Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud, on the same case.
The canon leaves Holmes’s cocaine habit lying in plain sight; take it seriously and the obvious man to put him in a room with is Freud.
You know the canon and you want a short, sharp novel that rereads it.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: Watson as narrator — the book presents itself as a reprint from his reminiscences — and Moriarty, though not as you know him.
Changes: who Moriarty really is, and how much of Holmes’s inner life gets examined.
Whose story is it?
Holmes’s, seen by a Watson who is now worried rather than dazzled.
How much time does it ask?
224 pages. The title is Holmes’s own phrase for his cocaine, from The Sign of the Four.
W. W. Norton paperback: “Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.”
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More versions: The Complete Novels and Stories, Bantam Classics (two volumes) · The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford World’s Classics (2025) · The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oxford World’s Classics (2023)