Could this be true? Surely not. But a grisly exhumation may hold the answer.
High on Dartmoor, the bleak landscape made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles, another mystery is brewing, one that might have baffled Sherlock Holmes himself.Posted by Alan at September 19, 2005 06:12 AMThis is the strange case of the famous author and the dead journalist, and it is Conan Doyle who stands accused of crimes most foul: plagiarism, conspiracy and murder. This week a group of scientists and amateur detectives formally applied for permission to exhume the body of Bertram Fletcher Robinson from a grave in Ipplepen, on the edge of Dartmoor, to establish, by forensic testing, whether he was poisoned.
The team, led by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele and Paul Spiring, a scientist, claims that Fletcher Robinson, a journalist and aspiring writer, was the unacknowledged author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and that Conan Doyle arranged to have him poisoned five years after the book was published to avoid exposure as a fraud.