BRITAIN: The case of the lost personal papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is due to reach its conclusion today when the final instalment of the author's vast collection of letters and manuscripts goes under the auctioneer's hammer.
But the sale, which is expected to earn up to £1.5 million for the descendants of the man most famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, has ignited a furore, with some fans and scholars claiming it is elementary that the collection should be gifted, intact, to the nation.
Sir Christopher Frayling, chairman of the British Arts Council and an eminent cultural historian, said that breaking up the collection would "consign Conan Doyle to the second eleven. If this was Jane Austen or Charles Dickens there would be a national outcry." He called for public and political pressure to prevent the dispersal of the collection, which includes hundreds of letters as well as diaries and material from Conan Doyle's archives on a wide range of subjects.
"Anyone who wants to write a collected letters or a definitive biography will never be able to reassemble this material again," he said.
For those in favour of the sale, however, Conan Doyle's provenance is a moot point. "Conan Doyle wasn't English, he was half Irish and half Scottish, so to say his papers belong to the nation, to England, is preposterous," said Mr Tom Lamb, head of the manuscripts and books department for Christie's, the auctioneers. "A Doyle is a Doyle after all, so perhaps this material should go to Ireland," he joked.
"These papers are the private property of Conan Doyle's family and it is their business what they do with them, no one else's."
The papers include a drawing of Holmes that Conan Doyle did for the first novel in which the spruce sleuth appeared, A Study In Scarlett, which was published in 1887. The sketch in Conan Doyle's spidery, cartoonish style, bears the novel's original title, A Tangled Skein, crossed out.
Conan Doyle went on to write four novels and 56 short stories featuring Holmes and his trusted friend and companion, Dr Watson, who like the author was a doctor and writer who had served in the British army. Conan Doyle was knighted in 1903 and died in 1930 having won international acclaim and accumulated a significant fortune.
The 3,000 items in the sale represent the final 30 per cent of the vast collection of material that Conan Doyle accumulated in the study of his Sussex mansion.
The auction is scheduled to take place in London today.