HOTTEST FACES AND BODIES

HOTTEST FACES AND BODIES. Cont'd.

Arthur Conan Doyle: He died in 1930 and he is still the hottest author.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. LONDON (AP) -- Thousands of personal papers belonging to Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fetched almost $1.8 million US at an auction Wednesday, with many of the items sold to private U.S. collectors. Christie's Auction House had expected the entire archive of letters, notes and handwritten manuscripts to raise about double the amount. However, 31 of the 135 lots on offer failed to meet their reserve price and remained unsold. The highest successful bid for an individual lot was $250,000 US for a collection of items including the author's notebooks from his time as a young medical doctor in Southsea, southern England. The lot, which was snapped up by a private American buyer, also contained the author's drawing for the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes in the novel A Study in Scarlet, with the original title of the book, A Tangled Skein, crossed out. A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887. Over the following 40 years, Conan Doyle published 56 short stories and four novels featuring Holmes and his faithful sidekick, Dr. Watson, who, like Conan Doyle, was a physician, a writer and had served in the British army. The author died in 1930. There also was plenty of interest at the auction in Conan Doyle's private life. Letters the author wrote to his brother Innes, which included an acknowledgment that Conan Doyle began a relationship with a new woman before the death of his ailing first wife, sold for $129,000 US. The letters were sold to British book dealer Bernard Quaritch Ltd. A Christie's spokeswoman said many of the lots went to private U.S. collectors. She declined to provide details on the unsold lots. The auction was a great disappointment to scholars who had hoped the papers would be donated to a public institution.

Scholars keen to find out more about Conan Doyle had been frustrated by a family court battle that broke out after the death in 1970 of the author's son Adrian. As a result, the collection was locked up in a lawyer's office for about 25 years until the beneficiaries of the author's daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, decided upon the Christie's auction. Sir Christopher Frayling, head of the Arts Council, which allocates government arts funding, this month called the papers "a vast piece of English heritage" that should be kept together for future scholars. "If this was Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, there would be a national outcry," he told BBC Radio. The archive also became entwined in a mystery worthy of Conan Doyle's celebrated fictional detective: the bizarre death of a leading Holmes scholar. Lancelyn Green, 50, was found dead in his bed on March 27, garroted with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon, and surrounded by stuffed toys. At an inquest in April, coroner Paul Knapman said suicide was the most likely explanation, but he acknowledged there was no note, that garroting was a painful way to kill oneself, and that it therefore had been a "very unusual death." He said the deceased had been acting paranoid. Christie's said it had consulted Green as an expert and he provided eight of the photographs that illustrate the sale catalogue.

Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930), a British writer, created Sherlock Holmes, the world's best-known detective. Millions of readers have followed Holmes's adventures and delighted in his ability to solve crimes by an amazing use of reason and observation. Doyle wrote a story in 1893 in which Holmes was killed. But public demand forced Doyle to bring Holmes back to life in another story. Critic Christopher Morley said of Holmes, "Perhaps no fiction character ever created has become so charmingly real to his readers." Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He began practicing medicine in 1882, but his practice was not a success. He started writing while waiting for the patients that never came. His early stories earned him little money, but he won great success with his first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887).Holmes appeared in 56 short stories and three other novels—The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Valley of Fear (1915). Doyle may have been the highest paid short-story writer of his time. He also wrote historical novels, romances, and plays. He eventually abandoned fiction to study and lecture on spiritualism (communication with spirits). For his efforts in support of the British cause during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, King Edward VII knighted Doyle in 1902. He became known as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur died on July 7, 1930.-Janne Wardell.

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