Richard Lancelyn Green
Encyclopedia
Richard Lancelyn Green was a British
scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle
and Sherlock Holmes
, generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.
, Cheshire
to Roger Lancelyn Green and June Green. His father was an author known for his popular adaptations of the Arthurian, Robin Hood
and Homer
ic myths, and his mother was a drama teacher and adjudicator. He attended Bradfield College
in Berkshire
, and then University College, Oxford
, where he earned a degree in English
.
After leaving college, he travelled extensively, throughout Europe
, India
and South-East Asia.
from the Mystery Writers of America
during 1984.
Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologized Doyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings
, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) collected the most interesting of letters to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society
, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to the fictional "221b".
He 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 visit Reichenbach Falls
, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have died until Conan Doyle "resurrected" him eight years later. For his encyclopedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his masterful scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.
Later in life, he 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.
. 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 untimely death he 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 of Portsmouth)
Packing the collection took two weeks for a team of ten and in total filled 12 vans. It comprises approximately fourteen thousand volumes and some two hundred thousand other items. The collection is currently in the fourth year of being catalogued by the City of Portsmouth Museum where exhibitions have created much interest. The patron of the collection is Stephen Fry
.
were part of a collection that Dame Jean Conan Doyle
, the author's daughter, actually wanted the British Library
to have. 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, 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 the 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.
The Coroner
returned an open verdict. Many of Richard's best friends thought it was not in his nature to commit suicide. However, some thought the death to have been an elaborate suicide, intended to seem like murder, in order 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 commits suicide in a manner meant to implicate the woman with whom her husband had been flirting.
During August 2004, it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed his extensive collection of Arthur Conan Doyle to the Portsmouth
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.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
and Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
, generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.
Background
He was born in BebingtonBebington
Bebington is a small town and electoral ward within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, in Merseyside, England. It lies south of Liverpool and west southwest of Manchester, along the River Mersey on the eastern side of the Wirral Peninsula...
, Cheshire
Cheshire
Cheshire is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although its largest town is Warrington. Other major towns include Widnes, Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow...
to Roger Lancelyn Green and June Green. His father was an author known for his popular adaptations of the Arthurian, Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....
and Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
ic myths, and his mother was a drama teacher and adjudicator. He attended Bradfield College
Bradfield College
Bradfield College is a coeducational independent school located in the small village of Bradfield in the English county of Berkshire.The college was founded in 1850 by Thomas Stevens, Rector and Lord of the Manor of Bradfield...
in Berkshire
Berkshire
Berkshire is a historic county in the South of England. It is also often referred to as the Royal County of Berkshire because of the presence of the royal residence of Windsor Castle in the county; this usage, which dates to the 19th century at least, was recognised by the Queen in 1957, and...
, and then University College, Oxford
University College, Oxford
.University College , is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2009 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £110m...
, where he earned a degree in English
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...
.
After leaving college, he travelled extensively, throughout Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
and South-East Asia.
Scholarly pursuits
He 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), and Letters to the Press (1986), all co-edited with Gibson. The Conan Doyle bibliography earned Green and Gibson a Special Edgar AwardEdgar Award
The Edgar Allan Poe Awards , named after Edgar Allan Poe, are presented every year by the Mystery Writers of America...
from the Mystery Writers of America
Mystery Writers of America
Mystery Writers of America is an organization for mystery writers, based in New York.The organization was founded in 1945 by Clayton Rawson, Anthony Boucher, Lawrence Treat, and Brett Halliday....
during 1984.
Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologized Doyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings
Canon of Sherlock Holmes
Traditionally, the canon of Sherlock Holmes consists of the fifty-six short stories and four novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this context, the term "canon" is an attempt to distinguish between Doyle's original works and subsequent works by other authors using the same...
, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) collected the most interesting of letters to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society
Abbey National
Abbey National plc was a UK-based bank and former building society, which latterly traded under the Abbey brand name. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Grupo Santander of Spain in 2004, and was rebranded as Santander in January 2010, forming Santander UK along with the savings business of the...
, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to the fictional "221b".
He 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 visit Reichenbach Falls
Reichenbach Falls
The Reichenbach Falls are a series of waterfalls on the River Aar near Meiringen in Bern canton in central Switzerland. They have a total drop of 250 m . At 90 m , the Upper Reichenbach Falls is one of the highest cataracts in the Alps...
, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have died until Conan Doyle "resurrected" him eight years later. For his encyclopedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his masterful scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.
Later in life, he 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.
The collection
As early as the age of seven years Richard began his collection of Sherlockiana, and created his version of 221b Baker St in an attic room at Poulton Hall, gleaning material for a few shillings at junk shops and from the family's own VictorianaVictoriana
Victoriana refers to items or material from the Victorian period , especially those particularly evocative of the design style and outlook of the time....
. 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 untimely death he 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 of Portsmouth)
Packing the collection took two weeks for a team of ten and in total filled 12 vans. It comprises approximately fourteen thousand volumes and some two hundred thousand other items. The collection is currently in the fourth year of being catalogued by the City of Portsmouth Museum where exhibitions have created much interest. The patron of the collection is Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry
Stephen John Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter and film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club. He first came to attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also...
.
Last days, death, and aftermath
Lancelyn Green suspected that the Conan Doyle papers being auctioned at Christie'sChristie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
were part of a collection that Dame Jean Conan Doyle
Jean Conan Doyle
Air Commandant Dame Lena Annette Jean Conan Doyle, Lady Bromet , DBE, AE, WRAF, ADC was best known as Jean Conan Doyle....
, the author's daughter, actually wanted the British Library
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
to have. 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, 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 the CID
Criminal Investigation Department
The Crime Investigation Department is the branch of all Territorial police forces within the British Police and many other Commonwealth police forces, to which plain clothes detectives belong. It is thus distinct from the Uniformed Branch and the Special Branch.The Metropolitan Police Service 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.
The Coroner
Coroner
A coroner is a government official who* Investigates human deaths* Determines cause of death* Issues death certificates* Maintains death records* Responds to deaths in mass disasters* Identifies unknown dead* Other functions depending on local laws...
returned an open verdict. Many of Richard's best friends thought it was not in his nature to commit suicide. However, some thought the death to have been an elaborate suicide, intended to seem like murder, in order 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
The Problem of Thor Bridge
"The Problem of Thor Bridge" is a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle, which appears in the collection The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes...
, in which a woman commits suicide in a manner meant to implicate the woman with whom her husband had been flirting.
During August 2004, it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed his extensive collection of Arthur Conan Doyle to the Portsmouth
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island...
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.