A Conversation with Author Nicholas Meyer About Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell

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[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_01]: For many of us, our first foray into the world of the art of detection came as we followed the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes.

[00:00:38] [SPEAKER_01]: Reading the stories of the great detective's adventures with Dr. Watson may have been what turned some of us into lifelong lovers of mysteries, both the fictional and real-life variety.

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_03]: All of these years later, stories of Holmes still have the power to captivate us.

[00:00:54] [SPEAKER_03]: And, of course, new tales continue to be written.

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_01]: One of the best modern writers of Sherlock Holmes stories is Nicholas Meyer.

[00:01:01] [SPEAKER_01]: His first novel about the great detective, The 7% Solution, was published back in 1974 and related the then-unchronicled tale of how Sigmund Freud helped Holmes overcome his addiction to cocaine.

[00:01:14] [SPEAKER_01]: It was later made into a film.

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_01]: Since then, Meyer has continued to periodically revisit Holmes, writing several more engaging tales about the detective.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_03]: Along the way, he has also worked on many terrific movies.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_03]: For instance, he wrote and directed Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, the film that famously killed Mr. Spock.

[00:01:35] [SPEAKER_03]: He also directed The Day After, a television movie that has been cited as changing President Ronald Reagan's mind about nuclear policy.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_01]: And now he is back with another Sherlock Holmes story.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_01]: Though all of them have been wonderful, this new one is probably his best.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_01]: Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell spells out the fascinating and heretofore untold story of a crucial secret mission Holmes and Watson undertook in the United States during the First World War, at a time when America was not yet involved in the conflict.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_03]: We got a chance to talk with Nicholas Meyer about all of this when he visited the area recently.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_03]: He even explained why he considers Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell a work of true crime.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_01]: My name is Anya Kane.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm a journalist.

[00:02:20] [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Kevin Greenlee.

[00:02:21] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm an attorney.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_01]: And this is The Murder Sheet.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_03]: We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews and deep dives into murder cases.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_01]: We're The Murder Sheet.

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_03]: And this is a conversation with author Nicholas Meyer about Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell.

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background and just introduce yourself to the listeners?

[00:03:32] [SPEAKER_02]: My name is Nicholas Meyer and I am a storyteller.

[00:03:37] [SPEAKER_02]: I sometimes tell stories in books and sometimes I tell them on film.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm from New York City.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_02]: I attended the University of Iowa.

[00:03:47] [SPEAKER_02]: My father was a psychoanalyst.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_02]: My mother was a concert pianist.

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Is that enough?

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_02]: That's perfect.

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, good.

[00:03:58] [SPEAKER_03]: So one thing I always find interesting.

[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_03]: I'm a fan of Frank Sinatra and it's very interesting to me to go back and listen to how he recorded the same songs at different stages of his life to see his different interpretation of the lyrics.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_03]: And, of course, your first written, I believe your second published novel was The 7% Solution about Sherlock Holmes.

[00:04:19] [SPEAKER_03]: And now you have another Sherlock Holmes book.

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_02]: 50 years later.

[00:04:22] [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm curious, what are some of the differences in the way you see Holmes now than you did 50 years ago?

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the differences are probably informed by two variables.

[00:04:37] [SPEAKER_02]: One is my age and the other is the age at which I depict Holmes in the two books.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I believe that The 7% Solution takes place in about 1893 or something like that.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell takes place in 1916 through most of 1918.

[00:05:00] [SPEAKER_02]: So he's a much older man.

[00:05:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And so as it happens, am I.

[00:05:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Trying to depict him at a different stage in his life is also informed to a degree by the different stage of my own.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_02]: I think that it's very hard not to identify at this point.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_02]: It's a coincidence, you know, that I'm writing about a guy who is now 66 years old and beginning to feel the tug of gravity, let us say.

[00:05:37] [SPEAKER_02]: The other thing is that in 50 years since I wrote The 7% Solution, the world itself has changed.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's fair to say that all works of art are ineluctably informed by the time and place in which they're created.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_02]: For example, Mozart doesn't just sound like Mozart.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_02]: He also sounds like mid-18th century Middle European music.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Renoir doesn't just look like Renoir.

[00:06:14] [SPEAKER_02]: He also looks like late 19th century French Impressionism.

[00:06:19] [SPEAKER_02]: If I were to show you four movies that are set in the year 1776 and one movie was made in 1924 and one movie was made in 1952 and one movie was made in 1983 and one was made in 2010,

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_02]: I would bet you that within five minutes and five years, you could identify when each of these movies was made.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_02]: The time of their creations will give them away.

[00:06:56] [SPEAKER_02]: This is probably as it should be.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Not much you can do about it, but it does play havoc with forgery because forgeries too are products of the time in which they are created.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_02]: When you look at Van Meegren's Vermeer forgeries, hello, they stink.

[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_02]: They look like Art Deco and you wonder how anybody could have ever been fooled by them.

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And similarly, my own Sherlock Holmes books are also the products of the time, the circumstance, and the person who is doing the forging.

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_02]: They are informed by the politics, the aesthetics, the ideologies of my time rather than Doyle's.

[00:07:44] [SPEAKER_02]: No matter how hard I try to conceal the fact, I will give the game away.

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_03]: That's also interesting because one thing I see in your work is you tell very fun, rollicking stories.

[00:07:59] [SPEAKER_03]: This is a terrifically fun and very enjoyable book, but there's always echoes of the time.

[00:08:06] [SPEAKER_03]: Star Trek 6, fun adventure movie also about the end of the Cold War.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_03]: This book, Telegram from Hell, it feels like there's some echoes of Gaza and stuff in there.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I wrote it before the Gaza catastrophe.

[00:08:21] [SPEAKER_02]: So it would be hard for me to argue that Gaza was on my mind when I was writing the book.

[00:08:28] [SPEAKER_02]: I wrote the book way before any of that happened.

[00:08:32] [SPEAKER_02]: What was on my mind was World War I in which the book takes place and the endless, pointless

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_02]: slaughter of millions, I think it was millions, who died for no reason.

[00:08:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And nothing was really solved except maybe the groundwork for World War II was laid.

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a rather gloomy book.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, you say you find it rollicking.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_02]: There may be rollicking interludes in it, but Holmes is not a happy man at the end of this novel.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Another thing I find interesting about your work is sometimes you also engage even more

[00:09:20] [SPEAKER_03]: directly with politics and the real world, such as in The Day After.

[00:09:25] [SPEAKER_03]: Is it more challenging to engage with it directly or indirectly?

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it depends on the medium.

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_02]: The Day After, I should explain to your listeners, is a movie that I directed but did not write

[00:09:41] [SPEAKER_02]: for television in 1983.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's about a nuclear exchange between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union.

[00:09:51] [SPEAKER_02]: It has the distinction, it has probably a couple of distinctions about being the most watched

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_02]: movie ever made for television.

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_02]: It was over 100 million people in one night.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_02]: It was also shown in the Soviet Union.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And it was the movie that changed Ronald Reagan's mind about a winnable nuclear war.

