25 May 1901. The following promotional announcement was made in Tit-Bits ahead of the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This periodical was like The Strand Magazine,
also published by George Newnes. Significantly, this announcement also
appeared before ACD and BFR had visited Dartmoor together (on or shortly after 26 May 1901), indicating
that they had already settled the matter of authorship:
August 1901. The first of nine monthly instalments of The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in the British edition of The Strand Magazine. BFR’s contribution was fully acknowledged in a brief footnote on the first page of the first Chapter as follows:
25 March 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles was published as a novel by George Newnes, London. The book preceded by one month the publication of the final instalment of the serialisation printed in the British edition of The Strand Magazine. This book edition includes a short acknowledgement that reads:
MY DEAR ROBINSON,
It was to your account of a West-
Country legend that this tale owes its incep-
tion. For this and for your help in the
details all thanks.
Yours most truly,
A. CONAN DOYLE.
HINDHEAD, HASLEMERE.
Thereafter, BFR gave first edition copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles
to Henry Baskerville, The Rev. Robert Duins Cooke and to his
wife, Agnes Cooke. Baskerville was coachman to the
Robinson family for twenty years and drove BFR and ACD about Dartmoor during the early summer of 1901.
The Rev. Robert Duins Cooke was the Rector of St. Andrew’s Church in
Ipplepen (1897-1939) and during early May 1901 (before ACD's visit), he assisted BFR in mapping-out the fictional locations for the story. The following inscriptions, in BFR’s hand-writing, make it clear
that he laid no claim to the authorship of the story:
To Rev. R D Cooke from the assistant plot producer, Bertram Fletcher Robinson
To Mrs. Cooke, with the kind regards of the assistant plot producer, Bertram Fletcher Robinson
To Harry Baskerville from B Fletcher Robinson with apologies for using the name!
15 April 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles
was published as a novel by McClure, Phillips and Company (New York).
This, the first American edition of the book, includes a version of
ACD’s acknowledgement letter to BFR. This version was written, from
dictation, on the 26 January 1902, by Major Charles Terry (ACD’s
Secretary) and it therefore predates the acknowledgement published in
the first British edition. This letter is now held by the Berg
Collection in New York Public Library and it reads:
MY DEAR ROBINSON
It was your account of a west country legend which first suggested the idea of this little tale to my mind.
For this, and for the help which you gave me in its evolution, all thanks. Yours most truly, A. Conan Doyle.
31 October 1903. ACD had a short Sherlock Holmes tale entitled The Adventure of the Norwood Builder published in Collier's Weekly Magazine. In this story, an innocent person is incriminated for a murder through the use of a wax-mould to falsify their thumbprint. ACD reportedly bought this idea from BFR for fifty pounds during their return voyage to England aboard the steamship Briton in July 1900. It seems highly improbable that ACD would have risked using the idea should there have been any controversy between himself and BFR over the authorship of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
January 1904. BFR, ACD and Max Pemberton were elected as members of a
select twelve-man London-based criminological society referred to by
its members as ‘Our Society’.
1904. During this year, Sir John Robinson's autobiography entitled
Fifty Years on Fleet Street was
published posthumously by McMillan & Company Limited of London. It includes the
following statement made in a foreword written by Frederick Moy Thomas,
a friend and former employee of Sir John’s for over 25 years:
I am much indebted to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for leave to publish his
striking letter to Sir John Robinson on the subject of America and the
Americans [dated 3rd November 1894]… and to a number of Sir John’s
relatives and friends for similar facilities or for valuable counsel or
assistance.
Clearly, ACD had recently granted permission for his letter to be
reproduced in Sir John’s autobiography. This implies that ACD and the
Robinson family were still on friendly terms some three years after
publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
23 June 1904. ACD had a ‘Letter to the Editor’ published in Vanity Fair under the heading of M.C.C. Absolutism.
BFR had recently replaced Oliver Armstrong Fry as the editor of this
periodical. ACD, an avid cricketer and himself a member of the
Marlyebone Cricket Club, begins this letter by writing:
Sir,—You were
good enough to ask me for my opinion of the management of the M.C.C.
Clearly, BFR had relied upon his friendship with ACD to persuade the
latter to write upon this topic. Again this nullifies the suggestion
that there was any friction between BFR and ACD in respect to the
authorship of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
7 July 1904. BFR had an article entitled On Political Lies – A Growing Danger in British Politics, published in Vanity Fair.
