MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES; A REPORTER AT LARGE |
Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes,
believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the
past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries,
and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The
archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by
some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story,
"The Hound of the Baskervilles."
The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them
no one had been able to write a definitive biography--a task that Green was
determined to complete. Many scholars feared that the archive had been
discarded or destroyed; as the London Times noted earlier this year, its
whereabouts had become "a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B
Baker Street," the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr.
Watson.
Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of
Conan Doyle's five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs' agreement,
stashed the papers in a locked room of a chateau that he owned in Switzerland.
Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the
chateau without his siblings' knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In
the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack--giving rise to the legend
of the curse. After Adrian's death, the papers apparently vanished. And
whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an
impenetrable web of heirs--including a self-styled Russian princess--who seemed
to have deceived and double-crossed each other in their efforts to control the
archive.
For years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives,
until one day the muddled trail led to London--and the doorstep of Jean Conan
Doyle, the youngest of the author's children. Tall and elegant, with silver
hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. ("Something very strong
and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body," her father had
written of Jean when she was five. "Her will is tremendous.") Whereas
her brother Adrian had been kicked out of the British Navy for insubordination,
and her elder brother Denis was a playboy who had sat out the Second World War
in America, she had become an officer in the Royal Air Force, and was honored,
in 1963, as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his
walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. Green had almost as great an interest
in her father as she did, and she began sharing her memories, as well as family
photographs. She asked him to return, and one day, Green later told friends,
she showed him some boxes that had been stored in a London solicitor's office.
Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. Dame Jean
informed him that, because of an ongoing family dispute, she couldn't yet allow
him to read the papers, but she said that she intended to bequeath nearly all
of them to the British Library, so that scholars could finally examine them.
After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer--but nothing
happened.
Then, last March, Green opened the London Sunday Times and was shocked to
read that the lost archive had "turned up" at Christie's auction
house and was to be sold, in May, for millions of dollars by three of Conan
Doyle's distant relatives; instead of going to the British Library, the contents
would be scattered among private collectors around the world, who might keep
them inaccessible to scholars. Green was sure that a mistake had been made, and
hurried to Christie's to inspect the materials. Upon his return, he told
friends that he was certain that many of the papers were the same as those he
had uncovered. What's more, he alleged, they had been stolen--and he had proof.
Over the next few days, he approached members of the Sherlock Holmes Society
of London, one of hundreds of fan clubs devoted to the detective. (Green had
once been chairman.) He alerted other so-called Sherlockians, including various
American members of the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only group that
was founded in 1934 and named after the street urchins Holmes regularly employed
to ferret out information. Green also contacted the more orthodox scholars of
Conan Doyle, or Doyleans, about the sale. (Unlike Green, who moved between the
two camps, many Doyleans distanced themselves from the Sherlockians, who often
treated Holmes as if he were a real detective and refused to mention Conan
Doyle by name.)
Green shared with these scholars what he knew about the archive's
provenance, revealing what he considered the most damning piece of evidence: a
copy of Dame Jean's will, which stated, "I give to The British Library all
. . . my late father's original papers, personal manuscripts, diaries,
engagement books, and writings." Determined to block the auction, the
makeshift group of amateur sleuths presented its case to Members of Parliament.
Toward the end of the month, as the group's campaign intensified and its
objections appeared in the press, Green hinted to his sister, Priscilla West,
that someone was threatening him. Later, he sent her a cryptic note containing
three phone numbers and the message "please keep these numbers safe."
He also called a reporter from the London Times, warning that
"something" might happen to him.
On the night of Friday, March 26th, he had dinner with a longtime friend,
Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that "an
American was trying to bring him down." After the two men left the
restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car
behind them.
The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering
machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn't pick up.
Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response.
After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the
entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed,
surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his
neck. He had been garroted.
"I will lay out the whole case for you," John Gibson, one of
Green's closest friends, told me when I phoned him shortly after learning of
Green's death. Gibson had written several books with Green, including "My
Evening with Sherlock Holmes," a 1981 collection of parodies and pastiches
of the detective stories. With a slight stammer, Gibson said of his friend's
death, "It's a complete and utter mystery."
Not long after, I travelled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south
of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the
train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him--narrow shoulders,
long face, unruly gray hair--seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported
by an invisible cane. "I have a file for you," he said, as we drove
off in his car. "As you'll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of
answers."
He sped through town, past a twelfth-century stone church and a row of
cottages, until he stopped at a red brick house surrounded by hedges. "You
don't mind dogs, I hope," he said. "I've two cocker spaniels. I only
wanted one but the person I got them from said that they were inseparable, and
so I took them both and they've been fighting ever since."
When he opened the front door, both spaniels leaped on us, then at each
other. They trailed us into the living room, which was filled with piles of
antique books, some reaching to the ceiling. Among the stacks was a
near-complete set of The Strand Magazine, in which the Holmes stories were
serialized at the turn of the twentieth century; a single issue, which used to
sell for half a shilling, is now worth as much as five hundred dollars.
"Altogether, there must be about sixty thousand books," Gibson said.
We sat on a couch and he opened his case file, carefully spreading the pages
around him. "All right, dogs. Don't disturb us," he said. He looked
up at me. "Now I'll tell you the whole story."
Gibson said that he had attended the coroner's inquest and taken careful
notes, and as he spoke he picked up a magnifying glass beside him and peered
though it at several crumpled pieces of paper. "I write everything on
scraps," he said. The police, he said, had found only a few unusual things
at the scene. There was the cord around Green's neck--a black shoelace. There
was a wooden spoon near his hand, and several stuffed animals on the bed. And
there was a partially empty bottle of gin.
The police found no sign of forced entry and assumed that Green had
committed suicide. Yet there was no note, and Sir Colin Berry, the president of
the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, testified to the coroner that, in his
thirty- year career, he had seen only one suicide by garroting.
"One," Gibson repeated. Self-garroting is extremely difficult to do,
he explained; people who attempt it typically pass out before they are
asphyxiated. Moreover, in this instance, the cord was not a thick rope but a
shoelace, making the feat even more unlikely.
Gibson reached in his file and handed me a sheet of paper with numbers on
it. "Take a look," he said. "My phone records." The records
showed that he and Green had spoken repeatedly during the week before his
death; if the police had bothered to obtain Green's records, Gibson went on,
they would no doubt show that Green had called him only hours before he died.
"I was probably the last person to speak to him," he said. The
police, however, had never questioned him.
During one of their last conversations about the auction, Gibson recalled,
Green had said he was afraid of something.
"You've got nothing to worry about," Gibson told him.
"No, I'm worried," Green said.
"What? You fear for your life?"
"I do."
Gibson said that, at the time, he didn't take the threat seriously but
advised Green not to answer his door unless he was sure who it was.
Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something
critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his
friend Keen about an "American" who was trying to ruin him. The
following day, Gibson said, he had called Green's house and heard a strange
greeting on the answering machine. "Instead of getting Richard's voice in
this sort of Oxford accent, which had been on the machine for a decade,"
Gibson recalled, "I got an American voice that said, 'Sorry, not
available.' I said, 'What the hell is going on?' I thought I must've dialled
the wrong number. So I dialled really slowly again. I got the American voice. I
said, 'Christ almighty.' "
Gibson said that Green's sister had heard the same recorded greeting, which
is one reason that she had rushed to his house. Reaching into his file, Gibson
handed me several more documents. "Make sure you keep them in
chronological order," he said. There was a copy of Jean Conan Doyle's
will, several newspaper clippings on the auction, an obituary, and a Christie's
catalogue.
