Bizarrism II

hen I was a young reader just graduating from picture books, I developed a fascination with myths and legends. I was fortunate in that my school library had quite an extensive collection of books on them, which I devoured, and the first ‘favourite author’ I can remember having (apart from, perhaps, Dr Seuss) was Roger Lancelyn Green. He specialised in beautifully written retellings of the Greek and Norse myths, the stories of King Arthur, Robin Hood and so on, which were published in attractive editions by Puffin Books. I still have all of them on my shelves.

The school library was also well stocked with Sherlock Holmes, who may also be said to have entered the realm of myth and legend. I still remember how excited I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and the short stories for the first time. As anyone who has read them or taken an interest in the immense subculture they have spawned will know, Arthur Conan Doyle’s coldly rational detective has a peculiar effect on some readers. Holmes has long been the fictional character most commonly assumed to have been a real person (and indeed a real and immortal person, given that letters to him are still being sent in large numbers to 221B Baker Street in London). Some of this stems from Doyle’s vivid and economical writing style. The stories are full of evocative details such as the contents of Holmes’ famed study — the violin, the Turkish slipper filled with tobacco, the jars of chemicals and so on — and they still effortlessly conjure up a picture of fogbound 19th century London. Then there is the imperious figure of Holmes himself, who offers the promise that all the problems of the world could be solved with a sufficient application of reason.

Doyle, as is well known, grew heartily sick of his creation, thinking his historical novels were of far more importance, and at one point killed him off by sending him over the Reichenbach Falls (only to bring him back later due to near hysterical public demand). It was no doubt because of his disdain for the character that Doyle was somewhat cavalier about keeping the facts of the Holmes saga consistent, so that certain details found in some stories flatly contradict others. For Sherlockians with time on their hands, this has opened a fertile field. Taking as their starting point that Holmes was a real person, and all of Watson’s accounts are true case records, they have created a vast literature which attempts to explain the contradictions in ingenious ways. It’s all rather silly, but it can be quite amusing as well, and when I started reading the stories I also began to acquire some of this secondary literature. In this way I came upon the name of Richard Lancelyn Green, who was considered one of the leading Sherlockians, and whom I assumed, correctly, was Roger Lancelyn Green’s son.

I had not thought about Richard Lancelyn Green for many years when, in March 2004, I turned the page of a newspaper and read an account of his extremely curious death. He had been found in his London flat, amid his fabulous collection of Sherlock Holmes books and memorabilia. He was lying on his bed, with a bootlace around his neck and a wooden spoon near his hand. He had been garrotted. The question was, had it been suicide or murder?

Richard Lancelyn Green had been besotted with Sherlock Holmes since the age of eleven. Born in 1954, he was the youngest of Roger’s three children, and grew up in the family’s huge, ancient but rundown home, Poulton Hall near Liverpool. He was a shy boy who had been blinded in one eye in an accident, and took refuge in a fantasy world based on books. When he was thirteen he began scouring junk shops and putting together a meticulous recreation of Holmes’ study in the attic, which became the envy of Holmes fans around the country, and soon afterwards was inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

Green’s interest in Holmes extended to his creator, and he began to collect every piece of material related to Doyle he could get his hands on. He eventually amassed a collection of some 40,000 items, the largest in the world, and was acknowledged as the leading expert on Doyle and Holmes. With a colleague, he produced a massive Doyle bibliography, then set his sights on writing the definitive biography of him. He knew that to do the job properly, though, he would need to have access to a large archive of Doyle manuscripts and other documents which had attained legendary status among Holmes enthusiasts. This had once been in the possession of Doyle’s ne’er-do-well son Adrian, who had stored it in his house in Switzerland. It had been used by the American crime fiction writer John Dickson Carr (who specialised in locked room mysteries) when he produced a lacklustre Doyle biography in the 1950s, but since Adrian’s death in 1970 it had vanished. Green set himself the task of finding it. He met with many members of the Doyle family, and his sleuthing paid off when he gained the trust of Doyle’s youngest daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle. One day she took him to her solicitor’s office where he was shown part of the archive, packed away in boxes. She told him that its ownership was still being settled among the family so he could not read any of it yet, but assured him that, on her death, the archive would be donated to the British Museum. Green became so close to Dame Jean that she thought of him like a son, but they eventually had a falling out when she took exception to certain things he had written about her father. Green was devastated by this turn of events.