[00:10:16] [SPEAKER_02]: He came to power believing that there was such a thing as a winnable nuclear war.

[00:10:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And after seeing the movie, which apparently shook him up a lot, as he says in his memoir

[00:10:30] [SPEAKER_02]: and also as Edmund Morris says in his biography, Dutch, because Morris was living in the White

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_02]: House as the official biographer, ultimately it sent Reagan off to Reykjavik, Iceland,

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_02]: to meet with Premier Gorbachev and sign the Intermediate Range Missile Treaty, which is

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_02]: the only treaty that ever resulted in the physical dismantling of nuclear weapons.

[00:11:00] [SPEAKER_02]: That movie, you know, I think you can say it was a political film.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure what that term means anyway.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_02]: But I viewed it, or I came to view it as a kind of public service announcement like Smokey

[00:11:16] [SPEAKER_02]: the Bear, only you can prevent forest fires.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_02]: If you have a nuclear war, this is what it might look like, P.S., on a good day.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's not interested in who started the war.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_02]: It never takes any position on that.

[00:11:34] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, when that war happens, it will probably happen by accident.

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_02]: There have been several close calls that we don't like to think about.

[00:11:45] [SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the real problems about nuclear wars, that we don't like to think about it.

[00:11:49] [SPEAKER_02]: So we hope it doesn't happen.

[00:11:52] [SPEAKER_02]: But hope is not a strategy.

[00:11:54] [SPEAKER_02]: That was sort of the thinking.

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_02]: I think when I began the movie, I had the rather grandiose notion that this was going

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_02]: to unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for re-election.

[00:12:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And then I realized, no, this is the wrong strategy.

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_02]: You don't do any of that.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Just show what a nuclear war is and let the chips fall where they may.

[00:12:16] [SPEAKER_02]: And he went off and signed that.

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_02]: He was going to sign off a lot more too when he was in Regevich with Gorbachev, but he

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_02]: wouldn't give up his Star Wars initiatives, SDI.

[00:12:30] [SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, that's my little contribution.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_01]: LESLIE KENDRICK In terms of Telegram from Hell, so this is

[00:12:38] [SPEAKER_01]: a story about World War I and Sherlock Holmes.

[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm curious, when you're researching historical fiction, obviously a certain amount

[00:12:47] [SPEAKER_01]: of historical research needs to go into that.

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_01]: But you also have to contend with Sherlock Holmes' history and sort of the fictional

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_01]: history of the canon.

[00:12:55] [SPEAKER_01]: How do you go about researching that?

[00:12:58] [SPEAKER_01]: And how sort of seriously do you take sort of his own history?

[00:13:03] [SPEAKER_02]: RONALD REAGAN I try to play by the rules, all the rules.

[00:13:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I should say that I started reading the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was about 11.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_02]: My dad gave me the complete stories.

[00:13:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, they call it an impressionable age.

[00:13:17] [SPEAKER_02]: When you're a kid, those are the things that stay with you.

[00:13:20] [SPEAKER_02]: The first time you see Bambi, you know, you do not forget.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And whether it's movies or art or people or experiences that you have as a kid, they

[00:13:31] [SPEAKER_02]: imprint.

[00:13:32] [SPEAKER_02]: They stay.

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm an arch conservative in this one area, which is Sherlock Holmes.

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want it messed with.

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't like most Sherlock Holmes movies.

[00:13:45] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't like the Basil Rathbone movies.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_02]: I never understood why a genius hangs out with a jerk.

[00:13:54] [SPEAKER_02]: RISA GOLUBOFFA Nigel Bruce?

[00:13:55] [SPEAKER_02]: RONALD REAGAN Yeah, it didn't make any sense to me.

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And that was—why would he want to, you know, the admiration of an unintelligent person?

[00:14:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Holmes is very vain.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think if anything, he wants the admiration of a normal person.

[00:14:13] [SPEAKER_02]: And I never got that Nigel Bruce was the guy who wrote the stories that I was reading.

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[00:15:59] [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm very careful, or I try to be careful about the chronology.

[00:16:05] [SPEAKER_02]: What year?

[00:16:05] [SPEAKER_02]: And there are chronologies and there are at least two annotated Sherlock Holmes stories.

[00:16:11] [SPEAKER_02]: One, you know, 60 years ago by William Baring Gould and the other one more recently by Les

[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Clinger, Leslie Clinger.

[00:16:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And I try to sort of fit it into the chronology that's number one.

[00:16:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Number two has to do with the ancillary, the World War I research.

[00:16:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a big juggling act.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_02]: I read two books.

[00:16:39] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I cite a lot of books at the end.

[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_02]: I read a couple of books with the same title that were written about 60 years apart.

[00:16:48] [SPEAKER_02]: One of them is called The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman, which was published in

[00:16:53] [SPEAKER_02]: around 1950.

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_02]: And the other one was published about four or five years ago by a man, Thomas Boghart,

[00:17:00] [SPEAKER_02]: also called The Zimmerman Telegram.

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_02]: He had access to a lot of declassified information that she didn't.

[00:17:07] [SPEAKER_02]: But his book is very respectful toward her as well.

[00:17:11] [SPEAKER_02]: You get intrigued by something that fits into the Holmesian chronology and then start wondering,

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_02]: would it be possible?

[00:17:20] [SPEAKER_02]: So The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, which is another of my Holmes books, which

[00:17:26] [SPEAKER_02]: is about Holmes versus the protocols of the learned elders of Zion, which is, I guess,

[00:17:35] [SPEAKER_02]: the most famous and vicious hoax of all time, which is it's indestructible.

[00:17:41] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a case that Holmes loses.

[00:17:44] [SPEAKER_02]: But I try to play by the rules.

[00:17:47] [SPEAKER_01]: And then you talked about what might make for a bad Sherlock Holmes story, like having

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_01]: a bumbler like Nigel Bruce sort of inserted in there for sort of needless comedic…

[00:17:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Comic relief.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_01]: I guess 1940s audiences wanted him falling down the stairs and getting his head stuck

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_01]: in a bucket or whatever they were doing.

[00:18:05] [SPEAKER_01]: But I guess, what do you think makes for a really good Sherlock Holmes story?

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's much—that's a very—no one has asked me that question.

[00:18:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Um, the short answer is Arthur Conan Doyle makes for a really good Sherlock Holmes story.

[00:18:23] [SPEAKER_02]: He's the writer and he is inevitably the gold standard.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_02]: What's remarkable about the 60 Holmes stories, 56 short stories and four novellas,

[00:18:34] [SPEAKER_02]: is almost their amazing consistency.

[00:18:38] [SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting because Doyle had rather ambivalent relations with Sherlock Holmes.

[00:18:43] [SPEAKER_02]: He felt he could write a Holmes story in a week and sort of toss them all and toss them off.

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, he takes my mind from better things, meaning his historical novels,

[00:18:58] [SPEAKER_02]: his science fiction.

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And those things, in a way you could argue that many of them are better.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And he certainly poured a lot more effort into them.

