“I am lost without my
Boswell.”
—Sherlock Holmes
The Red-Handed League, my new thriller about Sherlock Holmes,
debuts this week.
Hewing to a Doylean
naming strategy, this little essay might be called, The Matter of the Murdered Biographer. It could also be titled, The Case of Fearful Symmetry.
Here’s what I
mean:
My first work
published by Betimes Books was the literary thriller Permanent Fatal Error. It centers on a presumed-dead cult novelist ala
J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon whose would-be biographers mysteriously die.
The Red-Handed League is a present-day prequel to Conan
Doyle’s first-published Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet.
My new book spins
on inappropriate relationships between students and instructors at an upscale
private school. It also re-imagines and melds aspects of several noted Holmes
tales, including “The Red-Headed League” and “The Master Blackmailer.”
What goes around
comes around, they say.
Or as Holmes
might observe, “Everything comes in circles. The old wheel turns and the same
spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.”
There’s a creepy
nexus between my first and second books for Betimes, you see.
While we were
working on cover designs and last touches for The Red-Handed League, my publisher ran across an article about a
man obsessed with writing the definitive biography of a famous author, only to
die violently under the most mysterious of circumstances.
The excellent
article by David Grann detailing this real-life mystery was published in The New Yorker in December 2004.
“That’s pretty
far back in the rearview mirror, Ms. Colt,” you might point out.
And I’d respond,
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
And yet?
There is fearful symmetry in this. Deliciously
lingering mystery, too.
The Betimes Books
publisher and her author were struck by the very strange overlap between the mysterious
death of a deceased novelist’s would-be biographer (the set up for an elevator
pitch for Permanent Fatal Error) and
the fact our second novel together centers on Sherlock Holmes.
You see, the real-life
biographer who met his mysterious death in his home surrounded by Holmesian books
and collectibles was a revered Sherlock scholar named Richard Lancelyn Green.
His intended
biographical subject was (of course) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Apparent cause
of death: (Clears throat) Self-garroting
with a bit of string and a spoon.
Pray, go off now
and read Mr. Grann’s superb piece on this mysterious affair. I’ll wait
here, staring out the window, surely brooding, but sans pipe or violin.
***
Welcome back.
Chilling, no?
What was I doing as Christmas crept up in
2004? How did I miss this when it was
fresh?
At any rate, like
all good 21st Century armchair detectives, I went straight to
Googling this matter to see if any official investigator or real-life Holmes had
advanced the ball.
In the
intervening twelve or more years, surely someone shed definitive light on what
happened to this unfortunate biographer, yes?
But beyond the
mystery of the mysterious American voice on the answering machine turning out
to be a factory-loaded feature, there’s no more new to report, alas.
Matters stand
now as they did in December 2004.
You can believe this
was a case of murder, or you can dismiss it as an elaborate suicide staged by a
man given to extreme dramatics (very Holmes-like, that last).
Permanent Fatal Error, my thriller about murdered biographers,
opens with a quote declaring, “Any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography
within.”
Maybe too, a
biography can shelter mortal risk for the would-be Boswell… Perhaps even the
prospect of perishing before publishing.
