Revue de Presse
New York Times, 19 mai 2004
| The
Curious Incident of the Boxes |
LONDON, May 18 - For 25 years the cardboard
boxes, more than a dozen of them, sat in a corner of a London office, gathering
dust while lawyers argued about whom they belonged to and scholars dreamed about
what was inside. But the auction this Wednesday of their contents, once belonging
to Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has provoked another fight
and a mystery almost worthy of Holmes himself.
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Lancelyn Green, an opponent of the
sale,
was found strangled |
Nancy Browing and Michael W. Homer,
of Salt Lake City, reading one of Arthur Conan Doyle's diaries, being auctioned
by Christie's today |
The Conan Doyle archive — including
his unpublished first novel, a rich cache of family letters and handwritten literary
notebooks full of research and musings about works in progress — is expected
to bring in about £1 million to £1.5 million ($1.8 million to $2.7
million), according to Christie's, which is handling the sale. But even as that
auction house has attracted a stream of Conan Doyle enthusiasts thrilled at the
newly released material, it has also been sharply criticized by some scholars
and members of Parliament for allowing the sale because they say crucial legal
questions remain unresolved.
They also say that the material is too important to be sold off piecemeal. "This
will make it impossible for one academic or team of researchers ever to access
the entire collection for a definitive biography of Conan Doyle," Kevin Pringle,
a spokesman for Alex Salmond, a member of Parliament from the Scottish National
Party, said of the auction. "The material will be scattered to the four winds."
Adding to the sense of unease is the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green,
a leading Conan Doyle scholar and private collector, and a vociferous opponent
of the sale. On March 27 Mr. Lancelyn Green, 50, a former chairman of the Sherlock
Holmes Society of London and the author of several well-received books on Conan
Doyle, was found garroted to death, strangled by a shoelace wrapped around a wooden
kitchen spoon used to tighten its grip.
Mr. Lancelyn Green had become increasingly agitated and worried for his safety
in the days before he died, several friends and family members told the inquest
into his death. The coroner in the case said that he could not rule out murder
and recorded an open verdict, meaning that he did not conclude what led to Mr.
Lancelyn Green's death, although he said that he "would not wish to stress
the importance of any conspiracy theories."
Owen Dudley Edwards, a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh and a
Conan Doyle scholar who was a close friend of Mr. Lancelyn Green, said he did
not believe Mr. Lancelyn Green committed suicide. The two had teamed up to stop
the Christie's sale, he said, and Mr. Lancelyn Green had been concerned that people
connected to it would seek to damage his reputation.
"I think he was bewildered by the sale, as we all were," Mr. Dudley
Edwards said. "But I was speaking to him about 12 hours before his death,
and I didn't have the slightest impression of him being suicidal."
Everyone seems to agree on one thing: the materials to be sold are a treasure
trove. "I would say that some of it is very important," said Catherine
Cooke, curator of the Sherlock Holmes collection at the Marylebone Library in
London. She singled out letters from Conan Doyle's younger brother, Innes, and
oldest son, Kingsley, who both served in World War I and died of illnesses contracted
during or just after it.
There is also fascinating correspondence with public figures like Winston Churchill,
P. G. Wodehouse, Theodore Roosevelt and Oscar Wilde. There is Conan Doyle's tan
lizard-skin wallet, left as it was when he died in 1930, its contents yellowed
and faded. There are little cartoons he drew, presumably for his children, and
ample materials related to lesser-known aspects of his life, including his early
career as a doctor; his campaign to convince the British military to issue its
soldiers body armor; his involvement with cricket; and his experiences as a medic
in the Boer War in South Africa.
There is also an unpublished novel — Conan Doyle's first, written in the
mid-1890's — about a certain Mr. Smith and his battles with gout, among other
things. Conan Doyle thought the manuscript had been lost in the mail and once
wrote that "my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror
if it were suddenly to appear again — in print."
Tom Lamb, director of the book department at Christie's in London, said the papers
represented a valuable "personal corpus" for Conan Doyle. While many
other of his manuscripts and papers, sold off by his profligate sons years ago,
are more concerned with public aspects of his life, Mr. Lamb said, "This
material gives you the clues to Conan Doyle the man."
The unavailability of the material has frustrated and tantalized Conan Doyle scholars
for years. A 1949 biography by the American mystery writer John Dickson Carr drew
on the papers and included a list without going into detail about their contents,
and a French biographer read them in the 1960's, but no researchers have been
allowed to see them since. "Having access to these papers will really open
things up," Miss Cooke said. But like some other Conan Doyle scholars, she
is troubled by the sale, she said. There is the fear that the collection would
be broken up and sold to anonymous collectors uninterested in making them available
to academics. And there is a concern about the murky disposition of what remains
of Conan Doyle's prodigious estate.
After the deaths of Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean, the bulk of the estate
went to one of their sons, Adrian. Portions were sold by him and his brother,
Denis, although Adrian kept a core group of private papers intact. Neither Denis
nor Adrian had children; nor did their sister, Jean. By the late 1980's, with
the family having feuded for years over the remaining papers, the only direct
relatives left were Adrian's widow, Anna Conan Doyle; and Jean, who had become
Dame Jean Bromet. They agreed that they would each get a 50-percent interest in
the papers. Dame Jean, who died in 1997, bequeathed hers to the British Library;
Anna, who died in 1990, bequeathed hers to three distant relatives whose names
have not been made public. It is Anna's portion that is for sale.
The idea seems to have been that the material would be split evenly. But curiously
only 2 of a total of 15 boxes went to the British Library, the library says. That
state of affairs has led scholars like Mr. Dudley Edwards, who was friendly with
Dame Jean and who would like to see the whole collection in the hands of the British
Library, to question the division of the materials.
"It's very difficult to see how the division could have been equal between
Anna and Jean since there are only a few papers for Jean against this enormous
tranche of stuff for Anna," Mr. Dudley Edwards said.
British Library officials said that they had asked Anna Conan Doyle's beneficiaries
for a list of how the material was divided but were turned down.
"We have received assurances from the executors that the division represents
what Dame Jean's wishes were," said Clive Field, director of scholarship
and collections at the British Library. "We're not necessarily challenging
the legality, but what we're saying is that their assurances should be capable
of being validated by documentary material, which they're not providing to us.
This is a matter of significant national and international interest, and as a
public body we must exercise due diligence."
A spokeswoman for Christie's, Clare Roberts, said the auction house was satisfied
that its sale was proper. "Dame Jean had those items in her possession that
she owned at the time of her death, and she left them in her will to the British
Library," Ms. Roberts said. "In terms of how the family's split up things
between them, that's nothing to do with us."
By SARAH LYALL
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