According to this news item, the leading British expert on Sherlock Holmes committed suicide in such a fashion as to frame an American academic rival for murder. He based the method on a Holmes short story.
Really, really odd. Didn’t work, though. I suppose he just forgot that people other than British academics read those old mysteries.
There was an article about the case in the New Yorker last week. An interview with the author of the article is online, but not the article itself.
“The December 13, 2004, issue of The New Yorker features David Grann on the perplexing death of the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert (“Mysterious Circumstances,” p. 58). Was Richard Lancelyn Green, who was found garrotted in his London flat last March, murdered or did he commit suicide? The evidence seemed to point both ways. Green had become intimately involved in the disposition of an archive of Arthur Conan Doyle material. Green, one of the few scholars who had even glanced at the material, was shocked to discover that it was being offered up for sale by Christie’s, instead of going to the British Library, as he had reason to believe it would. In the weeks leading up to his death, Green hinted to family members and reporters that he was in danger because of his opposition to the Christie’s auction, saying that the mystery of the papers involved “an American,” who turns out to be a high-ranking Pentagon official, with whom Grann meets in Washington, D.C., to discuss the case. Grann’s investigation uncovers many strange aspects of the mystery and ultimately allows him to put forward a tentative solution.”