[00:19:08] [SPEAKER_02]: He got a lot of details wrong from story to story with Sherlock Holmes.

[00:19:13] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, was Watson wounded in the shoulder or the leg?

[00:19:16] [SPEAKER_02]: And why was the landlady Mrs. Turner at one point?

[00:19:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And all kind of silly stuff.

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_02]: He said, I have never much striven for it, meaning accuracy of detail.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_02]: No doubt have made some serious blunders in consequence.

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_02]: What matter so long as I hold my readers?

[00:19:36] [SPEAKER_02]: But he felt he was sort of being appreciated for the wrong thing.

[00:19:41] [SPEAKER_02]: He wanted his historical novels and his science fiction,

[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_02]: which are certainly worthy of appreciation.

[00:19:47] [SPEAKER_02]: He sort of wrote the original of King Kong.

[00:19:50] [SPEAKER_02]: He sort of wrote the ultimate medieval swashbuckler, The White Company and so forth.

[00:19:56] [SPEAKER_02]: But artists are not always appreciated for what they want to be appreciated.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_02]: To give you another example, Arthur Sullivan,

[00:20:05] [SPEAKER_02]: who the composer who wrote Onward Christian Soldiers,

[00:20:09] [SPEAKER_02]: and he was regarded as the English Mendelssohn.

[00:20:14] [SPEAKER_02]: He was the shining white hope of British music.

[00:20:17] [SPEAKER_02]: But what he's really remembered for are the operas he wrote with Gilbert and Sullivan,

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_02]: which he regarded as sort of fluff.

[00:20:25] [SPEAKER_02]: And if I'm remembered, it's going to be for my relationship with Star Trek.

[00:20:31] [SPEAKER_02]: The only difference between me and Arthur Sullivan is I'm not complaining.

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_02]: If somebody wants to like something that I did because it means something to them,

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to argue with them.

[00:20:45] [SPEAKER_02]: It seems sort of perverse to say, well, you really should read my novel

[00:20:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Confessions of a Homing Pigeon or something.

[00:20:54] [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm more reconciled by their example.

[00:21:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Talking about history and stuff and doing research, I'm curious.

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_03]: You've also read and written many mysteries.

[00:21:07] [SPEAKER_03]: Have you ever had any interest in true crime?

[00:21:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I would argue that the telegram from hell is true crime.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything in the book is true.

[00:21:17] [SPEAKER_02]: I managed to work Sherlock into it.

[00:21:21] [SPEAKER_02]: It's even true that the British agent who got his hands on the telegram went by the code name H.

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_02]: So most of the story is true crime and a whopping crime at that.

[00:21:39] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, unbelievable.

[00:21:40] [SPEAKER_02]: No wonder it's the telegram from hell.

[00:21:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And your listeners should know it's a real telegram.

[00:21:51] [SPEAKER_02]: All stories, I think, all fiction has its origin somewhere in fact.

[00:21:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered the ruins of Troy,

[00:22:04] [SPEAKER_02]: known as sort of the father of archaeology, he was a lot of other things too.

[00:22:09] [SPEAKER_02]: But he came up with the theory or the thesis that myths and legends have their origin

[00:22:16] [SPEAKER_02]: in some kind of fact.

[00:22:19] [SPEAKER_02]: So whether you're talking about Camelot and Knights of the Round Table or Troy,

[00:22:25] [SPEAKER_02]: he said there's something there underneath the myth and whatever.

[00:22:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And if you go looking for it, you may be able to find it.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Moby Dick was a real whale.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Was named Mocha Dick, M-O-C-H-A, Mocha because of his coloring and so forth.

[00:22:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Madame Bovary is based on a real story that Flaubert wrote.

[00:22:52] [SPEAKER_02]: It's hard to come up with something.

[00:22:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And when people say, oh, this is a pastiche, which seems kind of a pejorative term,

[00:23:01] [SPEAKER_02]: but my larger point is that most fiction, not all perhaps, can be traceable to some kind of

[00:23:11] [SPEAKER_02]: precedent.

[00:23:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Something came before it.

[00:23:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Forbidden Planet is clearly inspired by The Tempest.

[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And God knows what The Tempest is inspired by.

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure Romeo and Juliet is inspired by West Side Story.

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_02]: You can even, there's an episode in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's amazing novel,

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_02]: which is a Romeo and Juliet story between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords.

[00:23:41] [SPEAKER_02]: It's sort of a tragedy also, like the Romeo and Juliet story.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_02]: We just, all art, it seems to me, is a history of cut and paste.

[00:23:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody adds to what went before Michael Chabon said, all fiction is fan fiction.

[00:23:58] [SPEAKER_02]: So you add to it.

[00:24:02] [SPEAKER_01]: I will say Tempest was inspired by the wreck of the would-be Jamestown colonists in Bermuda.

[00:24:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Shakespeare was reading the memoirs and language.

[00:24:12] [SPEAKER_01]: So what you're saying is totally spot on.

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_03]: And I think even when people write memoirs and tell stories about their own lives,

[00:24:18] [SPEAKER_03]: they can maybe unintentionally fictionalize it a bit.

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, there's no question.

[00:24:23] [SPEAKER_03]: You tell a story in your memoir about Lytton Des Moines

[00:24:26] [SPEAKER_03]: saying that you directed the death of Spock scene dressed as Sherlock Holmes.

[00:24:32] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_02]: I should explain to your listeners that everybody who is involved with Star Trek,

[00:24:39] [SPEAKER_02]: sooner or later, writes a memoir.

[00:24:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And myself included.

[00:24:45] [SPEAKER_02]: But back in the good old days when there were bookstores,

[00:24:48] [SPEAKER_02]: I would go into the bookstore and I would see the Star Trek memoir of whoever.

[00:24:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And I immediately flipped to the index to see how I come out.

[00:24:56] [SPEAKER_02]: So I was looking at Leonard Nimoy's memoir and I flipped to the thing

[00:25:04] [SPEAKER_02]: and it talks about the day we filmed the death of Spock.

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_02]: He was very upset because I came to the set dressed as Sherlock Holmes.

[00:25:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I've never dressed as Sherlock Holmes in my life.

[00:25:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And being a little superstitious,

[00:25:22] [SPEAKER_02]: I've never even put a Deerstalker hat on my head.

[00:25:25] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know why I've never done it, but I've never done it.

[00:25:28] [SPEAKER_02]: So what was he remembering or misremembering?

[00:25:33] [SPEAKER_02]: What he was misremembering was the day that we filmed the death of Spock,

[00:25:40] [SPEAKER_02]: I was wearing a suit.

[00:25:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Now, why was I wearing a suit?

[00:25:45] [SPEAKER_02]: I was wearing a suit because I had tickets to the opera that night.

[00:25:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And in those days, you put on a suit if you were going to the opera.

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_02]: So I wore a suit because I was leaving from the studio to go downtown.

[00:26:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's what he remembered.

[00:26:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, there was a still photographer on the set as there always was.

