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.