|
He also had letters from
Doyle; a cigarette case inscribed “From Sherlock Holmes” that had been
given to Doyle by Sidney Paget; a hypodermic syringe containing a 7 per
cent solution of cocaine; letter openers, pens, and eyeglasses that Doyle
had owned; Doyle family photographs hanging on the walls; and a piece of
wallpaper from one of Doyle’s homes. He and John Michael Gibson coedited My
Evening with Sherlock Holmes (1981), a collection of parodies and
pastiches, and three books in a series called “The Unknown Conan Doyle”: Essays
on Photography (1982), Uncollected Stories (1982), and Letters
to the Press (1986). In 1985 they published a 712-page bibliography of
Doyle’s writings, with a foreword by Graham Greene, that received an
Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
On his own,
without Gibson, Green edited The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983);
Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985), a collection of the letters sent
from around the world to 221B Baker Street, which is actually the address
of the Abbey National Building Society; and The Further Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes: After Arthur Conan Doyle (1985), another collection of
pastiches. In the 1990s he annotated and wrote the introductions to two
volumes in the Oxford University Press edition of the Canon: The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
He lectured to Sherlock Holmes societies around the world. While he was
chairman from 1996 to 1999, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London got
permission and raised the funds for the eleven-foot bronze statue of Holmes
that now stands outside the Baker Street Underground station. At the annual
dinner of the Sherlock Holmes Society at the House of Commons in January
2004 he became the first recipient of the Tony Howlett Memorial Award,
named for the founder and former president of the society, who died in
2003. (By the way, I met Anthony Howlett at the Sherlock Holmes Pub when I
went to England for the first time in 1975. He invited me to come to his
home if I ever got back to London and see his collection of Sherlockiana. I
regret to say that I never did it.) Green was also a member of the Baker
Street Irregulars in New York and an honorary member of the Arthur Conan
Doyle Society of British Columbia.
Green’s great ambition was to write the definitive biography of Arthur
Conan Doyle, one that would not merely report the surface events of his
life but would reveal the inner man. To do that, he thought, he needed to
have access to an archive of Doyle’s letters, diaries, and manuscripts that
had disappeared after Doyle’s death in 1930 and was feared by many scholars
to have been destroyed. Green discovered that Doyle’s son Adrian, with the
agreement of the other heirs, had stored the papers in his home, the
Château de Lucens, near Geneva. But without the knowledge of his brothers
and sisters he began sneaking the Sherlock Holmes-related items out and
selling them to collectors to support his lavish life-style. In 1970 he
died of a heart attack, giving rise to a legend that the archive was
cursed. After his death, the archive vanished again. Green discovered a
tangled web of deceit and double-crossing as the various heirs tried to
gain control of the archive. Eventually he met Conan Doyle’s only surviving
child, Dame Jean Conan Doyle. He later claimed that she showed him some
boxes at her apartment in London; he looked inside and saw what he believed
to be part of the missing archive. Jean Conan Doyle told him that because
of litigation among the heirs, she couldn’t let him read the papers; but
she said that she planned to bequeath them all to the British Library,
where scholars would have full access to them.
Since he wouldn’t be able to use the papers until after Jean Conan Doyle
died, Green continued the research for his biography of her father using
public records. He decided that it would require at least three volumes:
the first on Doyle’s childhood, the second on his literary career, and the
third on his involvement with spiritualism and fairies, which was the one aspect
of Doyle that Green never could understand. Jean Conan Doyle died in 1997,
but years went by without the papers being donated to the British Library.
Green became more and more frustrated, and he seems to have taken out his
frustrations on Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2002 he wrote an article claiming to
prove that
|
|
Doyle had had sex with Jean
Leckie, who became his second wife, before his first wife, Louise, died of
tuberculosis, even though Doyle always insisted that his relationship with
Leckie was never consummated until after their marriage. Green’s evidence
was that Doyle and Leckie were both staying at the Ashdown Forest Hotel in
East Sussex on the day the 1901 census was taken. “Conan Doyle could not
have chosen a worse weekend on which to have a private tryst,” he wrote.
|
|