Sherlock Holmes update
Sun Dec 12, 7:33 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - The mysterious death of Britain's leading Sherlock Holmes expert appears to have been a bizarre suicide plot deliberately based on one of the cases tackled by the fictional detective himself, a report said.
According to friends of Richard Lancelyn Green, he appears to have dressed up his suicide as murder in an attempt to get at an enemy from beyond the grave, a notion lifted from one of Holmes's adventures, the Sunday Times said.
In March this year, the body of Lancelyn Green, a 50-year-old academic, was found at his home, asphyxiated with a shoelace. An inquest was unable to decide what had happened and recorded an open verdict.
However friends believe Lancelyn Green killed himself and deliberately tried to get an American academic rival, whom the paper did not name, framed for the murder.
According to the report, Lancelyn Green had become bitterly depressed after learning that a collection of papers belonging to the creator of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was to be broken up and sold at auction.
The expert had spent two decades trying to track down the archive so as to write a definitive biography of Conan Doyle, and decided to take his own life, also implicating the American he blamed for breaking up the collection.
He contacted fellow Holmes scholars to allege the archive had been stolen, told a journalist darkly that "something might happen to me" and then changed his usual telephone answer machine message to an American voice.
The Sunday Times said that friends believed Lancelyn Green based this on "The Problem of the Thor Bridge", one of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures.
In the story, the Victorian detective finds that a tycoon's wife who appeared to have been killed by the family governess had in fact committed suicide, while trying to implicate the woman.
This seemed the most likely explanation, said John Gibson, a friend of the dead academic.
"Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," he was quoted as saying by the paper.