The Devil and Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page A

any irrational behavior. “No, never,” he said. “He was the most levelheaded man I ever met.”
    He noted that Priscilla West had testified at the inquest that her brother had no history of depression. Indeed, Green’s physician wrote to the court to say that he had not treated Green for any illnesses for a decade.
    “One last question,” I said. “Was anything taken out of the apartment?”
    “Not that we know of. Richard had a valuable collection of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle books, and nothing appears to be missing.”
    As Gibson drove me back to the train station, he said, “Please, you must stay on the case. The police seem to have let poor Richard down.” Then he advised, “As Sherlock Holmes says, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
    S ome facts about Richard Green are easy to discern—those which illuminate the circumstances of his life, rather than the circumstances of his death. He was born on July 10, 1953; he was the youngest of three children; his father was Roger Lancelyn Green, a best-selling children’s author who popularized the Homeric myths and the legend of King Arthur, and who was a close friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; and Richard was raised near Liverpool, on land that had been given to his ancestors in 1093, and where his family had resided ever since.
    Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the American consul in Liverpool in the eighteen-fifties, visited the house one summer, and he later described it in his “English Notebooks”:
    We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally drove through a lawn, shaded with trees, and closely shaven, and reached the door of Poulton Hall. Part of the mansion is three or four hundred years old.… There is [a] curious, old, stately staircase, with a twisted balustrade, much like that of the old Province House in Boston. The drawing-room looks like a very handsome modern room, being beautifully painted, gilded, and paper-hung, with a white-marble fire-place, and rich furniture; so that the impression is that of newness, not of age.
    By the time Richard was born, however, the Green family was, as one relative told me, “very English—a big house and no money.” The curtains were thin, the carpets were threadbare, and a cold draft often swirled through the corridors.
    Green, who had a pale, pudgy face, was blind in one eye from a childhood accident, and wore spectacles with tinted lenses. (One friend told me that, even as an adult, Green resembled “the god of Pan,” with “cherubic-like features, a mouth which curved in a smile which was sympathetic, ironic, and always seeming to suggest that there was just one little thing that he was not telling you.”) Intensely shy, with a ferociously logical mind and a precise memory, he would spend hours roaming through his father’s enormous library, reading dusty first editions of children’s books. And by the time he was eleven he had fallen under the spell of Sherlock Holmes.
    Holmes was not the first great literary detective—that honor belongs to Edgar Allan Poe’s Inspector Auguste Dupin—but Conan Doyle’s hero was the most vivid exemplar of the fledgling genre, which Poe dubbed “tales of ratiocination.” Holmes is a cold, calculating machine, a man who is, as one critic put it, “a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bull-dog.” The gaunt Holmes has no wife or children; as he explains, “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.”Rigidly scientific, he offers no spiritual bromides to his bereaved clients. Conan Doyle reveals virtually nothing about his character’s interior life; he is defined solely by his method. In short, he is the perfect detective, the superhero of the Victorian era, out of which he blasted with his deerstalker hat and Inverness cape.
    Richard read the stories straight through, then read them again. His rigorous mind