That was pretty much all he had. The police, Gibson said, had not conducted
any forensic tests or looked for fingerprints. And the coroner--who had once
attended a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to conduct a mock inquest of
the murder from a Conan Doyle story in which a corpse is discovered in a locked
room--found himself stymied. Gibson said that the coroner had noted that there
was not enough evidence to ascertain what had happened, and, as a result, the
official verdict regarding whether Green had killed himself or been murdered was
left open.
Within hours of Green's death, Sherlockians seized upon the mystery, as if
it were another case in the canon. In a Web chat room, one person, who called
himself "inspector," wrote, "As for self-garroting, it is like
trying to choke oneself to death by your own hands." Others invoked the
"curse," as if only the supernatural could explain it. Gibson handed
me an article from a British tabloid that was headlined " 'curse of conan
doyle' strikes holmes expert."
"So what do you think?" Gibson asked.
"I'm not sure," I said.
Later, we went through the evidence again. I asked Gibson if he knew whose
phone numbers were on the note that Green had sent to his sister.
Gibson shook his head. "It hadn't come up at the inquest," he
said.
"What about the American voice on the answering machine?" I asked.
"Do we know who that is?"
"Unfortunately, not a clue. To me that's the strangest and most telling
piece of evidence. Did Richard put that on his machine? What was he trying to
tell us? Did the murderer put it on there? And, if so, why would he do
that?"
I asked if Green had ever displayed any irrational behavior. "No,
never," he said. "He was the most levelheaded man I ever met."
He noted that Priscilla West had testified at the inquest that her brother
had no history of depression. Indeed, Green's physician wrote to the court to
say that he had not treated Green for any illnesses for a decade.
"One last question," I said. "Was anything taken out of the
apartment?"
"Not that we know of. Richard had a valuable collection of Sherlock
Holmes and Conan Doyle books, and nothing appears to be missing."
As Gibson drove me back to the train station, he said, "Please, you
must stay on the case. The police seem to have let poor Richard down."
Then he advised, "As Sherlock Holmes says, 'When you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' "
Some facts about Richard Green are easy to discern--those which illuminate
the circumstances of his life, rather than the circumstances of his death. He
was born on July 10, 1953; he was the youngest of three children; his father
was Roger Lancelyn Green, a best-selling children's author who popularized the
Homeric myths and the legend of King Arthur, and who was a close friend of C.
S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and Richard was raised near Liverpool, on land
that had been given to his ancestors in 1093, and where his family had resided
ever since.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the American consul in Liverpool in the
eighteen-fifties, visited the house one summer, and he later described it in
his "English Notebooks":
We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove
through a lawn, shaded with trees, and closely shaven, and reached the door of
Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old. . . .
There is [a] curious, old, stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade, much
like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room looks like a
very handsome modern room, being beautifully painted, gilded, and paper-hung,
with a white-marble fire-place, and rich furniture; so that the impression is
that of newness, not of age.
By the time Richard was born, however, the Green family was, as one relative
told me, "very English--a big house and no money." The curtains were
thin, the carpets were threadbare, and a cold draft often swirled through the
corridors.
Green, who had a pale, pudgy face, was blind in one eye from a childhood
accident, and wore spectacles with tinted lenses. (One friend told me that,
even as an adult, Green resembled "the god of Pan," with
"cherubic-like features, a mouth which curved in a smile which was
sympathetic, ironic, and always seeming to suggest that there was just one
little thing that he was not telling you.") Intensely shy, with a
ferociously logical mind and a precise memory, he would spend hours roaming
through his father's enormous library, reading dusty first editions of
children's books. And by the time he was eleven he had fallen under the spell
of Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes was not the first great literary detective--that honor belongs to
Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Auguste Dupin--but Conan Doyle's hero was the most
vivid exemplar of the fledgling genre, which Poe dubbed "tales of
ratiocination." Holmes is a cold, calculating machine, a man who is, as
one critic put it, "a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound,
pointer, and bull-dog." The gaunt Holmes has no wife or children; as he
explains, "I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix." Rigidly
scientific, he offers no spiritual bromides to his bereaved clients. Conan
Doyle reveals virtually nothing about his character's interior life; he is
defined solely by his method. In short, he is the perfect detective, the
superhero of the Victorian era, out of which he blasted with his deerstalker
hat and Inverness cape.
Richard read the stories straight through, then read them again. His
rigorous mind had found its match in Holmes and his "science of
deduction," which could wrest an astonishing solution from a single,
seemingly unremarkable clue. "All life is a great chain, the nature of
which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it," Holmes explains
in the first story, "A Study in Scarlet," which establishes a narrative
formula that subsequent tales nearly always follow. A new client arrives at
Holmes's Baker Street consulting room. The detective stuns the visitor by
deducing some element of his life by the mere observation of his demeanor or
dress. (In "A Case of Identity," he divines that his client is a
shortsighted typist by no more than the worn "plush upon her sleeves"
and "the dint of a pince-nez at either side of her nose.") After the
client presents the inexplicable facts of the case, "the game is afoot,"
as Holmes likes to say. Amassing clues that invariably boggle Watson, the
stories' more earthbound narrator, Holmes ultimately arrives at a dazzling
conclusion--one that, to him and him only, seems "elementary." In
"The Red-Headed League," Holmes reveals to Watson how he surmised
that an assistant pawnbroker was trying to rob a bank by tunnelling underneath
it. "I thought of the assistant's fondness for photography, and his trick
of vanishing into the cellar," Holmes says, explaining that he then went
to see the assistant. "I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I
wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn, wrinkled and stained
they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The only remaining point was
what they were burrowing for. I walked round the corner, saw the City and
Suburban Bank abutted on our friend's premises, and felt that I had solved my
problem."
Following the advice that Holmes often gave to Watson, Green practiced how
to "see" what others merely "observed." He memorized
Holmes's rules, as if they were catechism: "It is a capital mistake to
theorize before one has data"; "never trust to general impressions,
my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details"; "there is nothing
more deceptive than an obvious fact."
Not long after Green turned thirteen, he carried an assortment of artifacts
from local junk sales into the dimly lit attic of Poulton Hall. Part of the
attic was known as the Martyr's Chamber and was believed to be haunted, having
once "been tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there and persecuted to
death for her religion," according to Hawthorne. Nevertheless, up in the
attic, Green assembled his objects to create a strange tableau. There was a
rack of pipes and a Persian slipper stuffed with tobacco. There was a stack of
unpaid bills, which he stabbed into a mantle with a knife, so that they were
pinned in place. There was a box of pills labelled "Poison"; empty
ammunition cartridges and trompe-l'oeil bullet marks painted on the walls
("I didn't think the attic would stand up to real bullets," he later
remarked); a preserved snake; a brass microscope; and an invitation to the
Gasfitters' Ball. Finally, outside the door of the room, Green hung a sign:
"Baker Street."
