Covinous, my dear Watson: Literary frauds

Q. What's behind the story that Conan Doyle was not the author of The Hound of the Baskervilles

A. Historian Roger Garrick-Steele has suggested that the super-sleuth's most celebrated adventure was not in fact penned by his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after all. By the turn of the 20th century Conan Doyle was heartrily sick of his most famous character, but was persuaded by public pressure - and promises of healthy remuneration - to write a new adventure for Strand magazine.

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This was The Hound of the Baskervilles, and it caused a sensation on publication and its success helped to elevate the then plain Mr Conan Doyle to his new social level as Sir Arthur.

However, Garrick-Steele says that the real author of the story was Bertram Fletcher Robinson, Conan Doyle's best friend. At the time Conan Doyle briefly acknowledged the debt owed to Robinson, who had shown him around Dartmoor, the setting of the story. But Garrick-Steele says that the debt is even greater, that Robinson wrote the story only to have it pinched by his friend.

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To complicate matters Conan Doyle was having an affair with Robinson's wife. The thought of exposure on both these counts caused him great anxiety. The fraud would have cost him his new knighthood, and public knowledge of the adultery social disgrace, so Garrick-Steele alleges that Conan Doyle persuaded Robinson's wife to murder her husband with an overdose of laudanum. Laudanum causes similar symptoms to typhoid, the cause of death shown on Robinson's death certificate, something Conan Doyle, who had medical training, would have known.

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Q. A mystery worthy of the attention of the great Holmes himself. Does anyone believe the story

A. The literary establishment and Holmes enthusiasts are dismissive of the theory, although many do think that Robinson's role in the tale has not been adequately credited. For, more than just showing Conan Doyle around Dartmoor, he told his friend the story of the evil Dartmoor squire Sir Richard Cabell - the model for Baskerville - and the two men had even planned to write a story inspired by this jointly.

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Q. Isn't there a long tradition of literary fraud

A. Although such hoaxes were known in classical times and during the Middle Ages, it was in the 18th century that literary frauds flourished. Someone whose real identity has never been discovered and who pretended to be a native of Taiwan (Formosa) published A Description of Formosa (1704) under the name George Psalmanazar. In the 1760s James Macpherson wrote a group of poems that he said were translations of the 3rd-century Celtic poet Ossian. William Ireland made news with his claim that he had found two lost plays of Shakespeare, Vortigern and Rowena.

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An interesting literary fraud of the early 20th century was the Spectra hoax. In 1916 two American poets, Witter Brynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, published a book of parodies called Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments, in which they satirised contemporary literary movements. The book won acclaim from critics, and the Spectrists were publicly accepted as a valid literary school.

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Of more financial than literary interest was the Hughes hoax of 1972, when a writer named Clifford Irving received around $750,000 from several publishers after he fraudulently convinced them that the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes wanted Irving to co-author Hughes's autobiography. Irving was subsequently convicted of fraud and sent to prison.

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Q. And what are the most famous literary frauds of all

A. The best-known 19th century examples were the supposed first editions of such famous writers as Tennyson, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Browning and Rudyard Kipling. They were long considered genuine and were not definitely proved to be forgeries until 1934. In 1939 the author was revealed as Thomas Wise, a noted book dealer.

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Possibly the most celebrated fraud was that by a poet named Thomas Chatterton, who wrote poems in an imitation of 15th-century English that he claimed were transcriptions from a manuscript of a poet-priest of that period, named Rowley.

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More recently, in 1984, the announcement of the discovery of manuscript diaries of Adolf Hitler created great interest, being serialised in the German magazine�Der Spiegel for huge sums and duping several prominent historians, including Hugh Trevor-Roper, who vouched for their authenticity and were most embarrassed when the diaries were proved to have been faked.

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By Simon Smith