In this article, BFR condemned the way in which the Radical political
parties (especially The Liberal Party and the nascent Labour Party)
were increasingly using misinformation to support their causes. He
cites lies being told about the Second Boer War, exaggerations about
rising food prices and the falsification of data pertaining to the
number of Chinese immigrants working the mines. He exemplifies the matter with a case involving ACD:
In the last General Election, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was standing for
a division of Edinburgh. The honesty of his convictions and his hard
hitting, straight-forward oratory won him the hearts even of political
opponents. He had made great progress in the centre of a Radical
stronghold, and his election seemed certain. On the day of the poll,
however, the constituency was placarded with posters, stating in
four-feet letters that Conan Doyle was a Roman Catholic, and that the
Church of Scotland was in danger.
This Radical lie – for Sir Arthur does not happen to be a Roman
catholic – caused the desired consternation. The worthy Scotsmen read,
exclaimed in horror, and hurried to the polls to avert this terrible
danger. An honourable method of winning an election surely!
Following publication of the above article, several supportive ‘Letters to the Editor’ were forwarded to Vanity Fair. BFR's reference to the integrity of ACD is particularly relevant, having been written over three years after the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
BFR clearly retained a high regard for ACD and was evidently satisfied
with the outcome of their literary collaboration during 1901.
August 1904. BFR had the first of a series of six detective short-stories collectively entitled The Chronicles of Addington Peace, published in Pearson’s The Lady’s Home Magazine (later retitled as Home Magazine of Fiction and then The Novel Magazine). Pearson’s by-lined this first part of the serialisation as follows:
Joint author with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Best Sherlock Holmes Story The Hound of the Baskervilles.
ACD is not recorded as having objected to this declaration suggesting
that he wished to assist BFR in any way possible and remained his
friend.
1905. BFR had his eight Addington Peace short stories published in a book entitled The Chronicles of Addington Peace (Harper & Brother, London). This book was included in Queen’s Quorum,
a listing created primarily by Frederic Dannay, one half of the ‘Ellery
Queen’ twosome, of the 106 (later 125) most significant short
detective/crime stories. Hence, it appears that BFR did derive some benefit
from the publicity which linked him to both ACD and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
26 November 1905. Californian born Journalist called H. J. W. Dam published an article entitled Arthur Conan Doyle – An Appreciation of the Author of ‘Sir Nigel’, the Great Romance Which Begins Next Sunday [3 December 1905], in the Sunday Magazine supplement of The New York Tribune.
This extended article provides an account of BFR’s reflections about
his trip to Dartmoor with ACD and Henry Baskerville in 1901. This article does not record any objection by BFR to the omission of his name from the front-cover
of the book:
One of the most interesting weeks that I have ever spent was with
Doyle on Dartmoor. He made the journey in my company shortly after I
told him, and he had accepted from me, a plot which eventuated in the
‘Hound of the Baskervilles’. Dartmoor, the great wilderness of bog and
rock that cuts Devonshire at this point, appealed to his imagination.
He listened eagerly to my stories of ghost hounds, of the headless
riders and of the devils that lurk in the hollows – legends upon which
I have been reared, for my home lay on the boarders of the moor. How
well he turned to account his impressions will be remembered by all
readers of ‘The Hound’.
Two incidents come especially to my recollection. In the centre of the
moor lies the famous convict prison of Princetown. In the great granite
buildings, swept by the rains and clouded in the mists, are lodged over
a thousand criminals, convicted on the more serious offences. A tiny
village clusters at the foot of the slope on which they stand, and a
comfortable old-fashioned inn affords accommodation to travellers.
The morning after our arrival Doyle and I were sitting in the
smoking-room when a cherry-cheeked maid opened the door and announced
‘Visitors to see you, gentlemen’. In marched four men, who solemnly sat
down and began to talk about the weather, the fishing in the moor
streams and other general subjects. Who they might be I had not the
slightest idea. As they left I followed them into the hall of the inn.
On the table were their four cards. The governor of the prison, the
deputy governor, the chaplain and the doctor had come, as a pencil note
explained, ‘to call on Mr. Sherlock Holmes.’
One morning I took Doyle to see the mighty bog, a thousand acres of
quaking slime, at any part of which a horse and rider might disappear,
which figured so prominently in The Hound. He was amused at the story I
told him of the moor man who on one occasion saw a hat near the edge of
the morass and poked at it with a long pole he carried. ‘You leave my
hat alone!’ came a voice from beneath it. ‘Whoi’! Be there a man under
‘at?’ cried the startled rustic. ‘Yes, you fool, and a horse under the
man.’
From the bog we tramped eastward to the stone fort of Grimspound,
which the savages of the Stone Age in Britain, the aborigines who were
earlier settlers than Saxons or Danes or Norsemen, raised with enormous
labour to act as a haven of refuge from marauding tribes to the South.
