![]() ![]() 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. ![]() After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer-but nothing happened. 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. Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. 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. 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 invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. “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. (“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. Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. 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.įor 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. After Adrian’s death, the papers apparently vanished. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack-giving rise to the legend of the curse. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the château without his siblings’ knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. ![]() 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 château that he owned in Switzerland. 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. 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. 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.” 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. Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Was the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert, an elaborate suicide or a murder? Illustration by Jean-François Martin ![]()
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