Bertram Fletcher Robinson

Bertram Fletcher Robinson grew up on the edge of Dartmoor and spent his career as a journalist and editor, including as a war correspondent covering the Boer War, where he met Arthur Conan Doyle in July 1900 aboard the ship bringing them both home. The following spring, on a golfing holiday in Norfolk, Robinson began telling Doyle the ghost stories he had been "reared" on, including a legend of a phantom hound. In 1901 he took Doyle to Dartmoor itself, and Doyle later wrote to his editor that "I must do it with my friend Robinson and his name must appear with mine."

That full co-credit never happened. The Strand Magazine's first instalment in August 1901 carried a footnote crediting Robinson with helping "both in the general plot and in the local details," and the book, published March 1902, was dedicated to him, but Robinson's name did not appear alongside Doyle's as an author. He seems not to have entirely let this go: a byline on one of his own later books described him as "Joint author with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Best Sherlock Holmes Story The Hound of the Baskervilles." Robinson died young, in January 1907, officially of typhoid and peritonitis after a visit to Paris. A writer's theory in 2000 that Doyle had poisoned him over the credit dispute led to a request to exhume his grave, which Exeter's Consistory Court rejected in 2008. There is no evidence for the poisoning claim beyond the theory itself.