Was the death the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert an elaborate suicide or a murder? NewYorkerArchive
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.
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 “ ‘“I’m not sure,” I said.
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.“Not that we know of. Richard had a valuable collection of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle books, and nothing appears to be missing.”
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.
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.
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 début, in the 1887a magazine of somewhat lurid fiction, he was considered not just a character but a paragon of the Victorian faith in all things scientific.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One day, Conan Doyle heard a voice in the séance room. As he later described the scene in a letter to a friend:He said in a very intense whisper and a tone all his own, “Father!” and then after a pause, “Forgive me!” 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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, Anne Conan Doyle.
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