Relying on the stray details sprinkled throughout Conan Doyle's stories,
Green had pieced together a replica of Holmes and Watson's apartment--one so
precise that it occasionally drew Holmes aficionados from other parts of
England. One local reporter described the uncanny sensation of climbing the
seventeen stairs--the same number specified in the stories--as a tape recording
played in the background with the sounds of Victorian London: the rumble of cab
wheels, the clopping of horses' hooves on cobblestones. By then, Green had
become the youngest person ever inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of
London, where members sometimes dressed in period costumes--in high-waisted
trousers and top hats.
Though Holmes had first appeared in print nearly a century earlier, he had
spawned a literary cult unlike that of any other fictional character. Almost
from his inception, readers latched onto him with a zeal that bordered on
"the mystical," as one Conan Doyle biographer has noted. When Holmes
made his debut, in the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, a magazine of somewhat
lurid fiction, he was considered not just a character but a paragon of the
Victorian faith in all things scientific. He entered public consciousness
around the same time as the development of the modern police force, at a moment
when medicine was finally threatening to eradicate common diseases and
industrialization offered to curtail mass poverty. He was the proof that,
indeed, the forces of reason could triumph over the forces of madness.
By the time Green was born, however, the worship of scientific thinking had
been shattered by other faiths, by Nazism and Communism and Fascism, which had
often harnessed the power of technology to demonic ends. Yet, paradoxically,
the more illogical the world seemed, the more intense the cult surrounding
Holmes became. This symbol of a new creed had become a figure of nostalgia--a
person in "a fairy tale," as Green once put it. The character's
popularity even surpassed the level of fame he had attained in Conan Doyle's
day, as the stories were reenacted in some two hundred and sixty movies,
twenty-five television shows, a musical, a ballet, a burlesque, and six hundred
radio plays. Holmes inspired the creation of journals, memorabilia shops,
walking tours, postage stamps, hotels, themed ocean cruises.
Edgar W. Smith, a former vice-president of General
Motors and the first editor of the Baker Street Journal, which publishes
scholarship on Conan Doyle's stories, wrote in a 1946 essay, "What Is It
That We Love in Sherlock Holmes?":
We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil and to set
aright the wrongs with which the world is plagued. He is Galahad and Socrates,
bringing high adventure to our dull existences and calm, judicial logic to our
biased minds. He is the success of all our failures; the bold escape from our
imprisonment.
What has made this literary escape unlike any other, though, is that so many
people conceive of Holmes as a real person. T. S. Eliot once observed,
"Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when
we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence." Green
himself wrote, "Sherlock Holmes is a real character . . . who lives beyond
life's span and who is constantly rejuvenated."
At the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Green was introduced to "the
great game," which Sherlockians had played for decades. It was built
around the conceit that the stories' true author was not Conan Doyle but
Watson, who had faithfully recounted Holmes's exploits. Once, at a gathering of
the elite Baker Street Irregulars (which Green also joined), a guest referred
to Conan Doyle as the creator of Holmes, prompting one outraged member to
exclaim, "Holmes is a man! Holmes is a great man!" If Green had to
invoke Conan Doyle's name, he was told, he should refer to him as merely
Watson's "literary agent." The challenge of the game was that Conan
Doyle had often written the four Holmes novels and fifty-six short
stories--"the Sacred Writings," as Sherlockians called them--in
haste, and they were plagued with inconsistencies that made them difficult to
pass off as nonfiction. How, for instance, is it possible that in one story
Watson is described as having been wounded in Afghanistan in the shoulder by a
Jezail bullet, though in another story he complains that the wound was in his
leg? The goal was thus to resolve these paradoxes, using the same airtight
logic that Holmes exhibits. Similar textual inquiries had already given birth
to a related field, known as Sherlockiana--mock scholarship in which fans tried
to deduce everything from how many wives Watson has (one to five) to which
university Holmes attended (surely Cambridge or Oxford). As Green once
conceded, quoting the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, "Never had
so much been written by so many for so few."
After Green graduated from Oxford, in 1975, he turned his attention to more
serious scholarship. Of all the puzzles surrounding the Sacred Writings, the
greatest one, Green realized, centered on the man whom the stories had long
since eclipsed--Conan Doyle himself. Green set out to compile the first
comprehensive bibliography, hunting down every piece of material that Conan
Doyle wrote: pamphlets, plays, poems, obituaries, songs, unpublished
manuscripts, letters to the editor. Carrying a plastic bag in place of a
briefcase, Green unearthed documents that had long been hidden behind the veil
of history.
In the midst of this research, Green discovered that John Gibson was working
on a similar project, and they agreed to collaborate. The resulting tome,
published in 1983 by Oxford
University Press, with a foreword by Graham Greene, is seven hundred and
twelve pages long and contains notations on nearly every scrap of writing that
Conan Doyle ever produced, down to the kind of paper in which a manuscript was
bound ("cloth," "light blue diaper-grain"). When the
bibliography was done, Gibson continued in his job as a government property
assessor. Green, however, had inherited a sizable sum of money from his family,
who had sold part of their estate, and he used the bibliography as a launching
pad for a biography of Conan Doyle.
Writing a biography is akin to the process of detection, and Green started
to retrace every step of Conan Doyle's life, as if it were an elaborate crime
scene. During the nineteen-eighties, Green followed Conan Doyle's movements
from the moment he was born, on May 22, 1859, in a squalid part of Edinburgh.
Green visited the neighborhood where Conan Doyle was raised, by a devout
Christian mother and a dreamy father. (He drew one of the first illustrations
of Sherlock Holmes--a sketch of the detective discovering a corpse, which
accompanied a paperback edition of "A Study in Scarlet.") Green also
amassed an intricate paper record that showed his subject's intellectual
evolution. He discovered, for instance, that after Conan Doyle studied
medicine, at the University of Edinburgh, and fell under the influence of
rationalist thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes--who undoubtedly inspired the
surname of Conan Doyle's detective--he renounced Catholicism, vowing,
"Never will I accept anything which cannot be proved to me."
In the early eighties, Green published the first of a series of
introductions to Penguin Classics editions of Conan Doyle's previously
uncollected works--many of which he had helped to uncover. The essays, written
in a clinical style, began garnering him attention outside the insular
subculture of Sherlockians. One essay, running more than a hundred pages, was a
small biography of Conan Doyle unto itself; in another, Green cast further
light on the short story "The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted," which
had been found in a chest more than a decade after Conan Doyle's death and was
claimed by his widow and sons to be the last unpublished Holmes story. Some
experts had wondered if the story was a fake and even if Conan Doyle's two
sons, in search of money to sustain their lavish life styles, had forged it.
Yet Green conclusively showed that the story was neither by Conan Doyle nor a
forgery; instead, it was written by an architect named Arthur Whitaker, who had
sent it to Conan Doyle in hopes of collaborating. Scholars described Green's
essays variously as "dazzling," "unparalleled," and--the ultimate
compliment--"Holmesian."
Still, Green was determined to dig deeper for his now highly anticipated
biography. As the mystery writer Iain Pears has observed, Conan Doyle's hero
acts in nearly the same fashion as a Freudian analyst, piecing together his
clients' hidden narratives, which he alone can perceive. In a 1987 review of
Conan Doyle's autobiography, "Memories and Adventures," which was
published in 1924, Green noted, "It is as if Conan Doyle--whose character
suggested kindliness and trust--had a fear of intimacy. When he describes his
life, he omits the inner man."
