The curious case of old Conan Doyle

Meanwhile, the incumbency of Holmes in his cemetery comes as news to Mark, its foreman, who had previously assumed his most famous resident to be the man who invented the steam hammer. There are 70,000 graves in the cemetery, so locating that of the great inquisitor proves a real three-pipe problem. He pulls from the office shelves a series of vast and ancient ledgers and begins cross-referencing names with the spaces in which they might possibly be. And then Mark makes a discovery. “Aha! ” he says, in a tone not dissimilar to that heard when Holmes solved the case of the Politician, the Lighthouse and the Trained Cormorant, “Section AA, plot 139”.

At this point, and in the interests of the veracity it was Holmes’s life’s work to establish, it should be pointed out that the grave in Dean cemetery is not actually that of Sherlock Holmes at all. It is the grave of Dr Joseph Bell, 1837-1911, former professor of medicine at Edinburgh University. To some, though, the difference is academic.

Bell, to be sure, never lived at 221b Baker Street, never wore a deerstalker or Inverness cape, never played the violin badly or (as far as we can know) injected himself with a 7% solution of cocaine when his nerves were bad. But in all the ways that matter, particularly his habit of deducting the truth from the tiniest of clues, Bell effectively was Holmes, or became Holmes, through the deathless art of Conan Doyle, Bell’s most famous pupil.

And, ultimately, it is on Conan Doyle that the obscurity of Bell’s grave reflects most. The author is a strangely neglected figure in the Scottish literary pantheon, a scribbled footnote after Burns, Stevenson and Scott. The Conan Doyle buff finds thin pickings in Edinburgh, amounting to a plaque on a childhood home at 23 George Square and a statue of Holmes opposite the house in which the author was born. “When I visited Edinburgh,” says Charles Foley, great-nephew of Conan Doyle and executor of his literary estate, “I was disappointed by the lack of acknowledgement for my great-uncle. There really isn’t very much at all.”

The National Library of Scotland admits it holds little in the way of original Conan Doyle papers, as does The Writer’s Museum, while the university holds only his medical thesis. In 2001 McDonald’s proposed opening a restaurant in a cottage Conan Doyle occupied on Gilmerton Road. The scheme was refused by the council though the house remains derelict. Another Conan Doyle residence is now a public toilet. The only lot coming to Scotland from the recent (and controversial) sale of Conan Doyle papers at Christie’s — a cache of letters from Conan Doyle supporting the convicted murderer Oscar Slater — was purchased by the library service in Glasgow. Most painfully of all, the finest collection of Holmes memorabilia in private hands went not to Edinburgh but Portsmouth, where Conan Doyle first practised as a doctor between 1882 and 1890 and where he wrote his first two Holmes books, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.

The collection — including a full-size replica of Holmes’s room in 221b Baker Street and the £100,000 volume in which the detective made his first appearance — was bequeathed by Richard Lancelyn Green, a prominent Doylean whose mysterious death in March proved the culmination of a series of long and acrimonious feuds around Conan Doyle and his literary legacy.

Back in Edinburgh, meanwhile, the Conan Doyle flag continues to be flown more innocently by the eponymous pub on York Place, opposite the writer’s birthplace. From the window, a portrait of Conan Doyle’s beneficent features gazes down Broughton Street. Inside, a reasonable stab has been made at approximating the study of a Victorian gentleman, though the effect is rather diminished by the customers’ long-standing habit of abstracting Conan Doyle memorabilia from the walls, including skis and cricket bats.

The most vocal advocate of Conan Doyle in the city is Owen Dudley Edwards, reader in history at Edinburgh University and author of The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle. Edwards is adamant that the author is insufficiently recognised. “I’d never wish to make the city fathers feel they could relax when it came to commemorating Conan Doyle,” he says. “Nobody could do enough to honour this man. As with JM Barrie and Peter Pan, we are in danger of forgetting Sherlock Holmes ever had an author at all.”

Edwards proposes official recognition of other Conan Doyle homes in Sciennes Hill Place, Longdale Terrace and Argyle Park Terrace, and perhaps also a bust in the National Library, along with increased teaching of Conan Doyle’s work in schools.

