Rubbing shoulders with the rich, the famous and the royal, neither needs the cash nor, you might think, the publicity. He then suggested she should slip him laudanum, as he knew its symptoms were similar to typhoid. “We’re not saying she was necessarily a co-conspirator in this, really more of a patsy,” said Mr Spiring.Holmes experts have dismissed the claims that Fletcher Robinson may have been the real author as “bunkum”.. A footnote to the first edition of Hound of the Baskervilles acknowledges his contribution: “This story owes its inception to my friend Fletcher Robinson who has helped me.”But the fullness of his debt became lost in later reprints. In a letter to his mother from Dartmoor, Conan Doyle says the book is already half complete – suggesting he may have been working from a manuscript presented to him by Fletcher Robinson.The investigation team suggests that the journalist’s wife may have tipped off Conan Doyle that her husband was unhappy that he was poorly remunerated for his efforts. Investigators are attempting to show once and for all that the creator of Sherlock Holmes was involved in a dark plot to bump off a former editor of the Daily Express – the man who should truly be acknowledged as the creator of the Hound of the Baskervilles.
In a bizarre scenario that Holmes himself might have appreciated, it is alleged that Bertram Fletcher Robinson was poisoned with laudanum, administered by his wife under the instruction of Conan Doyle.The motive, the investigators allege, was to cover up the theft of the Baskervilles tale and silence the true source of the story. Officially the cause of death was typhoid.Paul Spiring, a scientist coordinating the investigation, said: “If you take a purely objective, scientific view of our findings, the evidence of a cover-up is irrefutable.”Some of the allegations were outlined by the author Rodger Garrick-Steele in his book House of the Baskervilles, but Mr Spiring carried out his own investigations after becoming intrigued when he moved to the village of Ipplepen, where Fletcher Robinson is buried.Conan Doyle and the journalist visited Dartmoor together, and Baskerville was the surname of Fletcher Robinson’s coachman.

Next week the investigators will make a formal application to the Diocese of Exeter to dig up Fletcher Robinson’s corpse. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the world’s most famous crime writers, was himself a murderer and a thief according to a team of literary sleuths, who plan to prove their claim with a macabre exhumation in a Devon churchyard. Indeed, at points, you might wonder if Cartoon de Salvo are in the wrong kind of nursery.Director Alex Murdoch and her actors need to have an artistic growing spurt if they are to become – as predicted – the next Complicite.Still, for a summer evening, there’s plenty of sweet fun to be had here, and the final fireworks are a delight as Ike bicycles into the blue yonder – with Heath-Robinsonian wings made of fencing and chicken feathers, and a sparkler in his tail.Hawton Road Allotments, Newark (0115 941 9419), 11 to 20 August. Really, The Sunflower Plot feels like a piece of children’s theatre, barely dealing intellectually or emotionally with its themes of ownership and angry, wounded love. However, their communal spirit disintegrates as Straiton’s romantically unfulfilled Rosie slips away from her foolish hubby, Dennis Herdman’s Ike, to have a shed-juddering fling with Logan’s gangly Tom.Unfortunately, this show begins to wilt with much wandering back and forth, disappointingly feeble ballads, and with too much eagerly grinning whimsy.

Think of The Gherkin then imagine more of a gleaming glass, multi-storey Spring Onion, he says. His right-hand babe, the actress Paschale Straiton, is hilarious, struggling to recline alluringly on his sports car in a pencil skirt, and lurching over the wing.
Hereafter, the cast morph into a bevy of hippyish locals, tilling the soil and trying to persuade us to join in their sing-along, anti-capitalist protest, with a squeezebox and recorders made of carrots. Soon we learn that the dastardly plot conceived by Brian Logan’s greasy, swaggering Cameron Couch is to redevelop the land as a shopping plaza and designer flats And we are his potential investors. It’s also delightfully funny to begin with as the yuppies descend on the audience, in a dart formation, and start herding them up the garden path, cheekily hyping them en route to their corporate phone buddies (“They are looking quite excited by the whole thing” etc). The allotments are swarming with yuppies in dark glasses. They are buzzing around improbably, blathering into their mobile phones, among the leafy teepees of runner beans and the beds of silently ballooning marrows In fact, they’re acting as if they own the place. This summer comedy, devised by the physical theatre troupe Cartoon de Salvo, is a truly scenic, al fresco stroll among the vegetables Distant hay meadows and the sunset form the backdrop.