To reveal this "inner man," Green examined facts that Conan Doyle
rarely, if ever, spoke of himself--most notably, that his father, an epileptic
and an incorrigible alcoholic, was eventually confined to an insane asylum. Yet
the more Green tried to plumb his subject, the more he became aware of the
holes in his knowledge of Conan Doyle. He didn't want just to sketch Conan
Doyle's story with a series of anecdotes; he wanted to know everything about
him. In the draft of an an early mystery story, "The Surgeon of Gaster
Fall," Conan Doyle writes of a son who has locked his raving father inside
a cage--but this incident was excised from the published version. Had Conan
Doyle been the one to commit his father to the asylum? Was Holmes's mania for
logic a reaction to his father's genuine mania? And what did Conan Doyle mean
when he wrote, in his deeply personal poem "The Inner Room," that he
"has thoughts he dare not say"?
Green wanted to create an immaculate biography, one in which each fact led
inexorably to the next. He wanted to be both Watson and Holmes to Conan Doyle,
to be his narrator and his detective. Yet he knew the words of Holmes:
"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay." And the only
way to succeed, he realized, was to track down the lost archive.
"Murder," Owen Dudley Edwards, a highly regarded Conan Doyle
scholar, said. "I fear that is what the preponderance of the evidence
points to."
I had called him in Scotland, after Gibson informed me that Edwards was
pursuing an informal investigation into Green's death. Edwards had worked with
Green to stop the auction, which took place, in spite of the uproar, almost two
months after Green's body was found. Edwards said of his friend, "I think
he knew too much about the archive."
A few days later, I flew to Edinburgh, where Edwards promised to share with
me his findings. We had arranged to meet at a hotel on the edge of the old
city. It was on a hill studded with medieval castles and covered in a thin
mist, not far from where Conan Doyle had studied medicine under Dr. Joseph
Bell, one of the models for Sherlock Holmes. (Once, during a class, Bell held
up a glass vial. "This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug," he
said. "It is extremely bitter to the taste." To the class's
astonishment, he touched the amber liquid, lifted a finger to his mouth, and
licked it. He then declared, "Not one of you has developed his power of
perception . . . while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle
finger--aye--which somehow found its way into my mouth.")
Edwards greeted me in the hotel lobby. He is a short, pear-shaped man with
wild gray sideburns and an even wilder gray beard. A history professor at the
University of Edinburgh, he wore a rumpled tweed coat over a V-neck sweater,
and carried a knapsack on his shoulder.
We sat down at the restaurant, and I waited as he rummaged through the books
in his bag. Edwards, who has written numerous books, including "The Quest
for Sherlock Holmes," an acclaimed account of Conan Doyle's early life,
began pulling out copies of Green's edited collections. Green, he said, was
"the world's greatest Conan Doyle expert. I have the authority to say it.
Richard ultimately became the greatest of us all. That is a firm and definite
statement of someone who knows."
As he spoke, he tended to pull his chin in toward his chest, so that his
beard fanned out. He told me that he had met Green in 1981, while researching
his book on Conan Doyle. At the time, Green was still working on his
bibliography with Gibson; even so, he had shared all his data with Edwards.
"That was the kind of scholar he was," he said.
To Edwards, Green's death was even more baffling than the crimes in a Holmes
story. He picked up one of the Conan Doyle collections and read aloud from
"A Case of Identity," in the cool, ironical voice of Holmes:
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could
invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere
commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand,
hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer
things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the
cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations,
and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its
conventionalities and foreseen conclusion most stale and unprofitable.
After Edwards closed the book, he explained that he had spoken frequently
with Green about the Christie's sale. "Our lives have been dominated by
the fact that Conan Doyle had five children, three of whom became his literary
heirs," Edwards said. "The two boys were playboys. One of them,
Denis, was, I gather, utterly selfish. The other one, Adrian, was a repulsive
crook. And then there was an absolutely wonderful daughter."
Green, he said, had become so close to the daughter, Dame Jean, that he came
to be known as the son she never had, even though in the past Conan Doyle's
children had typically had fractious relationships with their father's
biographers. In the early nineteen-forties, for example, Adrian and Denis had
cooperated with Hesketh Pearson on "Conan Doyle: His Life and Art,"
but when the book came out and portrayed Conan Doyle as "the man in the
street," a phrase Conan Doyle himself had used, Adrian rushed into print
his own biography, "The True Conan Doyle," and Denis allegedly
challenged Pearson to a duel. Dame Jean had subsequently taken it upon herself
to guard her father's legacy against scholars who might present him in too
stark a light. Yet she confided in Green, who had tried to balance his
veneration of his subject with a commitment to the truth.
Edwards said that Dame Jean not only gave Green a glimpse of the treasured
archive; she also asked for his help in transferring various papers to her
solicitor's office. "Richard told me that he had physically moved
them," Edwards said. "So his knowledge was really quite
dangerous."
He claimed that Green was "the biggest figure standing in the way"
of the Christie's auction, since he had seen some of the papers and could
testify that Dame Jean had intended to donate them to the British Library. Soon
after the sale was announced, Edwards said, he and Green had learned that Charles
Foley, Sir Arthur's great-nephew, and two of Foley's cousins were behind the
sale. But neither he nor Green could understand how these distant heirs had
legally obtained control of the archive. "All we were clear about was that
there was a scam and that, clearly, someone was robbing stuff that should go to
the British Library," Edwards said. He added, "This was not a
hypothesis--it was quite certain in our own minds."
Edwards also had little doubt that somebody had murdered his friend. He
noted the circumstantial details--Green's mention of threats to his life, his
reference to the American who was "trying to bring him down." Some
observers, he said, had speculated that Green's death might have been the
result of autoerotic asphyxiation, but he told me that there were no signs that
Green was engaged in sexual activity at the time. He added that garroting is
typically a brutal method of execution--"a method of murder which a
skilled professional would use." What's more, Green had no known history
of depression. Edwards pointed out that Green, on the day before he died, had
made plans with another friend for a holiday in Italy the following week.
Moreover, he said, if Green had killed himself, there surely would have been a
suicide note; it was inconceivable that a man who kept notes on everything
would not have left one.
"There are other things," Edwards continued. "He was garroted
with a bootlace, yet he always wore slip-on shoes." And Edwards found
meaning in seemingly insignificant details, the kind that Holmes might
note--particularly, the partially empty bottle of gin by his bed. To Edwards,
this was a clear sign of the presence of a stranger, since Green, an oenophile,
had drunk wine at supper that evening, and would never have followed wine with
gin.
"Whoever did this is still at large," Edwards said. He put a hand
on my shoulder. "Please be careful. I don't want to see you garroted, like
poor Richard." Before we parted, he told me one more thing--he knew who
the American was.
The American, who asked that I not use his name, lives in Washington, D.C.