Dame Jean died in 1997, but the fabled archive failed to arrive at the British Museum. Once again it seemed to have slipped from the grasp of Doyle scholars. Green’s despair can be imagined.

In the second half of 2003, Green’s friends began to notice a change in his personality. He hinted that he had enemies, and these were somehow connected to the archive. One individual, whom he referred to as ‘the American’, was a particular persecutor.

Then, in March 2004, Green was astonished to read in a newspaper of the imminent auction of the archive at Christie’s. With mounting concern, he noted that it was to be sold in 137 lots, which meant that it would almost inevitably be broken up. He went to Christie’s to inspect the archive, which included the manuscript of Doyle’s first, unpublished novel, notebooks and unused plots for Sherlock Holmes stories, and was convinced it was the same material Dame Jean had shown him.

It was being sold on behalf of three Doyle family members, and Green immediately suspected, as Holmes might have put it, foul play. The archive belonged in the British Museum, as Dame Jean had intended, and these Doyle relatives had clearly stolen it. He contacted other Sherlockians, journalists, members of Parliament and anyone else who might be able to help stop the sale.

In the last two weeks of his life, Green was clearly under considerable strain. He told several people, including a journalist, that his life was under threat. He sent his sister, Priscilla West, a piece of paper on which three phone numbers were written, with a note reading, PLEASE KEEP THESE NUMBERS SAFE.

On 26 March, he rang one of his oldest friends, Mark Rathbone Utechin (a relative of Basil Rathbone, who had played Holmes in films in the 1940s) and made accusations against several people, including Utechin himself. When Utechin, disturbed, asked him why he was doing this, he replied, Perhaps it’s because I’m strange.

Green was an intensely private man, and his family had no idea that he was homosexual. That evening, he had dinner with a man named Lawrence Keen, who had been his lover some years before. After the dinner, at which Green drank heavily, they went back to Green’s townhouse in Scarsdale Villas, Kensington. Green was afraid to talk inside the house, saying he believed it was bugged, and they sat in the darkened garden, drinking coffee. Green spoke about the archive, the threats to his life, and ‘the American’.

The following morning, Green’s sister rang him but he did not pick up the phone. Instead of hearing the familiar message on his answering machine, which he had recorded years before, she heard an American voice saying, Sorry, not available. She was concerned enough to ring the police, who went to the house and, also receiving no answer, broke in. They found Green on his bed with the bootlace around his neck, surrounded by his Sherlock Holmes collection. Also on the bed were his childhood teddy bear and some other soft toys — a Snoopy, an Elmo. There was a half-empty bottle of gin nearby, but no suicide note. There was no sign of forced entry to the house, and nothing missing from his Sherlock Holmes collection, which was estimated to be worth millions of dollars.

The police seem to have assumed from the beginning that it was suicide. They failed to summon the CID or dust the room for fingerprints. Later, at the inquest, the coroner had so little evidence to go on that he was forced to deliver an open verdict.

The news of Green’s strange death quickly spread through the Sherlock Holmes community. The idea that he had managed to commit suicide with a bootlace seemed so inherently unlikely that speculation soon turned to the possibility he had been murdered. Sherlockians the world over reached for their metaphorical deerstalker hats and pipes (and in some cases their real ones) and pondered this intriguing new problem.

There are four possible explanations for the death of Richard Lancelyn Green: autoerotic asphyxiation, an S&M game involving another person gone wrong, murder or suicide.

The first two possibilities can be dealt with fairly briefly. Although autoerotic asphyxiation cannot be absolutely ruled out, there was nothing in the way that Green’s body was found which suggested it. There was also no evidence that anyone else — a fellow bondage enthusiast perhaps — was in his house at the time of his death. Admittedly the police investigation was perfunctory, but, to me anyway, the presence of the soft toys on the bed argues against anyone else being there.

