Richard Gordon Lancelyn Green (10 July 1953 – 27 March 2004) was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and was generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.
Background
Lancelyn Green was born in Bebington, Cheshire, England, The patron of the collection is Stephen Fry.
Last days and aftermath
Lancelyn Green suspected that the Conan Doyle papers being auctioned at Christie's 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 Criminal Investigation Department (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 Lancelyn Green's best friends thought it was not in his nature to kill himself. However, some thought the death to have been an elaborate suicide, intended to seem like murder, 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 dies by suicide in a manner meant to implicate the woman with whom her husband had been flirting.
Lancelyn Green's bizarre death later inspired a novel that deals with a fictional Holmes expert who dies in exactly the same manner as Lancelyn Green. The Sherlockian (2010) by Graham Moore features a Holmes expert and a missing Doyle manuscript.
In 2019, a play called Mysterious Circumstances, both whose title and subject matter were inspired by the 2004 New Yorker article, premiered at the UCLA Geffen Playhouse. Starring Alan Tudyk and written by Michael Mitnick, the story unravels Lancelyn Green's passion and obsession with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and his mysterious death – an alleged murder – which Holmes himself then sets about solving.
See also
- List of unsolved deaths