After I tracked him down, he agreed to meet me at Timberlake's pub near Dupont
Circle. I found him sitting at the bar, sipping red wine. Though he was slumped
over, he looked strikingly tall, with a hawkish nose and a thinning ring of
gray hair. He appeared to be in his fifties and wore bluejeans and a
button-down white shirt, with a fountain pen sticking out of the front pocket,
like a professor.
After pausing a moment to deduce who I was, he stood and led me to a table
in the back of the room, which was filled with smoke and sounds from a jukebox.
We ordered dinner, and he proceeded to tell me what Edwards had loosely
sketched out: that he was a longtime member of the Baker Street Irregulars and
had, for many years, helped to represent Conan Doyle's literary estate in
America. It is his main job, though, that has given him a slightly menacing
air--at least in the minds of Green's friends. He works for the Pentagon in a
high-ranking post that deals with clandestine operations. ("One of Donald
Rumsfeld's pals," as Edwards described him.)
The American said that after he received a Ph.D. in international relations,
in 1970, and became an expert in the Cold War and nuclear doctrine, he was
drawn into the Sherlockian games and their pursuit of immaculate logic.
"I've always kept the two worlds separate," he told me at one point.
"I don't think a lot of people at the Pentagon would understand my
fascination with a literary character." He met Green through the
Sherlockian community, he said. As members of the Baker Street Irregulars, both
had been given official titles from the Holmes stories. The American was
"Rodger Prescott of evil memory," after the American counterfeiter in
"The Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Green was known as "The
Three Gables," after the villa in "The Adventure of the Three
Gables," which is ransacked by burglars in search of a scandalous
biographical manuscript.
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the American said, he and Green had
collaborated on several projects. As the editor of a collection of essays on
Conan Doyle, he had asked Green, whom he considered then "the single most
knowledgeable living person on Conan Doyle," to write the crucial chapter
on the author's 1924 memoir. "My relationship with Richard was always
productive," he recalled. Then, in the early nineteen-nineties, he said,
they had had a falling out--a result, he added, of a startling rupture in
Green's relationship with Dame Jean.
"Richard had gotten very close to Dame Jean, and was getting all sorts
of family photographs, having represented himself as a great admirer of Conan
Doyle," he said. "And then she saw something in print by him and
suddenly realized that he had been representing his views very differently, and
that was kind of the end of it."
The American insisted that he couldn't remember what Green had written that
upset her. But Edwards, and others in Holmesian circles, said that the reason
nobody could recall a specific offense was that Green's essays had never been
particularly inflammatory. According to R. Dixon Smith, a friend of Green's and
a longtime Conan Doyle book dealer, the American played on Dame Jean's
sensitivities about her father's reputation and seized upon some of Green's
candid words, which had never upset her before, then "twisted" them
like "a screw." Edwards said of the American, "I think he did
everything he possibly could to injure Richard. He drove a wedge between
Richard and Dame Jean Conan Doyle." After Dame Jean cast Green out,
Edwards and others noted, the American grew closer to her. Edwards told me that
Green never got over the quarrel with Dame Jean. "He used to look at me
like his heart was breaking," he said.
When I pressed the American further about the incident, he said simply,
"Because I was Jean's representative, I got caught in the middle of
it." Soon after, he said, "the good feeling and cooperation by Green
toward me ended." At Sherlockian events, he said, they continued to see each
other, but Green, always reserved, would often avoid him.
Smith had told me that in Green's final months he often seemed
"preoccupied" with the American. "He kept wondering, What's he
gonna do next?" During the last week of his life, Green told several
friends that the American was working to defeat his crusade against the
auction, and he expressed fear that his rival might try to damage his scholarly
reputation. On March 24th, two days before he died, Green learned that the
American was in London and was planning to attend a meeting that evening of the
Sherlock Holmes Society. A friend said that Green called him and exclaimed,
"I don't want to see him! I don't want to go." Green backed out of
the meeting at the last minute. The friend said of the American, "I think
he scared Richard."
As I mentioned some of the allegations of Green's friends, the American
unfolded his napkin and touched the corners of his mouth. He explained that
during his visit to London he had offered counsel to Charles Foley--whom he now
served as a literary representative, as he had for Dame Jean--and discussed the
sale of the archive at Christie's. But the American emphasized that he had not
seen or spoken to Green for more than a year. On the night that Green died, he
revealed with some embarrassment, he was walking through London with his wife
on a group tour of Jack the Ripper's crime scenes. He said that he had learned
only recently that Green had become fixated on him before his death, and he
noted that some Sherlockians blurred the line between fandom and fanaticism.
"It was because of the way people felt about the character," he said.
Holmes was a sort of "vampire-like creature," he said; he consumed
some people.
The waiter had served our meals, and the American paused to take a bite of
steak and onion rings. He then explained that Conan Doyle had felt oppressed by
his creation. Though the stories had made him the highest-paid author of his
day, Conan Doyle wearied of constantly "inventing problems and building up
chains of inductive reason," as he once said bitterly. In the stories,
Holmes himself seems overwhelmed by his task, going days without sleep, and,
after solving a case, often shooting up cocaine ("a seven-percent
solution") in order to spell the subsequent drain and boredom. But, for
Conan Doyle, there seemed to be no similar release, and he confided to one
friend that "Holmes is becoming such a burden to me that it makes my life
unendurable."
The very qualities that had made Holmes invincible--"his character
admits of no light or shade," as Conan Doyle put it--eventually made him
intolerable. Moreover, Conan Doyle feared that the detective stories eclipsed
what he called his "more serious literary work." He had spent years
researching several historical novels, which, he was convinced, would earn him
a place in the pantheon of writers. In 1891, after he finished "The White
Company," which was set in the Middle Ages and based on tales of
"gallant, pious knights," he proclaimed, "Well, I'll never beat
that." The book was popular in its day, but it was soon obscured by the
shadow of Holmes, as were his other novels, with their comparatively stilted,
lifeless prose. After Conan Doyle completed the domestic novel "A Duet
with an Occasional Chorus," in 1899, Andrew Lang, a well-known editor who
had helped publish one of his previous books, summed up the sentiment of most
readers: "It may be a vulgar taste, but we decidedly prefer the adventures
of Dr. Watson with Sherlock Holmes."
Conan Doyle was increasingly dismayed by the great paradox of his success:
the more real Holmes became in the minds of readers, the less the author seemed
to exist. Finally, Conan Doyle felt that he had no choice. As the American put
it, "He had to kill Sherlock Holmes." Conan Doyle knew that the death
had to be spectacular. "A man like that mustn't die of a pin-prick or
influenza," he told a close friend. "His end must be violent and
intensely dramatic." For months, he tried to imagine the perfect murder.
Then, in December, 1893, six years after he gave birth to Holmes, Conan Doyle
published "The Final Problem." The story breaks from the established
formula: there is no puzzle to be solved, no dazzling display of deductive
genius. And this time Holmes is the one pursued. He is being chased by
Professor Moriarty, "the Napoleon of crime," who is "the
organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this
great city" of London. Moriarty is the first true counterpart to Holmes, a
mathematician who is, as Holmes informs Watson, "a genius, a philosopher,
an abstract thinker." Tall and ascetic-looking, he even physically
resembles Holmes.
What is most striking about the story, though, is that the two great
logicians have descended into illogic--they are paranoid, and consumed only
with each other. At one point, Moriarty tells Holmes, "This is not danger.