Could it have been a case of murder, then, as many have suspected? Green, when telling people in his final months that he feared for his life, always made it clear that these fears were connected to the archive. For the murder theory to be plausible, then, there would have to have been some genuine skulduggery behind the archive sale, but it seems that there was not. Green never knew it, but shortly before her death, Dame Jean Conan Doyle had made a new will. She left the bulk of the archive to the British Museum, while proceeds from the sale of the remainder would go to the three heirs of the widow of her brother Adrian. This was the material which was eventually auctioned at Christie’s on 19 May 2004. As it happened, the British Museum was able to buy most of the lots, and sometime after this, the remainder of the archive — the most important part of it that Dame Jean had withheld from sale — was also delivered to the museum. So the archive that Green had fretted about for years remained essentially intact in the end, just as he had wanted.

The matter of the sinister-sounding American also appears to have an innocent explanation. The writer David Grann, who went to England to research the case for a 2004 New Yorker story, was given the American’s name by one of Green’s colleagues, and interviewed him when he returned to the U.S. He worked at the Pentagon, and in his spare time devoted himself to Sherlockian pursuits, being a member of the pre-eminent American Holmes fan club, the Baker Street Irregulars. He had originally been a friend of Green’s, and they had collaborated on several projects. The American also acted as a representative of the Doyle literary estate in America, and it was this that led to a falling out between the two men. Green accused the American of poisoning Dame Jean’s mind against him by pointing out certain innocuous passages he had written about Doyle, and making them seem derogatory. Green, as we have seen, was hit hard by his estrangement from Dame Jean — a direct physical link to his hero. When interviewed by Grann, the American denied any malice on his part, saying that it been a misunderstanding, and that he had been unaware Green had become so fixated on him in recent years. He said that he had been in London on the night Green died, but had spent it attending one of London’s ever-popular Jack the Ripper walking tours with his wife.

As for the singularly eerie detail of the American voice suddenly appearing on Green’s answering machine, that turned out to be a piece of the sheerest coincidence, a red herring that would have made Arthur Conan Doyle himself proud. The answering machine had been made in America, and what seems to have happened is that on the night that he died, Green, methodical to the last, removed the message he had recorded on it. The machine therefore reverted to the default message placed on it by the manufacturer, which had an American voice.

Taking all of that into account, it seems likely that Green’s death was suicide. The question, then, is why he did it, and here there are two broad possibilities. The first, of course, involves the archive. Green had made an enormous emotional and intellectual investment in this over decades. He had come to believe that what would have been his crowning achievement in Sherlockian scholarship — and therefore of his life — the definitive Doyle biography, depended on his having access to it. He also believed that the archive was so important in itself that it needed to be kept intact and in England, and that the act of selling it was in fact a criminal conspiracy carried out by members of the Doyle family, whom he had come to despise. Perhaps he blamed himself for not doing enough to save it. The idea that it was about to be dispersed was too horrible to contemplate, and in the end it unbalanced his mind. He became paranoid, internalising the drama of the situation, conflating the destruction of the archive with his own demise.

Sounds good, but there are problems with this analysis. Green’s friends were adamant that, prior to the last few months when paranoia seemed to set in, he had never exhibited any signs of mental illness or depression. If it was a complete mental collapse, it happened with extraordinary suddenness. And why did he kill himself when he did, almost two months before the auction, when there was still every chance of stopping it?

The second possibility, and by far the most intriguing one, is that, having decided to end his life, Green chose to do it in a way that would leave a mystery as tantalising as anything in the Sherlock Holmes canon. There is no doubt that, once we accept this as a possibility, various elements of the story seem to fall neatly into place. Green assiduously laid the ground for it, muttering darkly about the people out to get him, sending the list of phone numbers to his sister (which turned out to be nothing more than the numbers of a couple of journalists and Christie’s auction house). He set up a suspect — the American — and took care to kill himself when the American was in London. And he left no suicide note which, considering the compulsive writer he was, would be sure to raise eyebrows among his associates.

