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After a year, the major and
Adrian had a falling out, and the Foleys returned to Gloucestershire.
Adrian sold some of the papers before he died in 1970 and left the rest to
his Danish wife, Anna. In the 1980s Charles Foley was studying for a master
of science in astrophysics in London and decided to contact his cousin,
Dame Jean Conan Doyle. She was childless, and was delighted to find a
family member who could act as executor of her estate. Then Adrian’s widow,
Anna, died in 1991 and left her share of the papers to Foley, whom she
remembered from his stay at the château when he was a boy, and two of his
cousins. Thus, the collection was owned jointly by Jean Conan Doyle and by
Anna’s estate. In 1997, when Jean was dying of cancer, Foley and Anna’s
other heirs met in Jean’s apartment in London to divide up the property.
They made lists
of the items and, deferring to Jean’s seniority, the others asked her to
take her pick. She said, “I’ll have A, B, C, and P, Q, R.” The transaction
was recorded in a deed of assignment and partition, and Jean’s lawyer
packed her items in separate boxes and took them to his office. Jean’s
selections, which amounted to two out of fifteen boxes of materials, were
given to the British Library; the rest, owned by Foley and his cousins,
went to Christie’s.
The Christie’s
auction on May 19, 2004, consisted of 137 lots; 104 of the lots were sold
for $1,678,926, while the other 33 didn’t meet their reserve price and went
unsold. Among the items that were sold were a draft of A Study in
Scarlet, a diary entry for December 1893 that says “Killed Holmes,” a fragment of the manuscript of “The Reigate Squires,” typescripts
of the play The Speckled Band and its unfinished precursor, The
Stonor Case. Many of the items were bought by private American
collectors, but the British
Library acquired more than 1,200 documents in the sale,
adding to the 900 documents left to the library by Jean Conan Doyle. The library is also trying to secure some of
the items that went unsold at the auction.In his New
Yorker article Grann quotes John Michael Gibson: “The tragedy is that
Richard could have still written his biography. He would have had
everything he needed.” And in an interview on the New Yorker Web
site Grann says that “at least one biographer is already . . . tapping into
this new wealth of information, which has been hidden for so long. It is
sad, though, that Green will not be the one to write the biography himself,
as he had always hoped. He was the ideal person to do it; he knew more
about Conan Doyle than anyone.”
Now, a
postscript on garroting. I don’t know about you, but my idea of this
practice comes mainly from the first Godfather movie, where Luca
Brasi has his hand stuck to the bar with a knife and is garroted by
Sollozzo, after which he is sent to sleep with the fishes; and at the end,
where Michael Corleone’s brother-in-law, Carlo, who lured Sonny into the
ambush at the tollbooth, gets into the car thinking he’s going to be taken
to the airport to fly to Las Vegas and instead is garroted from the
backseat by Clemenza and kicks out the windshield in his death throes. So
I’ve always thought of garroting as a method of murder, and a particularly
nasty one at that. So I’ve always been puzzled by Holmes saying in “The
Empty House” that he recognized the Moriarty gang’s sentinel outside 221B
Baker Street as “a harmless enough fellow, Parker by name, a garroter by
trade.” “By trade” would indicate that he was a professional; in other
words, a hired killer, or what we would nowadays refer to as a “hit man.” I
wondered how Holmes could call somebody like that “harmless.” Was he being
facetious? But then I saw that Jack Tracy’s Encyclopedia Sherlockiana
defines garroter as “one who commits street robbery by first
rendering his victim insensible.” So according to that definition, death
was not always involved, at least in Victorian days. And sure enough, in
doing some more Web surfing, I came upon an article titled “Garroting: A
Guide. Best Practices for Half-strangling Robbery Victims,” by Alfred H.
Guernsey, from the May 1853 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
Here is part of what it says:
We have been told, and the statement is curious if
true, that the garroter first acquired his art in a convict-ship, where her
Majesty’s jailers practiced it on him occasionally, whenever he
became very outrageous. Finding how easily he was subdued by this method,
and how little it injured him if coolly applied, the convict noted the
trick, with an eye to business when he should become a ticket-of-leave man.
Perhaps it is because the lessons they
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