[00:26:09] [SPEAKER_02]: You can see pictures of me.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, and this is a sub silliness,

[00:26:16] [SPEAKER_02]: I got cast in a movie because somebody saw one of those still photographs of me in a suit

[00:26:22] [SPEAKER_02]: and thought I looked like, well, they thought I looked like George Raft

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_02]: because my hair was wet from the shower.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_02]: So I got cast in the Mae West story as George Raft.

[00:26:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I had one line and I said it badly.

[00:26:38] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not a good actor, but I got this one thing because they saw me in the suit

[00:26:44] [SPEAKER_02]: thought with my hair slicked back, I look like George Raft.

[00:26:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Go figure.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_01]: LESLIE KENDRICK Nary a deerstalker in sight.

[00:26:53] [SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to ask you, I'm going to read a quick passage from something that you wrote in Crime

[00:26:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Reads.

[00:27:00] [SPEAKER_01]: And so reading about true crime and reading fictional mysteries, they obviously have things

[00:27:06] [SPEAKER_01]: in common, but some pretty different appeals as well.

[00:27:09] [SPEAKER_01]: And so you wrote, detective stories are as many will allow a source of great comfort,

[00:27:14] [SPEAKER_01]: which is strange if you think about it.

[00:27:16] [SPEAKER_01]: After all, detective stories promise death and bloody destruction, serial killers and mayhem,

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_01]: severed body parts with corpses splayed and unnatural angles, skulls fractured by blunt

[00:27:26] [SPEAKER_01]: instruments wielded by a person or persons unknown.

[00:27:30] [SPEAKER_01]: How can this stuff be comforting?

[00:27:32] [SPEAKER_01]: And to repeat your question, how why are we comforted by detective stories and mysteries?

[00:27:37] [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?

[00:27:38] [SPEAKER_02]: RICK I think detective stories deliver the opposite

[00:27:42] [SPEAKER_02]: of what they promise.

[00:27:44] [SPEAKER_02]: I think if we think about life in objective terms, although I won't lay it on anybody

[00:27:51] [SPEAKER_02]: else, when I think about life, life seems to me to be a random, arbitrary proposition

[00:27:59] [SPEAKER_02]: in which things happen sort of for no reason.

[00:28:03] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know why, to take an example that resonates with me, my wife died age 36 of

[00:28:10] [SPEAKER_02]: breast cancer.

[00:28:11] [SPEAKER_02]: What was that about?

[00:28:13] [SPEAKER_02]: With two children and just maybe you can look at the DNA and say why this had to happen.

[00:28:20] [SPEAKER_02]: But a lot of times you're walking down the street and you step into an open manhole cover,

[00:28:25] [SPEAKER_02]: you're struck by a car, you're hit by lightning.

[00:28:27] [SPEAKER_02]: It's all random.

[00:28:29] [SPEAKER_02]: But in detective stories, it's not random.

[00:28:32] [SPEAKER_02]: As the detective always says, it all adds up.

[00:28:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Life suddenly has meaning.

[00:28:40] [SPEAKER_02]: It may appear to be a replication of life.

[00:28:45] [SPEAKER_02]: It may be an uncanny police procedural.

[00:28:48] [SPEAKER_02]: But in most detective literature, it's not random.

[00:28:54] [SPEAKER_02]: It's been, there's a reason for things that happen.

[00:28:58] [SPEAKER_02]: There's the motive.

[00:28:59] [SPEAKER_02]: What is the motive?

[00:29:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And when the crime is solved, presumably life goes back to a state of equilibrium and whoever

[00:29:12] [SPEAKER_02]: survives can get on with their lives.

[00:29:15] [SPEAKER_02]: And so, and I think Aristotle observed that we kind of like drama because it's happening

[00:29:27] [SPEAKER_02]: to somebody else.

[00:29:28] [SPEAKER_02]: And we are, our emotions are purged, as he says, through pity and terror.

[00:29:34] [SPEAKER_02]: So people like to curl up with a good mystery.

[00:29:37] [SPEAKER_02]: It's comfort food.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_02]: You take it to bed with you at night and you read about all this blood-curdling stuff.

[00:29:45] [SPEAKER_02]: But it's not you and it's not without some kind of reasoning behind it.

[00:29:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas for me anyway, I won't put it on anybody else, life seems pretty arbitrary.

[00:30:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, if we're talking and I suddenly keel over from heart failure, it's just random.

[00:30:06] [SPEAKER_02]: It's random.

[00:30:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Later on, you can explain it.

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh yes, he had a ruptured aorta or something.

[00:30:12] [SPEAKER_02]: But at the time, it just seems or a lightning strike.

[00:30:15] [SPEAKER_02]: What is that?

[00:30:17] [SPEAKER_02]: People get struck by lightning on golf courses or in rainstorms.

[00:30:21] [SPEAKER_02]: And is that the workings of an inscrutable providence or is that I don't know what.

[00:30:30] [SPEAKER_01]: Earlier, I asked you what made for a good Sherlock Holmes story.

[00:30:34] [SPEAKER_01]: Now I wanted to ask you, what do you think makes for a good fictional or I guess non-fictional

[00:30:38] [SPEAKER_01]: mystery?

[00:30:40] [SPEAKER_02]: Henry James said that the least demand that you can make of a work of art is that it be

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_02]: interesting.

[00:30:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And most demand that you can make is that it be moving.

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_02]: When I read a story or go to the movies, I want to know what happens next.

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_02]: I want to be involved.

[00:31:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Again, going back to Aristotle, he pointed out that the way drama works,

[00:31:09] [SPEAKER_02]: is that the dramatist asks a question and the audience stays to see the answer to the

[00:31:16] [SPEAKER_02]: question.

[00:31:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Will Hamlet kill the king?

[00:31:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Will Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after?

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_02]: It is the job of the dramatist to work up as much suspense as to the outcome of that

[00:31:32] [SPEAKER_02]: question as possible.

[00:31:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And the process of phrasing that question so the audience understands the question,

[00:31:41] [SPEAKER_02]: what's the setup we call it?

[00:31:44] [SPEAKER_02]: We call that exposition.

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_02]: There's the Montagues and the Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks and they fight but one

[00:31:53] [SPEAKER_02]: of the Jets falls in love with one of the Sharks and how are they going to make it?

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And once Hamlet finally does kill the king, the play is over.

[00:32:04] [SPEAKER_02]: People go home.

[00:32:05] [SPEAKER_02]: So Mysteries is simply, it seems to me, a variation on that idea.

[00:32:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Somebody's dead, whodunit.

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_02]: It always helps to have a body at the beginning.

[00:32:19] [SPEAKER_02]: In Hamlet, the body turns out to be a ghost, which is a nice twist on the body idea.

[00:32:28] [SPEAKER_02]: What's the first detective story?

[00:32:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Probably Oedipus.

[00:32:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Oedipus goes looking for the murderer and in true detective story fashion, everybody

[00:32:39] [SPEAKER_02]: says, if you know what's good for you, stay out of it.

[00:32:43] [SPEAKER_02]: You'll be sorry.