. . . It is inevitable destruction." Finally, the two converge on a cliff
overlooking Reichenbach Falls, in Switzerland. As Watson later deduces from
evidence at the scene, Holmes and Moriarty struggled by the edge of the
precipice before plunging to their deaths. After finishing the story, Conan
Doyle wrote in his diary, with apparent delight, "Killed Holmes."
As the American spoke of these details, he seemed stunned that Conan Doyle
had gone through with such an extraordinary act. Still, he pointed out, Conan
Doyle could not escape from his creation. In England, men reportedly wore black
armbands in mourning. In America, clubs devoted to the cause "Let's Keep
Holmes Alive" were formed. Though Conan Doyle insisted that Holmes's death
was "justifiable homicide," readers denounced him as a brute and
demanded that he resuscitate their hero; after all, no one had actually seen
him go off the cliff. As Green wrote in a 1983 essay, "If ever a murderer
was to be haunted by the man he had killed and to be forced to atone for his
act, it was the creator, turned destroyer, of Sherlock Holmes." In 1901,
under increasing pressure, Conan Doyle released "The Hound of the
Baskervilles," about an ancient family curse, but the events in the story
antedated Holmes's death. Then, two years later, Conan Doyle succumbed
completely, and began writing new Holmes stories, explaining, less than
convincingly, in "The Adventure of the Empty House," that Holmes had
never plunged to his death but merely arranged it to look that way so he could
escape from Moriarty's gang.
The American told me that even after Conan Doyle died Holmes continued to
loom over his descendants. "Dame Jean thought that Sherlock Holmes was the
family curse," he said. Like her father, he said, she had tried to draw
attention to his other works but was constantly forced to tend to the
detective's thousands of fans--many of whom sent letters addressed to Holmes,
requesting his help in solving real crimes. In a 1935 essay entitled
"Sherlock Holmes the God," G. K. Chesterton observed of Sherlockians,
"It is getting beyond a joke. The hobby is hardening into a
delusion."
Several actors who played Holmes were also haunted by him, the American
said. In a 1956 autobiography, "In and Out of Character," Basil
Rathbone, who played the detective in more than a dozen films, complained that
because of his portrayal of Holmes his renown for other parts, including
Oscar-nominated ones, was "sinking into oblivion." The public
conflated him with his most famous character, which the studio and audience
demanded he play again and again, until by the end he, too, lamented that he
"could not kill Mr. Holmes." Another actor, Jeremy Brett, had a
breakdown while playing the detective and was eventually admitted to a
psychiatric ward, where he was said to have cried out, "Damn you,
Holmes!"
At one point, the American showed me a thick book, which he had brought to
the pub. It was part of a multivolume history that he was writing on the Baker
Street Irregulars and Sherlockian scholarship. He had started the project in
1988. "I thought if I searched pretty assiduously I'd find enough material
to do a single hundred-and-fifty-page volume," he said. "I've now
done five volumes for more than fifteen hundred pages, and I've only gotten up
to 1950." He added, "It's been a slippery slope into madness and
obsession."
As he spoke of his fascination with Holmes, he recalled one of the last
times he had seen Green, three years earlier, at a symposium at the University
of Minnesota. Green had given a lecture on "The Hound of the
Baskervilles." "It was a multimedia presentation about the origins of
the novel, and it was just dazzling," the American said. He repeated the
word "dazzling" several times ("It's the only word to describe
it"), and as he sat up in his chair and his eyes brightened I realized
that I was talking not to Green's Moriarty but to his soul mate. Then, catching
himself, he reminded me that he had a full-time job and a family. "The
danger is if you have nothing else in your life but Sherlock Holmes," he
said.
In 1988, Richard Green made a pilgrimage to Reichenbach Falls to see where
his childhood hero had nearly met his demise. Conan Doyle himself had visited
the site in 1893, and Green wanted to repeat the author's journey. Standing at
the edge of the falls, Green stared at the chasm below, where, as Watson noted
after he called out, "My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a
rolling echo from the cliffs around me."
By the mid-nineteen-nineties, Green knew that he would not have access to
the Conan Doyle archive until Dame Jean died--presuming that she bequeathed the
papers to the British Library. In the meantime, he continued researching his
biography, which, he concluded, would require no less than three volumes: the
first would cover Conan Doyle's childhood; the second, the arc of his literary
career; the third, his descent into a kind of madness.
Relying on public documents, Green outlined this last stage, which began
after Conan Doyle started using his powers of observation to solve real-world
mysteries. In 1906, Conan Doyle took up the case of George Edalji, a half-Parsi
Indian living near Birmingham, who faced seven years of hard labor for
allegedly mutilating his neighbors' cattle during the night. Conan Doyle
suspected that Edalji had been tagged as a criminal merely because of his
ethnicity, and he assumed the role of detective. Upon meeting his client, he
noticed that the young man was holding a newspaper inches from his face.
"Aren't you astigmatic?" Conan Doyle asked.
"Yes," Edalji admitted.
Conan Doyle called in an ophthalmologist, who confirmed that Edalji's malady
was so severe that he was unable to see properly even with glasses. Conan Doyle
then trekked to the scene of the crime, traversing a maze of railroad tracks
and hedges. "I, a strong and active man, in broad daylight, found it a
hard matter to pass," he later wrote. Indeed, he contended, it would have
been impossible for a nearly blind person to make the journey and then
slaughter an animal in the pitch black of night. A tribunal soon concurred, and
the New
York Times declared, "conan doyle solves a new dreyfus case."
Conan Doyle even helped in solving a case of a serial killer, after he
spotted newspaper accounts in which two women had died in the same bizarre
manner: the victims were recent brides, who had "accidentally" drowned
in their bathtubs. Conan Doyle informed Scotland Yard of his theory, telling
the inspector, in an echo of Holmes, "No time is to be lost"; the
killer, dubbed "the Bluebeard of the Bath," was subsequently caught
and convicted in a sensational trial.
Around 1914, Conan Doyle tried to apply his rational powers to the most
important matter of his day--the logic of launching the First World War. He was
convinced that the war was not simply about entangling alliances and a dead
archduke; it was a sensible way to restore the codes of honor and moral purpose
that he had celebrated in his historical novels. That year, he unleashed a
spate of propaganda, declaring, "Fear not, for our sword will not be
broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands." In the Holmes story
"His Last Bow," which is set in 1914, the detective tells Watson that
after the "storm has cleared" a "cleaner, better, stronger land
will lie in the sunshine."
Though Conan Doyle was too old to fight, many of his relatives heeded his
call "to arms," including his son Kingsley. The glorious battle Conan
Doyle envisioned, however, became a cataclysm. The products of scientific
reason--machines and engineering and electronics--were transformed into agents
of destruction. Conan Doyle visited the battlefield by the Somme, where tens of
thousands of British soldiers died, and where he later reported seeing a
soldier "drenched crimson from head to foot, with two great glazed eyes
looking upwards through a mask of blood." In 1918, a chastened Conan Doyle
realized that the conflict was "evidently preventable." By that time,
ten million people had perished, including Kingsley, who died from battle
wounds and influenza.
