Richard Gordon Lancelyn Green

Richard Gordon Lancelyn Green (born July 10, 1953 in Bebington , † March 27, 2004 in London ) was a British scholar on Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes , who is generally regarded as the world's leading scholar on these topics.

Life

His father was a writer known for his popular adaptations of the myths of Arthur, Robin Hood, and Homer, and his mother was a theater teacher and juror. The Lancelyn Green family had ruled the Poulton-Lancelyn manor in Cheshire for at least 1093. Randle Greene had Elizabeth, daughter and heir of William Lancelyn, in the reign of Elizabeth I married.

The younger son of Roger Lancelyn Green and June, daughter of Sidney Herbert Burdett, attended Bradfield College in Berkshire and then University College at Oxford , where he graduated in English. After graduation, he traveled extensively through Europe, India and Southeast Asia.

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

He also published other books. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) has summarized Doyle's non-canonical Sherlock Holmes writings, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) has the most interesting Collected letters to Sherlock Holmes. He reached the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society, whose address on Baker Street was closest to the fictional 221b .

Lancelyn Green was a type of actor who appeared as the 19th century master of ceremonies for the Sherlock Holmes Society, which he chaired from 1996 to 1999, and dressed in period costume to visit the Reichenbach Falls, in which Sherlock Holmes appeared. He was believed to have died until Conan Doyle resurrected him eight years later . He was valued by Holmes scholars for his encyclopedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and for his scientific work.

Lancelyn Green later worked extensively on notes and gathered material for a planned three-volume biography of Conan Doyle, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. He lamented the legal battles required to obtain rights to Conan Doyle's private papers and manuscripts that were to be sold at auction.

In August 2004 it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed its extensive collection to the Portsmouth Library Service through Conan Doyle . He had chosen the city because Conan Doyle had a doctor there and the first two Sherlock Holmes books were written there.

collection

He began collecting Sherlockiana at the age of seven and created his version of 221b Baker Street in an attic room at Poulton Hall, collecting shillings from junk shops and the family's Victoriana. He later began assembling his literary collection, adding each edition of Doyle's work, as well as posters, ephemera, and novelties with a Sherlock Holmes theme or a Doyle association.

At the time of his death, Lancelyn Green had been collecting insatiable items for more than 40 years and without a doubt owned the largest collection of Doyleiana that existed privately (and probably the largest collection that could ever have existed after being bequeathed to the city of Portsmouth). The collection is now kept at the Portsmouth City Museum, where exhibitions have attracted great interest. The patron of the collection is Stephen Fry .

Last days and aftermath

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

In the weeks before his death, he told friends and journalists that an unknown American was following him and that he feared his opposition to the auction could endanger his life. His behavior became more and more unpredictable and once he insisted on speaking to a visitor in the garden because he said his apartment had been bugged.

On the night of his death, his sister called his apartment and only got his answering machine, which had a new message in an American voice (this was later found to be the standard message tape that came with the device). Their concern led to Lancelyn Green being found face down on his bed, strangled with a lace tied with the handle of a wooden spoon.

Murder was suspected and there was some newspaper gossip. Since the criminal investigation department (CID) was not called at the beginning, all evidence that could have been useful for a murder investigation had been disrupted or removed in the course of handling the corpse.

The coroner returned an open judgment. Many of Lancelyn Green's best friends thought it was not in his nature to commit suicide. However, some suggested that death was an elaborate suicide designed to look like murder and suspect one of its rivals. This mirrors the plot of one of the final Sherlock Holmes puzzles, The Riddle of the Thor Bridge , in which a woman commits suicide in order to harm the woman her husband had flirted with.

The death of Lancelyn Green inspired in December 2004, the New Yorker article Mysterious Circumstances of David Grann .

The bizarre death of Lancelyn Green later inspired a novel dealing with a fictional Holmes expert who dies the same way as Lancelyn Green The Sherlockian (2010) by Graham Moore contains a Holmes expert and a missing Doyle manuscript.

In 2019, the UCLA Geffen Playhouse premiered a play called Mysterious Circumstances , the title and content of which was inspired by the 2004 article by New Yorker. In the story with Alan Tudyk and Michael Mitnicks text, Lancelyn Green's passion and obsession with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and his mysterious death - an alleged murder - that Sherlock himself wants to solve is dissolved.

Fonts (selection)

• with John Michael Gibson: A bibliography of A. Conan Doyle . Oxford 1983, ISBN 0-19-818190-6 .
• as editor: The Sherlock Holmes letters . London 1986, ISBN 0-436-18870-8 .
• as editor with John Michael Gibson: Letters to the press. The unknown Conan Doyle . London 1986, ISBN 0-436-13303-2 .
• as editor: The mystery of the spot ball. An unrecorded 1893 Sherlock Holmes parody from the Edinburgh Student . Cambridge 1997, ISBN 0-9530869-1-7 .

Web links

• Sherlock Holmes Research The Most Difficult Case