The good preservation in which the Grimspound fort still remains is
marvellous. The twenty-feet slabs of granite – how they were ever
hauled to their places is a mystery to historian and engineer – still
encircle the stone huts where the tribe lived. Into one of these Doyle
and I walked, and sitting down on the stone which probably served the
three thousand year-old chief as a bed we talked of the races of the
past. It was one of the loneliest spots in Great Britain. No road came
within a long distance of the place. Strange legends of lights and
figures are told concerning it. Add thereto that it was a gloomy day
overcast with heavy cloud.
Suddenly we heard a boot strike against a stone without and rose
together. It was only a lonely tourist on a walking excursion, but at
sight of our heads suddenly emerging from the hut he let out a yell and
bolted. Our subsequent disappearance was due to the fact that we both
sat down and rocked with laughter, and as he did not return I have
small doubt Mr. Doyle and I added yet another proof of the supernatural
to tellers of ghost stories concerning Dartmoor.
During 1906, the publisher P. F. Collier & Sons of New York published the first in a series of three anthologies entitled Great Short Stories, Volume 1 (1): Detective Stories
(edited by William Patten). It features twelve stories written by
Broughton Brandenburg (1), ACD (2), Anna Katherine Green
(1), Edgar Allen Poe (3) and Robert Louis Stevenson (4). The twelfth
and final story is The Vanished Millionaire by BFR and it is preceded by the following preamble:
Fletcher Robinson is a London Journalist, the editor of "Vanity Fair," and author of a dozen detective stories in which are recorded the startling adventures of Mr. Addington Peace of Scotland Yard. He collaborated with Conan Doyle in "The Hound of the Baskervilles." When some of these stories appeared in the American magazines, for an unexplained reason (presumably editorial) the name of the hero was changed to Inspector Hartley.
This statement is important for two reasons. Firstly, it reveals that ACD
and BFR were content to allow their work to be published within the
same anthology. This weakens any contention that the two men were in
conflict over the authorship of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Secondly, ACD made no
recorded objection to the reference about BFR's involvement with this
story. This might suggest that he was happy to allow the editor to
promote BFR's story through the association with his name.
18 October 1906. BFR and ACD appear to have attended a meeting of ‘Our Society’ at
the home of Max Pemberton. Their host presented a paper entitled An Attempt to Blackmail Me.
20 October 1906. BFR and ACD played a round of golf together at Hindhead in Surrey. This event is recorded within the personal diary
of ACD's brother, Innes Doyle, who also played (later Brigadier-General Doyle).
24 January 1907. The following floral tributes were sent to BFR’s funeral St. Andrew’s Church in Ipplepen, Devon:
In loving memory of an old and valued friend from Arthur Conan Doyle
From ‘Our Society,’ with deepest regrets from fellow members
[These fellow members included both ACD and Max Pemberton].
May 1907. Shortly before his death, BFR wrote an article entitled People Much Talked About in London that was
subsequently published posthumously in the American edition of Munsey’s Magazine (Vol. XXXVII, No. II). In this item BFR wrote:
In Pall Mall, too, it is likely that we shall meet some of the more
famous of English literary men bound for that most exclusive of clubs —
the Athenaeum. Here comes that kindly giant, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
the creator of Sherlock Holmes, prince of detectives. He is of a fine
British type, a clear-headed, sport-loving, big-hearted patriot.
A mention of the Athenaeum Club reminds me of a story Sir Arthur told
me of his first visit, after election, [8th March 1901], to that home
of the respectabilities. He walked up to the hall-porter and, desiring
to introduce himself to that important person’s notice, asked if there
were any letters for Conan Doyle. Now the Athenaeum is a favorite
resort of the clerical dignitaries, and the hall-porter, who had small
acquaintance with literature, replied ‘No, canon, there are no letters
for you.’
Sir Arthur did not care to explain, and for some weeks he suffered
much from the disapproving eye of the hall-porter. The suit of tweeds
affected by the great novelist shocked that functionary deeply, and
when one day Sir Arthur appeared in a long racing-coat, the spectacle
had such an effect upon him that Doyle had to rush to the desk and
explain that he was not a dignitary of the church, but a writer of
tales to whom some latitude in dress might be allowed.
Sir Arthur is an earnest supporter of the rifle-club movement. He has
erected targets for a miniature rifle-range at his house on the moors
at Hindhead [founded in late 1900]. There you may observe groom and
carpenter, mason and village blacksmith competing against one another
on a Saturday afternoon in the same fashion as their forebears did with
‘The Long’ bow, winning Creçy and Agincourt thereby. Among them the
novelist may be seen at his best, shooting with them, cheering them on
with kindly words or awarding prizes, chiefly out of his own pocket.
June 1929. ACD wrote the following comments in a preface to a collection of four Sherlock Holmes novellas entitled The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories that was published on 14 September 1929 by John Murray of London:
Then came The Hound of the Baskervilles. 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 are my own.
BFR Matters I 
