whose Brazilian wife has enlisted Holmes's help. Watson needs to convince Juliet that Holmes doesn't control him utterly, so he doesn't reveal that Holmes is in Egypt with them, trying to crack the case. Holmes, meanwhile, masquerades in another of his ingenious disguises, this time as an antiquarian named Arbuthnot.
The trail of the disappeared traveler leads to the home of one Fatima, a belly-dancer who in one of the colonials' favorite cafes specializes in fulfilling Orientalist fantasies. She's not what she seems, and in her duality intimates how far apart modern Egyptian society is from the Western imperialists', archaeologists', and tourists' ideas of it. Meanwhile, Watson and "Arbuthnot" find themselves on a train on a collision course with disaster and attract the attention of historical archaeologist Howard Carter, whom the reader knows will soon encounter the tomb of King Tut.
At one point, Holmes questions the ruthless Western grave-robbing that constitutes "Egyptology," asking his fellow European if they'd want to see their grandfathers' bodies exhibited in museums. He asks how long the dead must be dead before they lose their humanity, or if all that matters is whether they are European or not. These are great questions, to which the entire novel builds. Well-paced, riveting, and told in Meyer's characteristically captivating "Sherlockian" language, supposedly ripped from a manuscript of Watson's provided to a homebound Meyer during the pandemic by a Japanese correspondent, THE RETURN OF THE PHARAOH is something more than the "Mummy" pastiche its title suggests. At the same time, it has very little original to say about the problem of imperialist robbery of indigenous sacred things, which has infused the mystery genre at least since Wilkie Collins's THE MOONSTONE back in 1889. If you liked the previous Meyer adventures, you'll enjoy this one. It just doesn't dig quite as deeply as he usually does.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, December 2021
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