Richard Lancelyn Green

Richard Lancelyn Green (10 July, 1953 – 27 March, 2004) was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, widely considered the world's foremost scholar in the field.

Background

He was born in Bebington, Cheshire to Roger Lancelyn Green and June Green. His father was an author known for his popular adaptations of the Arthurian, Robin Hood and Homeric myths, and his mother is a drama teacher and adjudicator. He attended Bradfield College in Berkshire, and then University College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English. After leaving college, he travelled extensively, throughout Europe, India and South-East Asia.

cholarly pursuits

He was a collector of Holmes-related material, and was co-editor of the first comprehensive bibliography of Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle", with John Michael Gibson, and also a series of collections of Doyle writings that had never before been collected in book form: "Uncollected Stories" (1982), "Essays on Photography" (1982), and "Letters to the Press" (1986), all co-edited with Gibson. The Conan Doyle bibliography earned Green and Gibson a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1984.

Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own. "The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes" (1983) anthologized Doyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings, "The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and "Letters to Sherlock Holmes" (1985) collected the most interesting of letters from all over to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to 221b.

He was something of a showman, a trait that seems to have run in the family, appearing as a Victorian music hall master of ceremonies at events of the Sherlock Holmes Society, of which he was chairman from 1996 to 1999, and dressing up in period costume to visit Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have met his end until Conan Doyle resurrected him many years later. For this light touch, for his encyclopedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his masterful scholarly works, he was highly regarded and admired in the world of Holmes scholars.

Later in life, he worked extensively on notes and collecting material for a planned three-volume bibliography of Conan Doyle, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. He lamented the legal wranglings he went through to gain rights to Conan Doyle's private papers and manuscripts, which were planned to be sold at an auction.

Last days, death, and aftermath

Lancelyn Green suspected that the Conan Doyle papers being put up for auction at Christie's were part of a collection that Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the author's daughter, actually wanted the British Library to have. He attempted to stop the auction, but was unsuccessful.

In the weeks before his death, he told friends and journalists that an unidentified American was following him, and that he feared his opposition to the auction could bring his life into peril. His behaviour grew increasingly erratic, at one point he insisted on speaking to a visitor in the garden because he was sure his apartment was bugged.

On the night of his death, his sister called his apartment, reaching only his answering machine, which had a new message, in an American voice (this later turned out to be the standard message tape supplied with the machine). Her worries about this led to the discovery of Lancelyn Green's body, face down on his bed, garrotted with a shoelace that had been tightened with the handle of a wooden spoon.

Murder was suspected, and much gossip circulated both in the general press and in the world of Sherlock Holmes scholars. Because the CID was not called in at the start, any evidence that might have been useful for a murder enquiry had been disturbed or removed in the course of dealing with the body. The Coroner returned an open verdict. Many of Richard's closest friends feel it was not in his nature to commit suicide. However, some opinions settled on Lancelyn Green's death being an elaborate suicide, intended to look like murder, in order to cast suspicion upon one of his rivals. This echoes the plot of one of the last Sherlock Holmes mysteries, "The Problem of Thor Bridge", in which a woman commits suicide in a way meant to implicate the woman with whom her husband had been flirting.

In August 2004, it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed his extensive collection of Arthur Conan Doyle to the Portsmouth Library Service. Lancelyn Green had chosen the city because Conan Doyle had a medical practice there, and it was where the two first Sherlock Holmes books were written.