The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann Read Free Book Online

Leckie were together. Green based his allegation on the 1901 census, which reported that on the day the survey was taken Conan Doyle was staying at the Ashdown Forest Hotel, in East Sussex. So, too, was Leckie. “Conan Doyle could not have chosen a worse weekend on which to have a private tryst,” Green wrote. Yet Green failed to note one crucial fact also contained in the census report—Conan Doyle’s mother was staying in the hotel with him, apparently as a chaperone. Later, Green was forced to recant, in a letter to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, saying, “I was guilty of the capital mistake of theorising without data.”
    Still, he continued to lash out at Conan Doyle, as Conan Doyle once had at Sherlock Holmes. Edwards recalled that, in one conversation, Green decried Conan Doyle as “unoriginal” and “a plagiarist.” He confessed to another friend, “I’ve wasted my whole life on a second-rate writer.”
    “I think he was frustrated because the family wasn’t coming to any agreement,” Smith said. “The archive wasn’t made available, and he got angry not at the heirs but at Conan Doyle.”
    In March of 2004, when Green hurried to Christie’s after the auction of the papers was announced, he discovered that the archive was as rich and as abundant as he’d imagined. Among the thousands of items were fragments of the first tale that Conan Doyle wrote, at the age of six; illustrated logs from when Conan Doyle was a surgeon on a Scottish whaling ship, in the eighteen-eighties; letters from Conan Doyle’s father (whose drawings in the asylum resembled the fairies that his son later seized upon as real); a brown envelope with a cross and the name of his dead son inscribed upon it; the manuscript of Conan Doyle’s first novel, which was never published; a missive from Conan Doyle to his brother, which seemed to confirm that Green’s hunch had been right, and that Conan Doyle had in fact begun an affair with Leckie. Jane Flower, who helped to organize the papers for Christie’s, told reporters, “The whereabouts of this material was previously unknown, and it is for this reason that no modern-day biography of the author exists.”
    Meanwhile, back at his home, Green tried to piece together why the archive was about to slip into private hands once more. According to Green’s family, he typed notes in his computer, reexamining the trail of evidence, which he thought proved that the papers belonged to the British Library. He worked late into the night, frequently going without sleep. None of it, however, seemed to add up. At one point, he typed in bold letters, “ STICK TO THE FACTS .” After another sleepless night, he told his sister that the world seemed “Kafkaesque.”
    Several hours before Green died, he called his friend Utechin at home. Green had asked him to find a tape of an old BBC radio interview, which, Green recalled, quoted one of Conan Doyle’s heirs saying that the archive should be given to the British Library. Utechin said that he had found the tape, but there was no such statement on the recording. Green became apoplectic, and accused his friend of conspiring against him, as if he were another Moriarty. Finally, Utechin said, “Richard, you’ve lost it!”
      One afternoon while I was at my hotel in London, the phone rang. “I need to see you again,” John Gibson said. “I’ll take the next train in.” Before he hung up, he added, “I have a theory.”
    I met him in my hotel room. He was carrying several scraps of paper, on which he had taken notes. He sat down by the window, his slender figure silhouetted in the fading light, and announced, “I think it was suicide.”
    He had sifted through the data, including details that I had shared with him from my own investigation. There was mounting evidence, he said, that his rationalist friend was betraying signs of irrationality in the last week of his life. There was the fact that there was no evidence of forced entry at