creator of Holmes, prompting one outraged member to exclaim, 'Holmes is a man! Holmes is a great man!' If Green had to invoke Conan Doyle's name, he was told, he should refer to him as merely Watson's 'literary agent.' The challenge of the game was that Conan Doyle had often written the four Holmes novels and fifty-six short stories-'the Sacred Writings,' as Sherlockians called them-in haste, and they were plagued with inconsistencies that made them difficult to pass off as nonfiction. How, for instance, is it possible that in one story Watson is described as having been wounded in Afghanistan in the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, though in another story he complains that the wound was in his leg? The goal was thus to resolve these paradoxes, using the same airtight logic that Holmes exhibits. Similar textual inquiries had already given birth to a related field, known as Sherlockiana-mock scholarship in which fans tried to deduce everything from how many wives Watson has (one to five) to which university Holmes attended (surely Cambridge or Oxford). As Green once conceded, quoting the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, 'Never had so much been written by so many for so few.'
After Green graduated from Oxford, in 1975, he turned his attention to more serious scholarship. Of all the puzzles surrounding the Sacred Writings, the greatest one, Green realized, centered on the man whom the stories had long since eclipsed-Conan Doyle himself. Green set out to compile the first comprehensive bibliography, hunting down every piece of material that Conan Doyle wrote: pamphlets, plays, poems, obituaries, songs, unpublished manuscripts, letters to the editor. Carrying a plastic bag in place of a briefcase, Green unearthed documents that had long been hidden behind the veil of history.
In the midst of this research, Green discovered that John Gibson was working on a similar project, and they agreed to collaborate. The resulting tome, published in 1983 by Oxford University Press, with a foreword by Graham Greene, is seven hundred and twelve pages long and contains notations on nearly every scrap of writing that Conan Doyle ever produced, down to the kind of paper in which a manuscript was bound ('cloth,' 'light blue diaper-grain'). When the bibliography was done, Gibson continued in his job as a government property assessor. Green, however, had inherited a sizable sum of money from his family, who had sold part of their estate, and he used the bibliography as a launching pad for a biography of Conan Doyle.
Writing a biography is akin to the process of detection, and Green started to retrace every step of Conan Doyle's life, as if it were an elaborate crime scene. During the nineteen-eighties, Green followed Conan Doyle's movements from the moment he was born, on May 22, 1859, in a squalid part of Edinburgh. Green visited the neighborhood where Conan Doyle was raised by a devout Christian mother and a dreamy father. (He drew one of the first illustrations of Sherlock Holmes-a sketch of the detective discovering a corpse, which accompanied a paperback edition of A Study in Scarlet}) Green also amassed an intricate paper record that showed his subject's intellectual evolution. He discovered, for instance, that after Conan Doyle studied medicine, at the University of Edinburgh, and fell under the influence of rationalist thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes-who undoubtedly inspired the surname of Conan Doyle's detective-he renounced Catholicism, vowing, 'Never will I accept anything which cannot be proved to me.'
In the early eighties, Green published the first of a series of introductions to Penguin Classics editions of Conan Doyle's previously uncollected works-many of which he had helped to uncover. The essays, written in a clinical style, began garnering him attention outside the insular subculture of Sherlockians. One essay, running more than a hundred pages, was a small biography of Conan Doyle unto itself; in another, Green cast further light on the short story 'The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted,' which had been found in a chest more than a decade after Conan Doyle's death and was claimed by his widow and sons to be the last unpublished Holmes story. Some experts had wondered if the story was a fake and even if Conan Doyle's two sons, in search of money to sustain their lavish life styles, had forged it. Yet Green conclusively showed that the story was neither by Conan Doyle nor a forgery; instead, it was written by an architect named Arthur Whitaker, who had sent it to Conan Doyle in hopes of collaborating. Scholars described Green's essays variously as 'dazzling,' 'unparalleled,' and-the ultimate compliment-'Holmesian.'
Still, Green was determined to dig deeper for his now highly anticipated biography. As the mystery writer Iain Pears has observed, Conan Doyle's hero acts in nearly the same fashion as a Freudian analyst, piecing together his clients' hidden narratives, which he alone can perceive. In a 1987 review of Conan Doyle's autobiography, Memories and Adventures, which was published in 1924, Green noted, 'It is as if Conan Doyle-whose character suggested kindliness and trust-had a fear of intimacy. When he describes his life, he omits the inner man.'
