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But he had not noticed that
the census report also showed that Doyle’s mother was staying at the hotel
with him, evidently acting as a chaperone, as she and others frequently did
during his meetings with Leckie. Green recanted his claim in a letter to The
Sherlock Holmes Journal in which he said that he had been guilty of
violating Holmes’s rule against theorizing without data. In conversations
with friends, however, he called Doyle “unoriginal” and “a plagiarist” and said,
“I’ve wasted my whole life on a second-rate writer.”
Even so, he was shocked when an announcement appeared in the newspapers on
March 17, 2004:
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A lost collection of personal papers belonging to British author Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle has been found in London, according to auction house
Christie’s.
The collection contains 3,000 items which went missing during a legal
dispute over the writer’s estate following his death in 1930. . . .
Christie’s says the collection includes personal letters, notes and
hand-written manuscripts which illustrate the course of the writer’s
creative output. Most have never been published.
The collection was found in the offices of a London legal firm and will
go on display in May before being sold by Christie’s for an estimated
$US3.6 million.
One of the most important items is a sketch for the first appearance of
Sherlock Holmes in the novel A
Study in Scarlet, with the original title A Tangled Skein crossed through.
Christie’s manuscript consultant Jane Flower said: “The whereabouts of
this material was previously unknown and it is for this reason that no
modern day biography of the author exists.”
Tom Lamb, the head of Christie’s books and manuscripts
department, added: “Opening the dozen or so large cardboard boxes, which
had housed the archive since the 1960s, was a spine-tingling moment that
I will never forget.”
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The sale meant that the papers would be scattered among private collectors
all over the world, who would have no obligation to make them available to
scholars—including Green. Green rushed to Christie’s and looked over some
of the items; he found that they were the treasure trove he had anticipated
and even included a letter from Doyle to Doyle’s brother, Innes, that
seemed to confirm Green’s theory that Doyle had had a physical relationship
with Jean Leckie while his first wife was still alive. He told friends and
a reporter for The Times that many of the papers were the same ones
he had seen at Jean Conan Doyle’s apartment and that he was convinced that
they had been stolen. He obtained a copy of Jean Conan Doyle’s will that
said: “I give to the British Library all . . . my late father’s original
papers, personal manuscripts, diaries, engagement books, and writings.” He
recruited members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, the Baker
Street Irregulars, and non-Sherlockian Doyle scholars to try to block the
sale, and they took their objections to Members of Parliament.
He also began to
manifest paranoid behavior. Off the record, he told the Times
reporter that “something might happen to me,” and the reporter said later
that he had the impression that Green was “in an overwrought state.” Green
told his sister, Priscilla West, that people “were behaving in a way he did
not expect them to and doing things he did not expect them to.” He sent her
a note that seemed to her “to be the beginning of a thriller novel”: it had
three names and telephone numbers and the words “Please keep these names
safe.” He became particularly preoccupied with a certain American that he
thought was out to get him. On March 24th he heard that the American was in
London and was going to attend the meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society
that night; he called a friend and screamed, “I don’t want to see him! I
don’t want to go!” and backed out of going to the meeting at the last
minute. He told his friend and former collaborator John Michael Gibson that
he feared for his life. On March 26th Green called Nicholas Utechin, the
editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, and asked him to find a tape
of a BBC interview in which one of Conan Doyle’s heirs had said that the
archive should be donated to the British Library. When Utechin called back
and told Green that he had found the tape but that no such statement was on
it, Green
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flew into a rage and accused
Utechin of conspiring against him.
On the evening of March 26th Green went out to dinner with an old friend,
Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green seemed “quite depressed.” Green
told Keen that he thought his house was bugged and that “an American was
trying to bring him down.” As they left the restaurant, Green said that
they were being followed and pointed out a car behind them.
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