Novelists turned murderers, murderers turned novelists--it's enough to give you a bit of a headache if you think too hard about it. You've undoubtedly heard of North Carolina's Michael Peterson, author of Immortal Dragon, Inner Peace, etc., who was convicted of murdering his wife Kathleen in 2001 by beating her to death with a fire poker; his widely publicized trial, broadcast on Court TV and relayed in depth on its website, focused on forensic evidence, particularly blood spatter evidence. "American Justice" is working on a documentary about the case for broadcast this fall.
It wasn't known that bestselling mystery novelist Anne Perry, beloved for her series of Victorian-era morality tales, was a murderess until release of the movie Heavenly Creatures, a fictional treatment of the 1954 murder of Honora Parker by her teenage daughter and the daughter's friend Juliet Hulme. After serving a brief prison stretch, Hulme later changed her name to Anne Perry, a fact brought out by investigative reporter Lin Ferguson of New Zealand's Sunday News in 1994. While Anne Perry initially feared it would spell the end of her writing career, it seems to have had no effect at all.
And now a group of investigators in England want to add Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, to the list.
Headed by Rodger Garrick-Steele, author of House of the Baskervilles, which details his theory, the group has requested permission to exhume the remains of Bertram Fletcher Robinson, Conan Doyle's close friend, who died at 36 in 1907. The official cause of death was typhoid, but Garrick-Steele and others maintain that Conan Doyle and the victim's wife Gladys conspired to poison him with laudanum. The motive, they claim, was to cover up the fact that Fletcher Robinson was plagiarized for Conan Doyle's masterpiece, Hound of the Baskervilles.
Interestingly, Conan Doyle himself did not fully believe that his friend died of typhoid. In 1923, Conan Doyle gave interviews in which he said his friend had died of an ancient Egyptian curse. Fletcher Robinson was studying a female mummy in the British Museum, despite Conan Doyle's warnings of a curse, to write pieces for the Daily Express, where Fletcher Robinson was an editor. Said Conan Doyle: "It is impossible to say with absolute certainty if this is true. If we had proper occult powers we could determine it, but I warned Fletcher Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum.... I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his inquiries, but he was fascinated and would not desist. Then he was overtaken by illness. The immediate cause of his death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the 'elementals' [curses] guarding the mummy might act."
It also so happens to be the way laudanum might act....
Needless to say, Conan Doyle's fans excoriate the group as scandal-mongers and conspiracy theorists. Well, there's a simple way to prove or disprove the theory: exhume the body and test it for the presence of poisons (since curses are a bit harder to detect). That will either quell the rumors or rewrite a chapter of literary history.
Sources:
"Collectors of Treasures Fear King Tut's Curse; Sudden Rush to Hand Over their Relics to the British Museum--As Safeguard; Groundless Panic; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Theory of 'Elementals:' Death of Pressman," The Daily Express, as reprinted in The Kingston (Jamaica) Gleaner, April 27, 1923.
Blood Memory: Writer Anne Perry Once Took Part in a Murder, by Pam Lambert Ellin Stein, People, Sept. 26, 1994.
Call for Holmes: Conan Doyle is Accused of Betrayal and Murder, by Anthony Barnes, The Independent, July 27, 2005.
Did Conan Doyle Kill for Holmes? by Martin Williams, The (Glasgow) Herald, July 26, 2005.
Did Conan Doyle poison his friend to cheat him out of the Hound of the Baskervilles? by Richard Saville, The Telegraph, July 26, 2005.
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