Again, it all sounds good. But consider for a moment the practicalities of killing yourself by garrotting. It is rarely used as a method of suicide for the simple reason that you will almost always lose consciousness before achieving the desired aim of strangulation (a pathologist, Sir Colin Berry, told the inquest into Green’s death that he had only come upon one other such case in thirty years). Garrotting is also an excruciatingly painful way to die — especially if a bootlace is being used to accomplish the deed, rather than the more usual length of rope or cloth. To carry the act through would require the sort of grim, almost superhuman determination a Samurai needed to commit seppuku. Could the pudgy, bookish Green have mustered this sort of willpower for what was, in the final analysis, a sort of dark joke on his fellow Sherlockians?

Green was a keenly intelligent man with a prodigious memory. His writings, even those on arcane subjects which would only have been of interest to the most obsessed Holmes fan, were invariably incisive and often hailed as brilliant. Ever since his discovery of the Holmes stories, he had taken the detective’s precepts for investigating cases to heart, and approached life in the same coolly rational manner.

There was, however, a glaring irony in a man like Green devoting his life to the study of Doyle, for towards the end of his life the famous writer had become a veritable paragon of irrationality. It was not always like this, though. Doyle had originally been as sensible and methodical a thinker as his most famous creation. Indeed, he had used Holmesian techniques to analyse a number of real-life criminal cases, and was utterly dismissive of subjects such as life after death. Then came the First World War. When it began, he had been one of the most jingoistic supporters of British involvement, absolutely certain of the rightness of the cause and the inevitability of victory. When it ended four years later, with millions dead including his son Kingsley, he was a changed man. In a desperate attempt to make contact with his son he became an ardent and extremely credulous spiritualist, while all vestiges of reason seem to have deserted him when he took up the cause of the Cottingley Fairies. (Between 1917 and 1920, two young English girls, Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright, took a series of photos of ‘fairies’ which were actually drawings they had copied from books and stuck on hatpins. It had basically begun as a practical joke, but Doyle wrote an article about them in the Strand Magazine which later became a lavish book, The Coming of the Fairies.)

Green found this change in his hero hard to fathom. He discussed the dilemma with his friends, wondering aloud whether he had wasted his life by devoting it to the study of such a writer (for Green, a terrifying possibility). I suspect it may have been his difficulty in reconciling the two halves of Doyle, the rational and the irrational, rather than his inability to get his hands on the archive, which prevented him from writing his long anticipated biography.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s father, Richard, a noted illustrator, was mentally unstable and spent time in asylums, and it has often been surmised that behind Doyle’s creation of Holmes, and his championing of reason, lay a fear of hereditary madness. It is ironic indeed that the same tensions between reason and unreason which characterised Doyle’s life should also surface in the life of the man who became the world’s greatest expert on him.

For my money, the curious end of Richard Lancelyn Green is one of the most intriguing cases of unexplained death since the body of an unknown man was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, in 1948. As with Somerton Man, no matter what scenario you apply to the facts, there are some which stubbornly refuse to fit. Of course it may well be that there are important elements of the story which we simply do not know about, and perhaps never will. In the meantime, all we can do is speculate and wonder, and give credit where credit may be due. If Green really did intend to leave behind an insoluble mystery, he appears to have succeeded.

I am called mad for the same reason Socrates was. He was a rational man. It takes a man or woman of great moral courage, a man or woman almost unique to dare to take the risk of being himself or herself all the time, never acting, posing or affecting.

—Bee Miles

he scene is Rowe Street in Sydney’s central business district, one January afternoon in 1957. Office workers returning from their lunch break become aware of a commotion. A big woman, forcibly ejected from a taxi, is screaming blue murder at the driver, and he is shouting back at her. She leans against the cab’s open door and then puts her full weight against it, bending it back on its hinges — back, back — until it snaps right off and falls with a crunch onto the road. The woman takes off, the cabbie in hot pursuit, and runs into a nearby barbershop where she locks herself in a lavatory. As word of the incident goes around an appreciative crowd gathers.