[00:32:45] [SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't stay out of it and he discovers that the murderer he's searching for is himself.

[00:32:53] [SPEAKER_02]: There's an Agatha Christie thriller ending if ever there was one.

[00:32:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe that's a really great detective story and that Sophocles guy kind of nailed it first.

[00:33:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, he didn't make it up.

[00:33:12] [SPEAKER_02]: He was like me.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like Sophocles.

[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_02]: We came to it later and did our own riff on it.

[00:33:20] [SPEAKER_03]: You're talking about other writers and stuff.

[00:33:22] [SPEAKER_03]: I remember in your memoir, you have a line where it's a waste of time to ask people about

[00:33:28] [SPEAKER_03]: who influenced them.

[00:33:29] [SPEAKER_03]: What do you mean by that?

[00:33:32] [SPEAKER_02]: The question of who influenced you, what are your influences, is it's a very interesting

[00:33:38] [SPEAKER_02]: question, but it's a very difficult question to answer because most of the time we are

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_02]: unable to distinguish conscious from unconscious influences.

[00:33:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything influences you in one way or another and half the time you're not even aware of

[00:33:58] [SPEAKER_02]: the moment, the person, or the thing that influenced you.

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_02]: You may like to present yourself as being influenced by something that sounds kind of

[00:34:08] [SPEAKER_02]: cool.

[00:34:09] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I love Marcel Proust and stuff and maybe that's a kind of a highfalutin good

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_02]: thing, but you may also be influenced by the way a friend of yours in third grade laughed.

[00:34:26] [SPEAKER_02]: You may also be influenced by things you're not even aware that you have taken away.

[00:34:33] [SPEAKER_02]: I'll give you an example that occurred to me later.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_02]: At the end of Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, which I wrote and directed, there is a battle

[00:34:47] [SPEAKER_02]: essentially a submarine destroyer battle in the Mutara Nebula.

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_02]: It's the big climax of the film and I remember writing it, I remember filming it, I remember

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_02]: watching it, watching it and watching it.

[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And then it turns out years later I re-watched a movie made in the 1950s called The Enemy

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Below.

[00:35:14] [SPEAKER_02]: The Enemy Below starred Robert Mitchum as a destroyer captain and the German actor Kurt

[00:35:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Juergens as a U-boat captain.

[00:35:23] [SPEAKER_02]: And I thought, holy cow, I remember this movie and I forgot that I remembered it.

[00:35:31] [SPEAKER_02]: But there's absolutely no question in my mind that I incorporated the idea of that movie

[00:35:40] [SPEAKER_02]: into the climax of Star Trek II.

[00:35:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Talk about influences.

[00:35:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but dormant, unconscious.

[00:35:47] [SPEAKER_02]: You forget or you can't identify.

[00:35:51] [SPEAKER_02]: It's an endless...

[00:35:53] [SPEAKER_02]: There's a subject which I never even heard of until, I don't know, 20 years ago called

[00:35:59] [SPEAKER_02]: semiotics.

[00:36:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Semiotics is the study of signs.

[00:36:05] [SPEAKER_02]: What is a sign?

[00:36:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything turns out to be a sign.

[00:36:10] [SPEAKER_02]: The sun coming up is a sign.

[00:36:13] [SPEAKER_02]: A stop sign is a sign.

[00:36:15] [SPEAKER_02]: A person wearing glasses is a sign of...

[00:36:19] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything is a sign of something.

[00:36:21] [SPEAKER_02]: So semiotics and influences are sort of the same.

[00:36:25] [SPEAKER_02]: Everything's an influence.

[00:36:27] [SPEAKER_02]: And half the time you can't...

[00:36:30] [SPEAKER_02]: As I say, I would love to say, yes, I was very influenced by Hitchcock.

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what the hell influences me.

[00:36:36] [SPEAKER_02]: As I say, it wasn't until years after I directed the scene that we've been talking about in

[00:36:44] [SPEAKER_02]: Star Trek that I rewatched...

[00:36:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, great trivia question.

[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Who directed The Enemy Below?

[00:36:52] [SPEAKER_02]: No, you'll never guess.

[00:36:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Dick Powell.

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_03]: The actor?

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.

[00:37:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Dick Powell, who plays Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream movie with Mickey Rooney as

[00:37:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Puck.

[00:37:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Dick Powell, who was in all those Busby Berkeley movies, who then...

[00:37:14] [SPEAKER_02]: He transformed himself.

[00:37:16] [SPEAKER_02]: He used to speak in this high tenor.

[00:37:19] [SPEAKER_02]: He then became Philip Marlowe, the detective, and his voice got lower and he became more

[00:37:25] [SPEAKER_02]: of a tough guy.

[00:37:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And then he was directing movies and a lot of television.

[00:37:29] [SPEAKER_02]: And he directed The Enemy Below.

[00:37:32] [SPEAKER_03]: People have such diverse careers in Hollywood.

[00:37:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Hollywood, it's amazing how people...

[00:37:40] [SPEAKER_02]: What happens to people, life, influences.

[00:37:43] [SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to ask you, going back to Star Trek, you've compared Star Trek to sort of a Catholic

[00:37:50] [SPEAKER_01]: mass.

[00:37:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Can you elaborate on that for our listeners and how that kind of informed your ethos when

[00:37:56] [SPEAKER_01]: directing it?

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Basically, what I was trying to get at is what are the givens when you're writing a Star

[00:38:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Trek episode?

[00:38:07] [SPEAKER_02]: And how do you sort of fit into it?

[00:38:10] [SPEAKER_02]: So the Catholic mass has certain sections.

[00:38:14] [SPEAKER_02]: It has the Dies Irae, Agnus Dei, the Hosannas, these different sections.

[00:38:20] [SPEAKER_02]: But they are...

[00:38:21] [SPEAKER_02]: What makes them different is not the text.

[00:38:24] [SPEAKER_02]: The text is a given.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_02]: It's the music that makes them different.

[00:38:28] [SPEAKER_02]: So Mozart's Coronation Mass has nothing to do with Verdi's Requiem Mass.

[00:38:33] [SPEAKER_02]: Some of the words may be the same, but you'd never know it.

[00:38:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Or another analogy that I used is, okay, the shape of the bottle is a given shape.

[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_02]: This is a wine bottle.

[00:38:45] [SPEAKER_02]: This is the shape.

[00:38:46] [SPEAKER_02]: What vintage you manage to pour into that bottle can vary.

[00:38:51] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I'm not a winophile, so I can't be specific.

[00:38:58] [SPEAKER_02]: But I do know that there's Cabernets and there's Beaujolais and Bordeaux and stuff like that.

[00:39:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And they go into bottles.

[00:39:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And the bottles have basically a very similar, most of the time, shape.

[00:39:14] [SPEAKER_02]: So when you are working on Star Trek, you've got Kirk, you've got Spock, you've got Sulu,

[00:39:21] [SPEAKER_02]: you've got Uhura, you've got Chekhov.

[00:39:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And you have the sort of Star Trek philosophy, you know, that sort of decent people can come

[00:39:32] [SPEAKER_02]: together to achieve something good.

