UK Richard Lancelyn Green 27 March 2004, Kensington, London, United Kingdom

[petedavo.au]

Richard Lancelyn Green was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics. Wikipedia

The New Yorker on Twitter
Mysterious Circumstances
Extract>
On the night of Friday, March 26th (2004), he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that “an American was trying to bring him down.” After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.

The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn’t pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.

 

[petedavo.au]

'Perfect mystery' of writer's death plot
Extract>
Richard Lancelyn Green, a biographer of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was discovered garrotted with a shoelace tightened around his neck with a wooden spoon.

Now a close friend has sparked yet more intrigue by claiming the Wirral-born man spent days meticulously planning to kill himself while making it look like murder.

John Gibson, who co-edited a Conan Doyle bibliography with Mr Lancelyn Green in 1983, has told how he believes his former colleague set up a false trail of clues to make the death look like foul play.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, he said: "I think he wanted it to look like murder. That's why he didn't leave a note.

"That's why he took his voice off the answering machine message.

"He must have been planning it for days, giving us false clues.

 

[petedavo.au]

A documentary was made about the death of Richard Lancelyn Green

The Man Who Loved Sherlock Holmes (TV Movie 2007) - IMDb

BBC Four - The Man who Loved Sherlock Holmes

The Man who Loved Sherlock Holmes

 

[MarziPanda]

Oh, wow. I read one of his books as research for my master's dissertation. I had no idea all of this had happened. As someone who seemed to love mystery so much, it wouldn't surprise me if this was a very elaborate suicide.

 

[paper sun]

The New Yorker piece is worth a read —

Richard Lancelyn Green, the world’s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography—a task that Green was determined to complete.
​

— hard not to read on, eh?

His death seems to have been "a very elaborate suicide," as MarziPanda writes above.

 

[petedavo.au]

If it wasn't a very elaborate suicide, then someone's got away with murder.