“There’s no suggestion that Richard Lancelyn Green slighted Edinburgh in sending his collection to Portsmouth,” he says. “It’s a perfectly sensible choice — Doyle worked in Portsmouth for eight years, he wrote the first Holmes stories there, he played in the football team there.

“But it’s a mammoth collection and it’s by no means certain that Portsmouth libraries can house it properly. Richard’s will stipulated that if this proves to be the case the collection should go to Edinburgh.”

Even without the collection, the National Library should establish a Conan Doyle room, Edwards believes, but any hopes of buying other Holmes memorabilia may be thwarted by a buoyant market, with prices inflated by American money.

“All we could afford at the Christie’s auction was a set of Sherlock cigarette cards,” says Elaine Greig of the Edinburgh Writer’s Museum. “Added to all this, several Sherlockians believe that, historically, Conan Doyle’s background did him few favours in being taken to Edinburgh’s collective bosom, on account of his Irish ancestry and the fact that his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was committed to an asylum for chronic alcoholism.”

The singular nature of the Conan Doyle clan continues to affect the relationship even into the present day, to whit the Strange Affair of the Missing Manuscript. When Conan Doyle’s last surviving offspring, his daughter Dame Jean Bromet, died in 1997 she bequeathed manuscripts to various bodies: the British Library, Portsmouth libraries and an institution in Edinburgh, which was widely assumed to be the National Library.

Conan Doyle’s daughter-in-law Anna had died in 1990 and owned the remainder of the author’s papers. These made up the infamous Christie’s sale in May. It was the belief of Lancelyn Green, however, that Dame Jean’s papers had somehow become incorporated illegitimately into Anna’s papers, rendering the Christie’s sale fraudulent. “We certainly tried for some while to get an idea from the Conan Doyle estate whether we would benefit,” says Dr Murray Simpson of the National Library, “but got no response.”

In the final weeks of his life, Lancelyn Green became so distraught by the prospect of the auction that close friends grew concerned for his mental stability.

On March 27, Lancelyn Green was found dead in his bed, surrounded by cuddly toys. He had been strangled with a shoelace, tied round a wooden spoon to pull it tighter. The coroner, himself a Sherlock buff who had heard a mock inquiry for the Sherlock Holmes Society in 1994, noted that self-garrotting was an unusual and agonising way to kill oneself but delivered an open verdict. This was considered by some Sherlockians an implicit acknowledgement that Lancelyn Green had been murdered, or certainly that the idea he had killed himself with a shoelace was deeply questionable.

“Nonsense,” says Scirard Lancelyn Green, Richard’s brother. “An open verdict is delivered when there is no suicide note, as in this case. The family think of him now as a David Kelly figure, the foremost expert in a field, one who would rather die than have his reputation besmirched.”

The figure at the heart of most Conan Doyle controversies in recent years is Foley, vendor of the controversial Christie’s material. A 49-year-old sound engineer based in Brighton, Foley is heartily sick of “being painted as the villain of the piece” by those in the Lancelyn Green camp and says he is finally ready to put the record straight.

Regarding the legitimacy of the sale, Foley claims he has heard from “a very reliable source” that Lancelyn Green privately withdrew his objections to the auction in the days before his death and was happy to let it go ahead. As for its necessity, he reveals he has been suffering an as-yet undiagnosed medical complaint for a number of years which has impeded his working.

“The money coming in from the sale of the papers has proven to be a lifeline at this time,” he says. “I couldn’t have got by without it. It’s a shame to sell the papers but plenty have gone into public collections too. The nation hasn’t lost out in the slightest. The British Library knew months ahead of the auction what was going up for sale and had it made a private offer we would have given it every consideration.”

The experience of being Conan Doyle’s executor has been “nightmarish”, he says, comprising ceaseless attempts to defend their copyright on material already published. This work has been completed, he adds, while revealing that the manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes story will be gifted to an unnamed Edinburgh institution in the autumn: “It’s been quite a job choosing the best home for it,” he says. “Contrary to what the Doyleans think, I take my duties seriously, hellish though they sometimes are.”