[00:39:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the rest of it is, to use an analogy, the music.

[00:39:40] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, how you deal with it.

[00:39:42] [SPEAKER_02]: What you do with the characters within what are the limitations of the bottle or of the text.

[00:39:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Kirk is a certain kind of person.

[00:39:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Spock is a certain kind of person.

[00:39:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And so for Bones is a certain kind of person.

[00:40:02] [SPEAKER_03]: Marc Thiessen One thing about your stories that I find at

[00:40:06] [SPEAKER_03]: least is consistent, it makes it very hard to turn away from, is the characters always

[00:40:10] [SPEAKER_03]: seem very human, very relatable.

[00:40:13] [SPEAKER_03]: You really feel involved with them.

[00:40:15] [SPEAKER_03]: They feel real.

[00:40:16] [SPEAKER_03]: You care about them.

[00:40:17] [SPEAKER_03]: And I imagine that's difficult enough to do when you're creating a wholly original character.

[00:40:24] [SPEAKER_03]: But you've also been able to do this with historical figures, you know, Sigmund Freud

[00:40:29] [SPEAKER_03]: or HG Wells in Time After Time all the way to a character in A Telegram from Hell, which

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_03]: I won't name because I don't want to give away any spoilers.

[00:40:38] [SPEAKER_03]: How do you do that?

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_03]: How do you make these characters seem so involving?

[00:40:43] [SPEAKER_02]: That's a question I don't know how to answer except to tell you something that sort of very

[00:40:52] [SPEAKER_02]: oblique, but you'll sort of get what I mean.

[00:40:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Socrates was told by the Oracle at Delphi that he's the wisest man in Greece.

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And he thinks that can't be right.

[00:41:04] [SPEAKER_02]: And all I need to disprove the Oracle is to talk to somebody wiser than me.

[00:41:10] [SPEAKER_02]: So he goes around talking to all segments of Greek society and finally works his way

[00:41:15] [SPEAKER_02]: around to the poets.

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And I think poets includes artists, sculptors, painters, writers.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_02]: They were all guys back then.

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_02]: But he thinks surely these men who have written or painted or sculpted so insightfully about

[00:41:36] [SPEAKER_02]: the human condition will prove to be wiser than me.

[00:41:41] [SPEAKER_02]: He said, imagine my surprise when I found that the poets were the stupidest people I

[00:41:47] [SPEAKER_02]: spoke to.

[00:41:48] [SPEAKER_02]: They were like children.

[00:41:51] [SPEAKER_02]: They were infantile.

[00:41:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Except when they did their art.

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And then it appears they go into a kind of trance during which they take dictation from

[00:42:08] [SPEAKER_02]: God.

[00:42:09] [SPEAKER_02]: And this they call inspiration.

[00:42:13] [SPEAKER_02]: And then at the end when they're done, they come out of it and they go back to being jerks

[00:42:18] [SPEAKER_02]: again.

[00:42:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, there's no shortage of artists, writers, film directors, composers, whatever

[00:42:26] [SPEAKER_02]: who are jerks.

[00:42:28] [SPEAKER_02]: They're jerks.

[00:42:29] [SPEAKER_02]: They are not admirable.

[00:42:32] [SPEAKER_02]: They are not whatever.

[00:42:33] [SPEAKER_02]: They don't make a lot of sense.

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_02]: But their art is something entirely different.

[00:42:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And when my girlfriend reads the text of a book that I'm writing or a screenplay and

[00:42:47] [SPEAKER_02]: she says, how did you do this?

[00:42:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know the answer because I was in another place.

[00:42:56] [SPEAKER_02]: I looked up and it was hours later.

[00:42:59] [SPEAKER_02]: And the rest of the world was shut out, whether you want to say I was taking dictation or

[00:43:05] [SPEAKER_02]: whether you say I was in a trance or I was inspired or whatever those words are that

[00:43:12] [SPEAKER_02]: are meant to cover something that is basically, as far as I can determine, inexplicable.

[00:43:19] [SPEAKER_02]: It begins perhaps as an intellectual process where you say, OK, I need a hook to start

[00:43:27] [SPEAKER_02]: this thing.

[00:43:27] [SPEAKER_02]: I need a body or something.

[00:43:30] [SPEAKER_02]: What's the fastest hook?

[00:43:33] [SPEAKER_02]: The fastest hook is two words in Hamlet.

[00:43:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Who's there?

[00:43:38] [SPEAKER_02]: And we're off and running.

[00:43:40] [SPEAKER_02]: We're gone.

[00:43:41] [SPEAKER_02]: The hook is in.

[00:43:43] [SPEAKER_02]: But you sort of work on kind of instinct or unconscious and you're mushing around stuff.

[00:43:49] [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, if the business of writing—and we're talking about writing as opposed to

[00:43:55] [SPEAKER_02]: painting or sculpting—but if the business of writing is rewriting, computers are a godsend

[00:44:01] [SPEAKER_02]: because it used to be I had to get out the scissors and the scotch tape and the white

[00:44:07] [SPEAKER_02]: out to fix a comma or something.

[00:44:10] [SPEAKER_02]: If you're not, like me, a perfectionist by nature, you say, oh, the hell with it.

[00:44:15] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, who'll know?

[00:44:16] [SPEAKER_02]: And you become lazy.

[00:44:18] [SPEAKER_02]: But with a computer, you don't have to be lazy.

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_02]: You can just work it and rework it until it's exactly what it needs to be or what you think

[00:44:29] [SPEAKER_02]: it needs to be.

[00:44:30] [SPEAKER_02]: But at the end of the day, when you look up and it's four in the afternoon and you have

[00:44:35] [SPEAKER_02]: no idea where all the time went, you were lost in this kind of problem-solving thing.

[00:44:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And then later on, at least in my case, because I think creativity is about as different for

[00:44:51] [SPEAKER_02]: people as it is for how you fall asleep.

[00:44:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Some people sleep on their back.

[00:44:56] [SPEAKER_02]: Some people use an eye mask or face mask.

[00:45:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And some people are on their side.

[00:45:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Whatever gets you there.

[00:45:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Stephen Sondheim said, you know, when you're working, if you ever get the urge to lie down,

[00:45:11] [SPEAKER_02]: don't fight it.

[00:45:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Don't fight it.

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Because that's when the ideas come, when you're falling asleep or waking up.

[00:45:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And I walk around with these notebooks and I just write stuff down.

[00:45:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes it's a line of dialogue or pick up dry cleaning.

[00:45:28] [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't seem to matter.

[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And then later you try to remember which is which when you look at your page.

[00:45:34] [SPEAKER_03]: How is it different to work by yourself writing a novel as opposed to working in collaboration

[00:45:40] [SPEAKER_03]: with another screenwriter?

[00:45:42] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, novels and screenplays are very, very different animals.

[00:45:48] [SPEAKER_02]: When you're writing a novel, you are in total control.

[00:45:53] [SPEAKER_02]: No one can tell you what to do.

