Richard Lancelyn Green

Richard Lancelyn Green (10 July 1953 – 27 March 2004) was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.

Green was born in Bebington, Cheshire, England. His parents were Roger Lancelyn Green and June Green. His father was an author known for his popular adaptations of the Arthurian, Robin Hood and Homeric myths, and his mother was a drama teacher and adjudicator. He attended Bradfield College in Berkshire, and then University College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English. After leaving college, he travelled extensively, throughout Europe, India and South-East Asia.

Green was a collector of Sherlock Holmes-related material, and was co-editor of the first comprehensive bibliography of Arthur Conan Doyle, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, with John Michael Gibson, and also a series of collections of Doyle's writings that had never before been collected in book form: Uncollected Stories (1982), Essays on Photography (1982), and Letters to the Press (1986), all co-edited with Gibson. The Conan Doyle bibliography earned Green and Gibson a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America during 1984.

Green also published other books on his own. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologised Doyle's non-canon Sherlock Holmes writings, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) is a collection of Holmes pastiches and parodies, and Letters to Sherlock Holmes (1985) collected the most interesting of letters to Sherlock Holmes, arriving at the headquarters of the Abbey National Building Society, whose address in Baker Street was the closest to the fictional "221b".

Green was something of a showman, appearing as a 19th-century music hall master of ceremonies at events of the Sherlock Holmes Society, of which he was chairman from 1996 to 1999, and dressing in period costume to visit Reichenbach Falls, where Sherlock Holmes was thought to have died until Conan Doyle "resurrected" him eight years later. For his encyclopaedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.

...
Wikipedia