Police arrive but the woman refuses to open the door. The barber has an idea. He races down to a chemist shop and returns with some ammonia. Using an electric fan the barber and policemen attempt to waft the fumes under the door to flush her out, but most of it goes back into their faces. The woman can be heard laughing behind the door. Finally a policeman puts his shoulder to it. The big woman is taken away, a look of triumph and defiance on her face. The following day, the people of Sydney open their newspapers and chuckle at the latest chapter in the long-running saga of Bee Miles.

Sydney has produced more than its fair share of colourful street characters over the years, but for many older residents, Bee Miles remains its quintessential eccentric. Rotund, free-spirited, Shakespeare-spouting, rabidly nationalist and determinedly her own woman, Bee kept the city entertained — and its taxi drivers terrified — for over four decades.

Beatrice Miles was born in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield on 17 September 1902, the fourth of six children. Her father was William John Miles, known as W.J., a prominent businessman and controversialist. W.J. promoted a range of views which may seem today a little contradictory. He was an avowed atheist and secretary of the Sydney branch of the Rationalist Society. He was a staunch Australian nationalist, anti-British and anti-Semitic. After his retirement, he devoted much of his time to political enthusiasms, and became a friend and patron of the writer and editor P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen. Together they fronted the quasi-fascist Australia First group in the 1930s (Stephensen’s political activities would see him interned during WWII). But the two men were also staunchly pro-Aboriginal, campaigning for full citizenship for native Australians, and W.J. financed the first Aboriginal newspaper. In 1938, when celebrations for Australia’s sesquicentenary were being held, Miles and Stephensen organised a ‘Day of Mourning’ meeting at the Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street in Sydney, to which only Aboriginals were invited. Rounding out these views, W.J. was also a confirmed anti-feminist.

The young Bee.

In 1908, W.J. moved his family to the more affluent suburb of Wahroonga on the North

Shore. Bee (her preferred spelling) was sent to the exclusive girls’ school Abbotsleigh, where she soon showed that she had inherited her father’s cantankerousness and most of his views. She sported an anti-conscription badge during the divisive (and ultimately unsuccessful) referendum campaigns called by the wartime Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who was eager to send more troops to aid Britain, and claimed to have been marked down for an essay in which she called Gallipoli a strategical blunder. One of her classmates recalled a day when their teacher was giving a talk on the subject ‘God is everywhere’. Is He in this inkwell? asked Bee. When told He was, Bee clapped her hand over it and said, Got him! Bee later encapsulated her thoughts on atheism in verse.

I’m an atheist born and bred

I don’t come alive once I’m dead

I’m sound in the body and sane in the head

I’m an atheist born and bred.

I’m an atheist by conviction

The Bible, I think, is mainly fiction

Idiotic stories, but magnificent diction

I’m an atheist by conviction.

I’m an atheist because I’ve thought

I try to be good because I ought

And not because I think I’ll go to hell if I’m caught

I’m an atheist because I’ve thought.

At 17, Bee passed her leaving certificate with decent marks, including first degree honours in English. Initially contemplating a career as a doctor, she enrolled in Sydney University but switched to Arts, attending courses for a year but never sitting for any exams. She was forced to drop out after contracting the disease encephalitis lethargica, popularly known as sleeping sickness. Very rare today, there was an epidemic of it between the end of World War I and the 1920s. The symptoms include drowsiness and depression, and in severe cases the victim may go into a coma or die. Bee recovered from it, but it has been suggested that some of her more erratic behaviour in later years could be attributed to the aftereffects of this disease.

It was around this time that Bee started to gain her reputation as an eccentric. Tall, lithe and very pretty when she was young, she first came to the attention of the public by being excessively mobile. She could be seen riding around on a mens’ bike wearing a shirt and scandalously short white shorts, or in full evening dress,