Post by dreamy on Oct 14, 2005 7:32:10 GMT 10
Sleuths investigate Conan Doyle murder claim
(NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN)
IT READS like the plot of one of his Sherlock Holmes novels, but Edinburgh author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is at the centre of a murder mystery in which he is accused of killing the man who inspired his greatest yarn, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
A team investigating claims that Conan Doyle killed Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a journalist and close friend, has formally applied to exhume a body from a churchyard in Devon. The group of amateur detectives, led by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele and scientist Paul Spiring, want to establish through forensic testing that Fletcher Robinson, who is buried in a grave in Ipplepen on the edge of Dartmoor, was poisoned.
They claim the aspiring writer was the unacknowledged author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that Conan Doyle arranged to have him poisoned five years after the book was published to avoid exposure as a fraud.
Fletcher Robinson died mysteriously in 1907 aged 36. Holmes fans and literary scholars have dismissed the poison theory, but have acknowledged that Fletcher Robinson's role in creating the novel has been underplayed.
Spiring, a former police officer who teaches biology and physics at the European School in Karlsruhe, Germany, said: "This way we can find out, once and for all, whether Fletcher Robinson was murdered, as we suspect, with a massive dose of laudanum."
Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson became friends when both were covering the Boer war in 1901. The pair would wile away nights in Norfolk, where the young Fletcher Robinson would entertain his older companion by recounting ghostly folk stories from his home in Dartmoor.
According to legend, Conan Doyle was intrigued by the tale of a mythical black hound that stalked the moors at night.
A footnote to the first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles acknowledges Fletcher Robinson's contribution: "This story owes its inception to my friend Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me," it says.
(NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN)
IT READS like the plot of one of his Sherlock Holmes novels, but Edinburgh author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is at the centre of a murder mystery in which he is accused of killing the man who inspired his greatest yarn, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
A team investigating claims that Conan Doyle killed Bertram Fletcher Robinson, a journalist and close friend, has formally applied to exhume a body from a churchyard in Devon. The group of amateur detectives, led by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele and scientist Paul Spiring, want to establish through forensic testing that Fletcher Robinson, who is buried in a grave in Ipplepen on the edge of Dartmoor, was poisoned.
They claim the aspiring writer was the unacknowledged author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that Conan Doyle arranged to have him poisoned five years after the book was published to avoid exposure as a fraud.
Fletcher Robinson died mysteriously in 1907 aged 36. Holmes fans and literary scholars have dismissed the poison theory, but have acknowledged that Fletcher Robinson's role in creating the novel has been underplayed.
Spiring, a former police officer who teaches biology and physics at the European School in Karlsruhe, Germany, said: "This way we can find out, once and for all, whether Fletcher Robinson was murdered, as we suspect, with a massive dose of laudanum."
Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson became friends when both were covering the Boer war in 1901. The pair would wile away nights in Norfolk, where the young Fletcher Robinson would entertain his older companion by recounting ghostly folk stories from his home in Dartmoor.
According to legend, Conan Doyle was intrigued by the tale of a mythical black hound that stalked the moors at night.
A footnote to the first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles acknowledges Fletcher Robinson's contribution: "This story owes its inception to my friend Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me," it says.