Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties.
And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs-including a self-styled Russian princess-who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed each other in their efforts to control the archive.įor years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives, until one day the muddled trail led to London-and the doorstep of Jean Conan Doyle, the youngest of the author’s children. After Adrian’s death, the papers apparently vanished. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack-giving rise to the legend of the curse. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the château without his siblings’ knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of Conan Doyle’s five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs’ agreement, stashed the papers in a locked room of a château that he owned in Switzerland.
Review sherlock holmes legacy of deeds archive#
Many scholars feared that the archive had been discarded or destroyed as the London Times noted earlier this year, its whereabouts had become “a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street,” the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr. The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography-a task that Green was determined to complete. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes.
Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. The old banter is all there, Holmes constantly ‘using’ the long suffering Watson who in return begrudgingly understands it’s for the greater good and the genuine friendship these two share continues to be alive and well.Was the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert, an elaborate suicide or a murder? Illustration by Jean-François Martin These types of books have to be able to convey Holmes and Watson as Doyle wrote them - they can’t simply be ‘well written mysteries’ - if they fail it’s like watching in your minds eye the wrong actor play a beloved role - it ‘jars’ - it feels ‘off’ - but here I found myself back in the company of ‘my’ Holmes and Watson. This story is one of the best I have read, rich, complex and ultimately making perfect sense. Pastiches of Holmes have varying degrees of success. This is where the new generation of authors takes over offering us the chance to return to those first readings where the clues were fresh, the puzzle still waiting to be solved and new ‘game is afoot’. There is a limited number of times you can read the original Holmes stories before you know them by heart and you are no longer reading them as mysteries to be solved but as familiar text to be revisited and savoured.
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