27. 2004. London, England

50-year-old Richard Lansling Green, considered to be the world's leading expert on Sherlock Holmes,

is discovered dead on top of his bed inside his flat. His cause of death is determined to be

his fixation after he was garauded with a shoelace which was tightened around his neck with a wooden

spoon. Prior to his death, Lansling Green told people his life was in danger over a dispute,

involving a collection of rare documents from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since there is no definitive

evidence pointing towards homicide or suicide, the coroner returns an open verdict,

so the exact circumstances of how Lansling Green died are never determined. After that, the trail

went cold.

Conan Doyle remains one of those writers so intensely stitched into our culture that it's easy

not to notice him. The immense talent, passion and literary brilliance that he brought to his work

gives him a unique place in English letters. His home stories introduce the wider reading public

to more than just the principles of observation and deduction, close reasoning and cunning detective

work which they're celebrated. It was through their blazingly well-written pages that the wider

reading public became aware of such things as Mormonism, the Ku Klux Klan, corrupt unions,

the Mafia, cocaine and opium use, and much else besides from the bloody and macabre underside of

Victorian grandeur and empire. His unique and simultaneously bringing down the curtain on one

era and raising one on another, ushering in a genre of writing that while imitated and expanded

has never been surpassed. His own life as footballer, cricketer, eye surgeon, champion of injustice,

investigator of the paranormal is itself the stuff of legend. Personally, I'd walk a mile in tight

boots just to read his letters to the Milton. Richard Lansling Green, the world's leading expert on

Sherlock Holmes and his creator Arthur Conan Doyle, dedicated his life to collecting an amazing

...