[00:45:55] [SPEAKER_02]: They may tell you there's a delivery date.

[00:45:58] [SPEAKER_02]: But a novel can be 200 pages.

[00:46:01] [SPEAKER_02]: It could be 2000 pages.

[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_02]: It can be written in the first person.

[00:46:04] [SPEAKER_02]: It can be written in the third person.

[00:46:06] [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't even have to be dramatic.

[00:46:09] [SPEAKER_02]: It can be whatever you want it to be.

[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_02]: And you are only limited by your own abilities.

[00:46:16] [SPEAKER_02]: A screenplay is essentially not a finished thing anyway.

[00:46:20] [SPEAKER_02]: It's a blueprint for a building that hasn't yet been built.

[00:46:26] [SPEAKER_02]: And there's many people involved in this building that's going to be.

[00:46:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Whoever is writing the checks.

[00:46:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And has an idea of what they want their building to be.

[00:46:36] [SPEAKER_02]: And you are working for hire.

[00:46:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And the director has ideas.

[00:46:41] [SPEAKER_02]: The star has ideas.

[00:46:43] [SPEAKER_02]: The producer, whoever's writing the checks.

[00:46:45] [SPEAKER_02]: The studio.

[00:46:46] [SPEAKER_02]: And there are limitations.

[00:46:49] [SPEAKER_02]: And it is in fact a drama or a comedy, whatever.

[00:46:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And you are sort of writing to order.

[00:46:57] [SPEAKER_02]: You may by your force of personality or argument be able to convince people to do something

[00:47:04] [SPEAKER_02]: your way as opposed to what they have in mind.

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_02]: It's like you've turned in this painting and the producer says,

[00:47:12] [SPEAKER_02]: gosh it's really good but don't you think it would be good if the sky were yellow?

[00:47:19] [SPEAKER_02]: And you go, well yeah that's kind of it.

[00:47:22] [SPEAKER_02]: How yellow are we talking about?

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe a kind of a blue yellow would be kind of cool.

[00:47:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe not quite a gold yellow but a more blue, deep blue.

[00:47:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And you try to jolly them along into what you think it ought to be.

[00:47:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And dispense with some ridiculous idea or an idea that you find ridiculous.

[00:47:50] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not always ridiculous.

[00:47:52] [SPEAKER_02]: But it's a collaborative medium.

[00:47:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Movies are collaborative medium.

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And writing a novel by and large is not.

[00:48:01] [SPEAKER_02]: And as the author in a book, you have the last word.

[00:48:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Publisher can't change it.

[00:48:08] [SPEAKER_02]: No one can change it but you.

[00:48:11] [SPEAKER_02]: That's not true with a screenplay.

[00:48:14] [SPEAKER_03]: We were at an event yesterday where you read an amazing, very moving passage

[00:48:20] [SPEAKER_03]: from Telegram from HAL and then your editor happened to be there.

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_03]: And he jokingly said, oh that passage was awful until I worked on it.

[00:48:30] [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm just curious what is the, obviously that was a joke,

[00:48:33] [SPEAKER_03]: what is the relationship between a novelist and an editor like?

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Well there are, with due respect to my current editor,

[00:48:42] [SPEAKER_02]: there are not a lot of editors anymore.

[00:48:45] [SPEAKER_02]: The idea that the editor is a kind of muse and somebody who's

[00:48:53] [SPEAKER_02]: really trying to bring out the best in something.

[00:48:56] [SPEAKER_02]: I was on a panel recently where Michael Connolly, famous writer,

[00:49:00] [SPEAKER_02]: said the only thing I want to hear from an editor is thank you.

[00:49:04] [SPEAKER_02]: And most editors at this point in the publishing business are not editors.

[00:49:12] [SPEAKER_02]: They are dealmakers and they're always on to the next book.

[00:49:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And despite what my editor said last night, he had nothing to do with the writing of

[00:49:23] [SPEAKER_02]: Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from HAL.

[00:49:25] [SPEAKER_02]: Nothing at all.

[00:49:26] [SPEAKER_02]: He was making a joke and everybody's entitled to a joke.

[00:49:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Somebody said failure is an orphan but success has many fathers.

[00:49:36] [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I understand the impulse but I presented him with a manuscript.

[00:49:43] [SPEAKER_02]: I said do you want to publish this?

[00:49:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And he said yes I do.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_02]: And that was our discussion.

[00:49:51] [SPEAKER_01]: I want to bring it back to Holmes really quickly.

[00:49:55] [SPEAKER_01]: You've talked about how you saw kind of elements of Holmes in your father,

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_01]: a psychoanalyst who would sort of observe people and draw conclusions from that.

[00:50:05] [SPEAKER_01]: I guess, do you think it's really possible for any of us to be much like Sherlock Holmes

[00:50:10] [SPEAKER_01]: or do you think he's truly a fantasy figure?

[00:50:12] [SPEAKER_01]: Or can we strive to become more like him and more observant and more plugged in?

[00:50:17] [SPEAKER_01]: What are your thoughts on that?

[00:50:19] [SPEAKER_02]: I think Holmes is a real figure.

[00:50:22] [SPEAKER_02]: He's based on a real figure.

[00:50:24] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not an accident that he is based on at least one and possibly two doctors.

[00:50:31] [SPEAKER_02]: You may know some of this but Doyle was himself a doctor.

[00:50:35] [SPEAKER_02]: And he was part of a clinic in Edinburgh, Scotland where he watched a Dr. Joseph Bell.

[00:50:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And Joseph Bell would look at a patient and said I see you are recently a non-commissioned officer

[00:50:52] [SPEAKER_02]: discharged from the Royal Marines and formerly stationed in the West Indies.

[00:50:57] [SPEAKER_02]: And everybody would be astonished because the guy hasn't yet even opened his mouth.

[00:51:03] [SPEAKER_02]: And then Bell would explain the steps.

[00:51:07] [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you've got your handkerchief in your sleeve.

[00:51:10] [SPEAKER_02]: That's the way non-commissioned officers are.

[00:51:12] [SPEAKER_02]: You're wearing your hat on while you're indoors.

[00:51:14] [SPEAKER_02]: That's military.

[00:51:15] [SPEAKER_02]: And so on.

[00:51:16] [SPEAKER_02]: Your complaint is elephantiasis and you have a tattoo.

[00:51:20] [SPEAKER_02]: So you're obviously in the Royal Marines and where could you get elephantiasis except in the West Indies and so forth.

[00:51:28] [SPEAKER_02]: And he would break it down bit by bit.

[00:51:30] [SPEAKER_02]: And Doyle took a lot of this away.

[00:51:34] [SPEAKER_02]: He said that Holmes was based on Joseph Bell.

[00:51:38] [SPEAKER_02]: Bell was modest enough to say there's only one Sherlock Holmes around here and it's you,

[00:51:44] [SPEAKER_02]: meaning Arthur Conan Doyle.

[00:51:46] [SPEAKER_02]: And Doyle would talk to one of his sons and they would look at a bicycle and he would

[00:51:52] [SPEAKER_02]: look at the tire tracks and say oh these are dunlaps and so on.

