A report published in the Western Morning News for September 2 reveals a strange investigation, which to me appears to involve a highly questionable series of events. A Devon author claims to have evidence implicating Arthur Conan Doyle in the death of his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who died in 1907 from typhoid. The suggestion is that Doyle persuaded Robinson's wife Gladys to poison her husband with laudanum.
A complication is that the critic questions the authorship of one of Doyle's most successful tales, ‘The hound of the Baskervilles', published in book form in 1902. The genesis of the book is well documented. In March, 1901, Doyle and Robinson, who became acquainted as journalists during the Boer War, spent a golfing holiday together at the Royal Links Hotel in Cromer. On a raw and windy afternoon when they were confined indoors, Robinson related some Dartmoor legends, one of which concerned a spectral hound, which he had come across when living in Ipplepen, several miles east of the moor. The two of them explored on foot the region in the centre of the moor where the tale is based, and Doyle entered enthusiastically into working out a plot featuring a spectral hound.
It is on record that Doyle offered to take Robinson as a collaborator, but his friend declined the invitation. "Conan Doyle had suggested that Robinson collaborate with him on the novel; although Robinson refused the offer, Conan Doyle acknowledged his debt by dedicating the novel to him." In the preface to his ‘Complete Sherlock Holmes long stories' (1929), Conan Doyle himself wrote of the ‘Hound': "It arose from a remark by that fine fellow whose premature death was a loss to the world, Fletcher Robinson, that there was a spectral dog near his home on Dartmoor. That remark was the inception of the book, but I should add that the plot and every word of the actual narrative was my own." Nevertheless, Doyle shared the royalties with his friend.
It is difficult to see in these manoeuvres any sign of a murderous intention on Conan Doyle's part. And the explanation offered, that he was as mentally and emotionally unstable, based as it is on the fact that from 1916 until his death in 1930 Doyle was fascinated by the occult, seems to me far too indigestible to stomach.