Scholarly Pursuits
Richard Lancelyn 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.
Lancelyn Green also published other books on his own. The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (1983) anthologized 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".
He 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 encyclopedic knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and for his masterful scholarly works, he was well regarded among scholars of Holmes.
Later in life, he worked extensively on notes and collecting material for a planned three-volume biography of Conan Doyle, which remained unfinished at the time of his death. He lamented the legal wranglings needed to gain rights to Conan Doyle's private papers and manuscripts, which were planned to be sold at an auction.
During August 2004, it was announced that Lancelyn Green had bequeathed his extensive collection on Conan Doyle to the Portsmouth Library Service. Lancelyn Green had chosen the city because Conan Doyle had a medical practice there, and it was where the two first Sherlock Holmes books were written.
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