HIGH on Dartmoor, the bleak landscape made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles, another mystery is brewing, one that might have baffled Sherlock Holmes himself.
This is the strange case of the famous author and the dead journalist, and it is Conan Doyle who stands accused of crimes most foul: plagiarism, conspiracy and murder. This week a group of scientists and amateur detectives formally applied for permission to exhume the body of Bertram Fletcher Robinson from a grave in Ipplepen, on the edge of Dartmoor, to establish, by forensic testing, whether he was poisoned.
The team, led by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele and Paul Spiring, a scientist, claims that Fletcher Robinson, a journalist and 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, a friend of Conan Doyle’s and a former Editor of the Daily Express, died mysteriously in 1907 at the age of 36 and was buried in St Andrew’s Church, Ipplepen, near Newton Abbot. “This way we can find out, once and for all, whether Fletcher Robinson was murdered, as we suspect, with a massive dose of laudanum,” said Mr Spiring, a former police officer who teaches biology and physics at the European School in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The forensic tests on the remains will be carried out by Susan Paterson, the head toxicologist at Imperial College London, using the technique of liquid gas chromatography to establish precisely whether, or when, the dead man was given laudanum, and how much.
There has long been debate among Holmes aficionados over the precise role played by Fletcher Robinson in the creation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which went on to become Conan Doyle’s most successful work. Certainly, the young journalist was more involved in the project than he is usually given credit for.
Conan Doyle and Fletcher Robinson became friends when both were covering the Boer War as journalists. In 1901, after playing golf together in Norfolk, Fletcher Robinson entertained his older companion with ghostly folk stories from his home on Dartmoor.
Conan Doyle was particularly taken with the tale of the mythical black hound that stalked the desolate moors at night, and the gruesome story of the evil squire Sir Richard Cabell, who sold his soul to the devil and was dragged to the underworld by a pack of hellhounds. This was the genesis of the Baskerville Hound.
Fletcher Robinson invited Conan Doyle to stay at his family home in Ipplepen and, at least initially, the book appears to have been conceived as a joint venture. “Robinson and I are exploring the moors together over our Sherlock Holmes book,” Conan Doyle wrote to his mother. Fletcher Robinson’s coachman, Harry Baskerville, drove the pair around the moors; in return, his name would be incorporated into one of the most popular books in English literature.
Many years later, in 1959, when he was 88, Baskerville claimed: “Doyle didn’t write the story himself. A lot of the story was written by Fletcher Robinson. But he never got the credit he deserved.”
When The Hound of the Baskervilles was being readied for publication in 1902, Conan Doyle is said to have wanted to put his friend’s name on the cover, again suggesting that Fletcher Robinson did more than act as a local guide. In the end, the younger man was merely acknowledged in a footnote to the first edition: “This story owes its inception to my friend Fletcher Robinson who has helped me.”
The book was a runaway success, cementing the reputation of Holmes, the great detective, and Conan Doyle, his creator. As the huge royalties began to flow in, Conan Doyle made a payment to Fletcher Robinson of £2,500, a quarter of the original advance: this was a considerable sum of money for someone who had merely helped, but not much for a co-author. Was the payment evidence of a guilty conscience, or the generosity of an older, richer man to a younger writer? In Conan Doyle’s preface to The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (1929), he stated that the book “arose from a remark by that fine fellow whose premature death was a loss to the world, Fletcher Robinson, that there was a spectral dog near his home on Dartmoor. That remark was the inception of the book, but I should add that the plot and every word of the actual narrative was my own”.
The tone seems oddly defensive, and Fetcher Robinson’s contribution amounted to more than “a remark”.
Mr Spiring and his collaborators believe that the two men may have quarrelled over royalties and, perhaps more importantly, over credit for writing the bestseller. Fletcher Robinson died unexpectedly in 1907. The official cause was typhoid, but the circumstances surrounding his death remain murky. His wife, Gladys, initially stated that he had died from food poisoning after returning from a reporting trip to Paris, but the investigators contend that the symptoms and circumstances of his death are more consistent with an overdose of laudanum. There have even been suggestions that Gladys might have had an affair with Conan Doyle, although the evidence for this is flimsy.
By law, any typhoid victim in 1907 should have been cremated, but Fletcher Robinson was buried in Ipplepen graveyard. His wife did not attend the funeral.Critics of the poison theory maintain that the investigators have simply eliminated the probable, to be left with the implausible. Certainly the case against Conan Doyle is based largely on circumstantial evidence, and the tiniest of clues.
Then again, to quote Holmes: “You know my method, Watson. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.” The truth about the death may never be fully known, but what the latest mystery has proved beyond doubt is the fascination, sometimes amounting to obsession, exerted by the fictional detective more than a century after Conan Doyle brought him to life.
HIS LIFE
He died on July 8, 1930