To reveal this 'inner man,' Green examined facts that Conan Doyle rarely, if ever, spoke of himself-most notably, that his father, an epileptic and an incorrigible alcoholic, was eventually confined to an insane asylum. Yet the more Green tried to plumb his subject, the more he became aware of the holes in his knowledge of Conan Doyle. He didn't want just to sketch Conan Doyle's story with a series of anecdotes; he wanted to know everything about him. In the draft of an early mystery story, 'The Surgeon of Gaster Fall,' Co-nan Doyle writes of a son who has locked his raving father inside a cage-but this incident was excised from the published version. Had Conan Doyle been the one to commit his father to the asylum? Was Holmes's mania for logic a reaction to his father's genuine mania? And what did Conan Doyle mean when he wrote, in his deeply personal poem 'The Inner Room,' that he 'has thoughts he dare not say'?
Green wanted to create an immaculate biography, one in which each fact led inexorably to the next. He wanted to be both Watson and Holmes to Conan Doyle, to be his narrator and his detective.
Yet he knew the words of Holmes: 'Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay.' And the only way to succeed, he realized, was to track down the lost archive.
'Murder,' Owen Dudley Edwards, a highly regarded Conan Doyle scholar, said. 'I fear that is what the preponderance of the evidence points to.'
I had called him in Scotland, after Gibson informed me that Edwards was pursuing an informal investigation into Green's death. Edwards had worked with Green to stop the auction, which took place, in spite of the uproar, almost two months after Green's body was found. Edwards said of his friend, 'I think he knew too much about the archive.'
A few days later, I flew to Edinburgh, where Edwards promised to share with me his findings. We had arranged to meet at a hotel on the edge of the old city. It was on a hill studded with medieval castles and covered in a thin mist, not far from where Conan Doyle had studied medicine under Dr. Joseph Bell, one of the models for Sherlock Holmes. (Once, during a class, Bell held up a glass vial. 'This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug,' he said. 'It is extremely bitter to the taste.' To the class's astonishment, he touched the amber liquid, lifted a finger to his mouth, and licked it. He then declared, 'Not one of you has developed his power of perception… while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle finger-aye-which somehow found its way into my mouth.')
Edwards greeted me in the hotel lobby. He is a short, pear-shaped man with wild gray sideburns and an even wilder gray beard. A history professor at the University of Edinburgh, he wore a rumpled tweed coat over a V-neck sweater, and carried a knapsack on his shoulder.
We sat down at the restaurant, and I waited as he rummaged through the books in his bag. Edwards, who has written numerous books, including The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, an acclaimed account of Conan Doyle's early life, began pulling out copies of Green's edited collections. Green, he said, was 'the world's greatest Conan Doyle expert. I have the authority to say it. Richard ultimately became the greatest of us all. That is a firm and definite statement of someone who knows.'
As he spoke, he tended to pull his chin in toward his chest, so that his beard fanned out. He told me that he had met Green in 1981, while researching his book on Conan Doyle. At the time, Green was still working on his bibliography with Gibson; even so, he had shared all his data with Edwards. 'That was the kind of scholar he was,' he said.
To Edwards, Green's death was even more baffling than the crimes in a Holmes story. He picked up one of the Conan Doyle collections and read aloud from 'A Case of Identity,' in the cool, ironical voice of Holmes:
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusion most stale and unprofitable.
After Edwards closed the book, he explained that he had spoken frequently with Green about the Christie's sale. 'Our lives have been dominated by the fact that Conan Doyle had five children, three of whom became his literary heirs,' Edwards said. 'The two boys were playboys. One of them, Denis, was, I gather, utterly selfish. The other one, Adrian, was a repulsive crook. And then there was an absolutely wonderful daughter.'
