Richard Lancelyn Green | |
|---|---|
| Born | Richard Gordon Lancelyn Green (1953-07-10)10 July 1953 |
| Died | 27 March 2004(2004-03-27) (aged 50) |
| Occupation | Scholar, editor, writer |
Richard Gordon[1] Lancelyn Green (10 July 1953 – 27 March 2004) was a British scholar ofArthur Conan Doyle andSherlock Holmes, and was generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.[2]
Lancelyn Green was born inBebington, Cheshire, England,[2] the younger son ofRoger Lancelyn Green and June, daughter of Sidney Herbert Burdett.[1] His father was an author known for his popular adaptations of theArthurian,Robin Hood andHomeric myths, and his mother was a drama teacher and adjudicator. The Lancelyn Green family had been lords of the manor of Poulton-Lancelyn in Cheshire since at least 1093; Randle Greene [sic] had married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of William Lancelyn, in the reign ofElizabeth I.[1]
Lancelyn Green attendedBradfield College in Berkshire, and thenUniversity College, Oxford, where he earned a degree inEnglish. After leaving university, he travelled extensively, throughout Europe, India and South-east Asia.
Lancelyn Green was a collector of Sherlock 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's writings that had never before been collected in book form:Uncollected Stories (1982),Essays on Photography (1982), andLetters to the Press (1986), all co-edited with Gibson. The Conan Doyle bibliography earned Lancelyn Green and Gibson a SpecialEdgar Award from theMystery Writers of America during 1984.
Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own.The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologisedDoyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings,The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches, andLetters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) collected the most interesting of letters to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of theAbbey National Building Society, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to the fictional "221B".
Lancelyn Green was something of a showman, appearing as a 19th-century music hall master of ceremonies at events of the Sherlock Holmes Society, of which he was chairman from 1996 to 1999, and dressing in period costume to visitReichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have died until Conan Doyle "resurrected" him eight years later. For his encyclopaedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.
Later in life, Lancelyn Green worked extensively on notes and collecting material for a planned three-volume biography of Conan Doyle, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. He lamented the legal wranglings needed to gain rights to Conan Doyle's private papers and manuscripts, which were planned to be sold at an auction.
During August 2004, it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed his extensive collection on Conan Doyle to thePortsmouth 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. Had Portsmouth declined the collection, Green's will stated the archive should instead be given to libraries inEdinburgh, Doyle's home town.
As early as the age of seven years, Lancelyn Green began his collection ofSherlockiana, and created his version of 221B Baker Street in an attic room atPoulton Hall, gleaning material for a few shillings at junk shops and from the family's ownVictoriana. Later he began to assemble his literary collection, and would add any edition of Doyle's output, as well as posters, ephemera and novelty items with a Sherlock Holmes theme or Doyle association.
By the date of his death Lancelyn Green had been collecting voraciously for more than 40 years and without doubt possessed the largest collection of Doyleiana that existed privately (and probably the largest such collection that ever could exist now that it has been bequeathed to the City ofPortsmouth).[2] The collection is now held by thePortsmouth City Museum where exhibitions have created much interest.[3] The patron of the collection isSir Stephen Fry.[4]
Lancelyn Green suspected that the Conan Doyle papers being auctioned atChristie's were part of a collection that DameJean Conan Doyle, the author's daughter, actually wanted theBritish Library to have.[5] 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 endanger his life. His behaviour became increasingly erratic, and once he insisted on speaking to a visitor in the garden because he said his apartment was bugged.
During the night of his death, his sister telephoned his apartment,[6] obtaining only his answering machine, which had a new message with an American voice (this was found later to be the standard message tape supplied with the machine). Her worries about this resulted in 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 there was some newspaper gossip. Because theCriminal Investigation Department (CID) was not called at the start, any evidence that might have been useful for a murder enquiry had been disturbed or removed during the course of dealing with the body.
Thecoroner returned an open verdict. Many of Lancelyn Green's best friends thought it was not in his nature to kill himself. However, some thought the death to have been an elaborate suicide, intended to seem like murder, to cast suspicion upon one of his rivals. This replicates the plot of one of the last Sherlock Holmes mysteries, "The Problem of Thor Bridge", in which a woman dies by suicide in a manner meant to implicate the woman with whom her husband had been flirting.[7]
Lancelyn Green's death inspired the December 2004New Yorker article "Mysterious Circumstances" byDavid Grann.[7]
Lancelyn Green's bizarre death later inspired a novel that deals with a fictional Holmes expert who dies in exactly the same manner as Lancelyn Green.The Sherlockian (2010) byGraham Moore features a Holmes expert and a missing Doyle manuscript.[8]
In 2019, a play calledMysterious Circumstances, both whose title and subject matter were inspired by the 2004 New Yorker article, premiered at theUCLAGeffen Playhouse. StarringAlan Tudyk and written byMichael Mitnick, the story unravels Lancelyn Green's passion and obsession with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and his mysterious death – an alleged murder – which Holmes himself then sets about solving.[9]