[00:51:56] [SPEAKER_02]: This is all about paying attention to detail.

[00:52:00] [SPEAKER_02]: When I would talk to my dad, the shrink, he would talk about observing his patients,

[00:52:08] [SPEAKER_02]: listening to them, listening to what they say, listening to how they say it,

[00:52:13] [SPEAKER_02]: paying attention to what they don't say and looking for clues.

[00:52:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Are they on time?

[00:52:20] [SPEAKER_02]: What's their body language?

[00:52:21] [SPEAKER_02]: What are they wearing?

[00:52:22] [SPEAKER_02]: To try to figure out what's going on.

[00:52:24] [SPEAKER_02]: And in that sense, observing and seeing and hearing, especially hearing, which is very

[00:52:31] [SPEAKER_02]: important, everybody can cultivate that.

[00:52:35] [SPEAKER_02]: We may not be able to cultivate it to the same degree that someone like Sherlock Holmes

[00:52:41] [SPEAKER_02]: does but it's possible to pay more attention to the world around us and to learn from it.

[00:52:48] [SPEAKER_03]: I would say again, The Telegram from Hell is a terrific book.

[00:52:52] [SPEAKER_03]: It's rollicking in places.

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_03]: It's sad.

[00:52:55] [SPEAKER_03]: It's moving.

[00:52:56] [SPEAKER_03]: There's a melancholy but it's a very involving, rewarding book.

[00:53:01] [SPEAKER_03]: I think the worst thing about it is that it ends and you want it to keep on going.

[00:53:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

[00:53:07] [SPEAKER_03]: And so I imagine one question our listeners would have if they buy it and finish it,

[00:53:13] [SPEAKER_03]: and a non-spoilery question is what's next?

[00:53:16] [SPEAKER_02]: It was in fact a two-book deal and I am now in the process of finishing Holmes number

[00:53:24] [SPEAKER_02]: seven, which is Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing, which is a novel about art forgery.

[00:53:32] [SPEAKER_02]: And I set it back.

[00:53:33] [SPEAKER_02]: It's not Holmes in 1918 when he's an aging person but it's Holmes at an earlier date

[00:53:42] [SPEAKER_02]: and I just inserted him, I hope correctly, into another little gap in the chronology.

[00:53:49] [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, that's it.

[00:53:51] [SPEAKER_01]: How are you inspired to pursue the topic of art forgery?

[00:53:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Like did you read something that kind of set that off in your mind?

[00:53:58] [SPEAKER_03]: You talked a little bit about forgery at the beginning of this conversation.

[00:54:03] [SPEAKER_02]: In 1974 when I wrote The 7% Solution, my publisher sent me on a book tour.

[00:54:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Those were in the days when the publisher paid for the tour, not like now.

[00:54:16] [SPEAKER_02]: And I flew through a thunderstorm on my way to Pittsburgh and I landed very green about

[00:54:23] [SPEAKER_02]: the gills, quite shaken up, to be met by a local reporter from some Pittsburgh newspaper

[00:54:32] [SPEAKER_02]: who had been dispatched to interview this kid author.

[00:54:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And he clearly thought this assignment was beneath him or unworthy of his talents.

[00:54:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And in a somewhat truculent vein, he approached the green author and said,

[00:54:51] [SPEAKER_02]: how does it feel to be a successful forger?

[00:54:54] [SPEAKER_02]: And I was really kind of rocked by this.

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_02]: What am I, 28 years old or something?

[00:55:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, actually, it doesn't say by Nicholas Meyer.

[00:55:12] [SPEAKER_02]: It says as edited by, so I'm not really claiming authorship as though that was going to get

[00:55:19] [SPEAKER_02]: me off the hook.

[00:55:20] [SPEAKER_02]: But and I don't remember what happened after that.

[00:55:23] [SPEAKER_02]: But his little harpoon kind of landed and I went to sleep in some strange hotel that

[00:55:30] [SPEAKER_02]: night thinking, wow, maybe he's got a point.

[00:55:34] [SPEAKER_02]: That's what boils down to is I am forging.

[00:55:39] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm pretending to be Watson, pretending to be Doyle, pretending to have discovered this

[00:55:45] [SPEAKER_02]: manuscript.

[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'm a forger.

[00:55:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And so that began my lifelong interest in forgery, which is a very intriguing topic.

[00:55:56] [SPEAKER_02]: At least it's intriguing to me what, for example, is the difference between a forgery

[00:56:03] [SPEAKER_02]: and a copy?

[00:56:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Something you can't see.

[00:56:08] [SPEAKER_02]: The intention.

[00:56:10] [SPEAKER_02]: A copy labels itself on a copy.

[00:56:13] [SPEAKER_02]: A forgery says, no, I'm the real thing.

[00:56:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And so forth.

[00:56:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And there are financial implications.

[00:56:21] [SPEAKER_02]: There are aesthetic implications.

[00:56:24] [SPEAKER_02]: There are philosophic implications in the subject of forgery.

[00:56:31] [SPEAKER_02]: And so I started amassing a library about forgers and forgery and doing a lot of reading

[00:56:39] [SPEAKER_02]: about it.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_02]: And when I accepted a two-book deal with the Mysterious Press, I had no idea what book

[00:56:50] [SPEAKER_02]: number two was supposed to be about.

[00:56:53] [SPEAKER_02]: I just thought, OK, there's another income for next year, but I have to think up something.

[00:57:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And surprisingly, it really didn't take long for me to say, oh, I'll do a book about

[00:57:08] [SPEAKER_02]: everything I know about forgery.

[00:57:10] [SPEAKER_02]: I'll put into this book.

[00:57:13] [SPEAKER_03]: I think we're about at the end of our hour.

[00:57:15] [SPEAKER_03]: Is there anything we didn't ask you about, The Telegram from Hell or Sherlock Holmes that

[00:57:20] [SPEAKER_03]: you would like to mention?

[00:57:22] [SPEAKER_02]: No, I'd just like to tell people that they should buy the book because they'll have

[00:57:26] [SPEAKER_02]: a very good time or I give them money back.

[00:57:31] [SPEAKER_01]: We can confirm that you'll have a very good time and you won't need your money back.

[00:57:34] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:57:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much.

[00:57:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

[00:57:37] [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.

[00:57:38] [SPEAKER_01]: We want to sincerely thank Nicholas Meyer for speaking with us.

[00:57:41] [SPEAKER_03]: We really enjoy getting the chance to talk with him and we will include links as to

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_03]: where you can buy your own copy of Sherlock Holmes and The Telegram from Hell in our show

[00:57:52] [SPEAKER_03]: notes.

[00:57:52] [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet.

[00:57:55] [SPEAKER_03]: If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_03]: murdersheet at gmail dot com.

[00:58:04] [SPEAKER_03]: If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the

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[00:58:13] [SPEAKER_01]: If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www dot patreon dot

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[00:58:36] [SPEAKER_03]: Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for The Murder Sheet and

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[00:59:07] [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks again for listening.

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