Green, he said, had become so close to the daughter, Dame Jean, that he came to be known as the son she never had, even though in the past Conan Doyle's children had typically had fractious relationships with their father's biographers. In the early nineteen-forties, for example, Adrian and Denis had cooperated with Hesketh Pearson on Conan Doyle: His Life and Art, but when the book came out and portrayed Conan Doyle as 'the man in the street,' a phrase Co-nan Doyle himself had used, Adrian rushed into print his own biography, The True Conan Doyle, and Denis allegedly challenged Pearson to a duel. Dame Jean had subsequently taken it upon herself to guard her father's legacy against scholars who might present him in too stark a light. Yet she confided in Green, who had tried to balance his veneration of his subject with a commitment to the truth.
Edwards said that Dame Jean not only gave Green a glimpse of the treasured archive; she also asked for his help in transferring various papers to her solicitor's office. 'Richard told me that he had physically moved them,' Edwards said. 'So his knowledge was really quite dangerous.'
He claimed that Green was 'the biggest figure standing in the way' of the Christie's auction, since he had seen some of the papers and could testify that Dame Jean had intended to donate them to the British Library. Soon after the sale was announced, Edwards said, he and Green had learned that Charles Foley, Sir Arthur's great-nephew, and two of Foley's cousins were behind the sale. But neither he nor Green could understand how these distant heirs had legally obtained control of the archive. 'All we were clear about was that there was a scam and that, clearly, someone was robbing stuff that should go to the British Library,' Edwards said. He added, 'This was not a hypothesis-it was quite certain in our own minds.'
Edwards also had little doubt that somebody had murdered his friend. He noted the circumstantial details-Green's mention of threats to his life, his reference to the American who was 'trying to bring him down.' Some observers, he said, had speculated that Green's death might have been the result of autoerotic asphyxiation, but he told me that there were no signs that Green was engaged in sexual activity at the time. He added that garroting is typically a brutal method of execution-'a method of murder which a skilled professional would use.' What's more, Green had no known history of depression. Edwards pointed out that Green, on the day before he died, had made plans with another friend for a holiday in Italy the following week. Moreover, he said, if Green had killed himself, there surely would have been a suicide note; it was inconceivable that a man who kept notes on everything would not have left one.
'There are other things,' Edwards continued. 'He was garroted with a bootlace, yet he always wore slip-on shoes.' And Edwards found meaning in seemingly insignificant details, the kind that Holmes might note- particularly, the partially empty bottle of gin by his bed. To Edwards, this was a clear sign of the presence of a stranger, since Green, an oenophile, had drunk wine at supper that evening, and would never have followed wine with gin.
'Whoever did this is still at large,' Edwards said. He put a hand on my shoulder. 'Please be careful. I don't want to see you gar-roted, like poor Richard.' Before we parted, he told me one more thing-he knew who the American was.
The American, who asked that I not use his name, lives in Washington, D.C. After I tracked him down, he agreed to meet me at Timberlake's pub near Dupont Circle. I found him sitting at the bar, sipping red wine. Though he was slumped over, he looked strikingly tall, with a hawkish nose and a thinning ring of gray hair. He appeared to be in his fifties and wore bluejeans and a button-down white shirt, with a fountain pen sticking out of the front pocket, like a professor.
After pausing a moment to deduce who I was, he stood and led me to a table in the back of the room, which was filled with smoke and sounds from a jukebox. We ordered dinner, and he proceeded to tell me what Edwards had loosely sketched out: that he was a longtime member of the Baker Street Irregulars and had, for many years, helped to represent Conan Doyle's literary estate in America. It is his main job, though, that has given him a slightly menacing air-at least in the minds of Green's friends. He works for the Pentagon in a high-ranking post that deals with clandestine operations. ('One of Donald Rumsfeld's pals,' as Edwards described him.)
The American said that after he received a Ph.D. in international relations, in 1970, and became an expert in the cold war and nuclear doctrine, he was drawn into the Sherlockian games and their pursuit of immaculate logic. 'I've always kept the two worlds separate,' he told me at one point. 'I don't think a lot of people at the Pentagon would understand my fascination with a literary character.' He met Green through the Sherlockian community, he said. As members of the Baker Street Irregulars, both had been given official titles from the Holmes stories. The American was 'Rodger Prescott of evil memory,' after the American counterfeiter in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.' Green was known as 'The Three Gables,' after the villa in 'The Adventure of the Three Gables,' which is ransacked by burglars in search of a scandalous biographical manuscript.