After the war, Conan Doyle wrote a handful of Holmes stories, yet the field
of detective fiction was changing. The all-knowing detective gradually gave way
to the hardboiled dick, who acted more on instinct and gin than on reason. In
"The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler, while admiring Conan
Doyle, dismissed the tradition of the "grim logician" and his
"exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues," which now seemed
like an absurdity.
Meanwhile, in his own life, Conan Doyle seemed to abandon reason altogether.
As one of Green's colleagues in the Baker Street Irregulars, Daniel Stashower,
relates in a 1999 book, "Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan
Doyle," the creator of Holmes began to believe in ghosts. He attended
seances and received messages from the dead through "the power of
automatic writing," a method akin to that of the Ouija board. During one
session, Conan Doyle, who had once considered the belief in life after death as
"a delusion," claimed that his dead younger brother said, "It is
so grand to be in touch like this."
One day, Conan Doyle heard a voice in the seance room. As he later described
the scene in a letter to a friend:
I said, "Is that you, boy?" He said in a very intense whisper and
a tone all his own, "Father!" and then after a pause, "Forgive
me!"I said, "There was never anything to forgive. You were the best
son a man ever had." A strong hand descended on my head which was slowly
pressed forward, and I felt a kiss just above my brow."Are you
happy?" I cried. There was a pause and then very gently, "I am so happy."
The creator of Sherlock Holmes had become the St. Paul of psychics. Conan
Doyle claimed to see not only dead family members but fairies as well. He
championed photographs taken in 1917 by two girls that purported to show such
phantasmal creatures, even though, as one of the girls later admitted, "I
could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I've always marvelled that
anybody ever took it seriously." Conan Doyle, however, was convinced, and
even published a book called "The Coming of Fairies." He opened the
Psychic Bookshop, in London, and told friends that he had received messages
that the world was coming to an end. "I suppose I am Sherlock Holmes, if
anybody is, and I say that the case for spiritualism is absolutely
proved," he declared. In 1918, a headline in the Sunday Express asked,
"is conan doyle mad?"
For the first time, Green struggled to rationalize his subject's life. In
one essay, Green wrote, "It is hard to understand how a man who had stood
for sound common sense and healthy attitudes could sit in darkened rooms
watching for ectoplasm." Green reacted at times as if his hero had
betrayed him. In one passage, he wrote angrily, "Conan Doyle was deluding
himself."
"One thing Richard couldn't stand was Conan Doyle's being involved with
spiritualism," Edwards said. "He thought it crazy." His friend
Dixon Smith told me, "It was all Conan Doyle. He pursued him with all his
mind and body." Green's house became filled with more and more objects
from Conan Doyle's life: long-forgotten propaganda leaflets and speeches on
spiritualism; an arcane study of the Boer War; previously unknown essays on
photography. "I remember once, I discovered a copy of 'A Duet with an
Occasional Chorus,' " Gibson said. "It had a great red cover on it. I
showed it to Richard and he got really excited. He said, 'God, this must have
been the salesman's copy.' " When Green found one of the few surviving
copies of the 1887 Beeton's Christmas Annual, with "A Study in
Scarlet," which was worth as much as a hundred and thirty thousand
dollars, he sent a card to a friend with two words on it: "At last!"
Green also wanted to hold things that Conan Doyle himself had held: letter
openers and pens and spectacles. "He would collect all day and all night,
and I mean night," his brother, Scirard, told me. Green covered many of
his walls with Conan Doyle's family photographs. He even had a piece of
wallpaper from one of Conan Doyle's homes. " 'Obsession' is by no means
too strong a word to describe what Richard had," his friend Nicholas
Utechin, the editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, said.
"It's self-perpetuating and I don't know how to stop," Green
confessed to an antiques magazine in 1999.
By 2000, his house resembled the attic at Poulton Hall, only now he seemed
to be living in a museum dedicated to Conan Doyle rather than to Holmes.
"I have around forty thousand books," Green told the magazine.
"Then, of course, there are the photographs, the pictures, the papers, and
all the other ephemera. I know it sounds a lot, but, you see, the more you
have, the more you feel you need."
And what he longed for most remained out of reach: the archive. After Dame
Jean died, in 1997, and no papers materialized at the British Library, he
became increasingly frustrated. Where he had once judiciously built his
conjectures about Conan Doyle's life, he now seemed reckless. In 2002, to the
shock of Doyleans around the world, Green wrote a paper claiming that he had
proof that Conan Doyle had had a tryst with Jean Leckie, his delicately
beautiful second wife, before his first wife, Louisa, died of tuberculosis, in
1906. Though it was well known that Conan Doyle had formed a bond with Leckie
during his wife's long illness, he had always insisted, "I fight the devil
and I win." And, to maintain an air of Victorian rectitude, he often
brought along chaperones when he and Leckie were together. Green based his
allegation on the 1901 census, which reported that on the day the survey was
taken Conan Doyle was staying at the Ashdown Forest Hotel, in East Sussex. So,
too, was Leckie. "Conan Doyle could not have chosen a worse weekend on
which to have a private tryst," Green wrote. Yet Green failed to note one
crucial fact also contained in the census report--Conan Doyle's mother was
staying in the hotel with him, apparently as a chaperone. Later, Green was
forced to recant, in a letter to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, saying, "I
was guilty of the capital mistake of theorising without data."
Still, he continued to lash out at Conan Doyle, as Conan Doyle once had at
Sherlock Holmes. Edwards recalled that, in one conversation, Green decried
Conan Doyle as "unoriginal" and "a plagiarist." He
confessed to another friend, "I've wasted my whole life on a second-rate
writer."
"I think he was frustrated because the family wasn't coming to any
agreement," Smith said. "The archive wasn't made available, and he
got angry not at the heirs but at Conan Doyle."
Last March, when Green hurried to Christie's after the auction of the papers
was announced, he discovered that the archive was as rich and as abundant as
he'd imagined. Among the thousands of items were fragments of the first tale
that Conan Doyle wrote, at the age of six; illustrated logs from when Conan
Doyle was a surgeon on a Scottish whaling ship, in the eighteen-eighties;
letters from Conan Doyle's father (whose drawings in the asylum resembled the
fairies that his son later seized upon as real); a brown envelope with a cross
and the name of his dead son inscribed upon it; the manuscript of Conan Doyle's
first novel, which was never published; a missive from Conan Doyle to his
brother, which seemed to confirm that Green's hunch had been right, and that
Conan Doyle had in fact begun an affair with Leckie. Jane Flower, who helped to
organize the papers for Christie's, told reporters, "The whereabouts of
this material was previously unknown, and it is for this reason that no
modern-day biography of the author exists."
Meanwhile, back at his home, Green tried to piece together why the archive
was about to slip into private hands once more. According to Green's family, he
typed notes in his computer, reexamining the trail of evidence, which he
thought proved that the papers belonged to the British Library. He worked late
into the night, frequently going without sleep. None of it, however, seemed to
add up. At one point, he typed in bold letters, "stick to the facts."
After another sleepless night, he told his sister that the world seemed
"Kafkaesque."
Several hours before Green died, he called his friend Utechin at home. Green
had asked him to find a tape of an old BBC
radio interview, which, Green recalled, quoted one of Conan Doyle's heirs
saying that the archive should be given to the British Library. Utechin said
that he had found the tape, but there was no such statement on the recording.
Green became apoplectic, and accused his friend of conspiring against him, as
if he were another Moriarty. Finally, Utechin said, "Richard, you've lost
it!"
One afternoon while I was at my hotel in London, the phone rang. "I
need to see you again," John Gibson said. "I'll take the next train
in." Before he hung up, he added, "I have a theory."
I met him in my hotel room. He was carrying several scraps of paper, on
which he had taken notes. He sat down by the window, his slender figure
silhouetted in the fading light, and announced, "I think it was
suicide."
He had sifted through the data, including details that I had shared with him
from my own investigation. There was mounting evidence, he said, that his
rationalist friend was betraying signs of irrationality in the last week of his
life. There was the fact that there was no evidence of forced entry at Green's
home. And there was the fact, perhaps most critically, of the wooden spoon by
Green's hand.
"He had to have used it to tighten the cord" like a tourniquet,
Gibson said. "If someone else had garroted him, why would he need the
spoon? The killer could simply use his hands." He continued, "I think
things in his life had not turned out the way he wanted. This Christie's sale
simply brought everything to a head."
He glanced nervously at his notes, which he strained to see without his
magnifying glass. "That's not all," he said. "I think he wanted
it to look like murder."
He waited to assess my reaction, then went on, "That's why he didn't
leave a note. That's why he took his voice off the answering machine. That's
why he sent that message to his sister with the three phone numbers on it.
That's why he spoke of the American who was after him. He must have been
planning it for days, laying the foundation, giving us false clues."
I knew that, in detective fiction, the reverse scenario generally turns out
to be true--a suicide is found to have been murder. As Holmes declares in
"The Resident Patient," "This is no suicide. . . . It is a very
deeply planned and cold-blooded murder." There is, however, one notable
exception. It is, eerily enough, in one of the last Holmes mysteries, "The
Problem of Thor Bridge," a story that Green once cited in an essay. A wife
is found lying dead on a bridge, shot in the head at point-blank range. All the
evidence points to one suspect: the governess, with whom the husband had been
flirting. Yet Holmes shows that the wife had not been killed by anyone; rather,
enraged by jealousy over her husband's illicit overtures to the governess, she
had killed herself and framed the woman whom she blamed for her misery. Of all
Conan Doyle's stories, it digs deepest into the human psyche and its criminal
motivations. As the governess tells Holmes, "When I reached the bridge she
was waiting for me. Never did I realize till that moment how this poor creature
hated me. She was like a mad woman--indeed, I think she was a mad woman, subtly
mad with the deep power of deception which insane people may have."
I wondered if Green could have been so enraged with the loss of the archive
that he might have done something similar, and even tried to frame the
American, whom he blamed for ruining his relationship with Dame Jean and for
the sale of the archive. I wondered if he could have tried, in one last
desperate attempt, to create order out of the chaos around him. I wondered if
this theory, however improbable, was in fact the least "impossible."
I shared with Gibson some other clues I had uncovered: the call that Green
had made to the reporter days before his death, saying that
"something" might happen to him; a reference in a Holmes story to one
of Moriarty's main henchmen as a "garroter by trade"; and a statement
to the coroner by Green's sister, who said that the note with the three phone
numbers had reminded her of "the beginning of a thriller."
After a while, Gibson looked up at me, his face ghastly white. "Don't
you see?" he exclaimed. "He staged the whole thing. He created the
perfect mystery."
Before I went back to America, I went to see Green's sister, Priscilla West.
She lives near Oxford,
in a three-story, eighteenth-century brick house with a walled garden. She had
long, wavy brown hair, an attractive round face, and small oval glasses. She
invited me inside with a reticent voice, saying, "Are you a drawing-room
person or a kitchen person?"
I shrugged uncertainly, and she led me into the drawing room, which had
antique furniture and her father's children's books on the shelves. As we sat
down, I explained to her that I had been struggling to write her brother's
story. The American had told me, "There is no such thing as a definitive
biography," and Green seemed particularly resistant to explication.
"Richard compartmentalized his life," his sister said. "There
are a lot of things we've only found out since he died." At the inquest,
his family, and most of his friends, had been startled when Lawrence Keen, who
was nearly half Green's age, announced that he had been Richard's lover years
ago. "No one in the family knew" that Green was gay, his sister
explained. "It wasn't something he ever talked about."
As West recalled other surprising fragments of Green's biography (travels to
Tibet, a brief attempt at writing a novel), I tried to picture him as best I could
with his glasses, his plastic bag in hand, and his wry smile. West had seen her
brother's body lying on the bed, and several times she told me, "I just
wish . . ." before falling silent. She handed me copies of the eulogies
that Green's friends had delivered at the memorial service, which was held on
May 22nd, the day Conan Doyle was born. On the back of the program from the
service were several quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories:
I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.He appears
to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.His career has been an
extraordinary one.
After a while, she got up to pour herself a cup of tea. When she sat down
again, she said that her brother had willed his collection to a library in Portsmouth,
near where Conan Doyle wrote the first two Holmes stories, so that other
scholars could have access to it. The collection was so large that it had taken
two weeks, and required twelve truckloads, to cart it all away. It was
estimated to be worth several million dollars--far more, in all likelihood,
than the treasured archive. "He really did not like the idea of
scholarship being put second to greed," West said. "He lived and died
by this."
She then told me something about the archive which had only recently come to
light, and which her brother had never learned: Dame Jean Conan Doyle, while
dying of cancer, had made a last-minute deed of apportionment, splitting the
archive between herself and the three heirs of her former sister-in-law, Anna Conan
Doyle. What was being auctioned off, therefore, belonged to the three heirs,
and not to Dame Jean, and, though some people still questioned the morality of
the sale, the British Library had reached the conclusion that it was legal.
Green also could not know that after the auction, on May 19th, the most
important papers ended up at the British Library. Dame Jean had not allotted
those documents to the other heirs, and had willed many of them to the library;
at the same time, the library had purchased much of the remaining material at
the auction. As Gibson later told me, "The tragedy is that Richard could
have still written his biography. He would have had everything he needed."
Two questions, however, remained unclear. How, I asked West, did an American
voice wind up on her brother's answering machine?
"I'm afraid it's not that complicated," she said. The machine, she
continued, was made in the United States and had a built-in recorded message;
when her brother took off his personal message, a prerecorded American voice
appeared.
I then asked about the phone numbers in the note. She shook her head in
dismay. They added up to nothing, she said. They were merely those of two
reporters her brother had spoken to, and the number of someone at Christie's.
Finally, I asked what she thought had happened to her brother. At one point,
Scirard Lancelyn Green had told the London Observer that he thought murder was
"entirely possible"; and, for all my attempts to build a case that
transcended doubt, there were still questions. Hadn't the police told the
coroner that an intruder could have locked Green's apartment door while
slipping out, thus giving the illusion that his victim had died alone? Wasn't
it possible that Green had known the murderer and simply let him in? And how
could someone, even in a fit of madness, garrote himself with merely a shoelace
and the help of a spoon?
His sister glanced away, as if trying one last time to arrange all the
pieces. Then she said, "I don't think we'll ever know for sure what really
happened. Unlike in detective stories, we have to live without answers."