Conan Doyle for the Defense
How Sherlock Holmes's Creator Turned Real-Life Detective and Freed a Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Murder
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4.0 • 15 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man behind Sherlock Holmes . . . Like all the best historical true crime books, it’s about so much more than crime.”—Tana French, author of In the Woods
A sensational Edwardian murder. A scandalous wrongful conviction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the rescue—a true story.
After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater’s freedom.
With “an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research” (The Wall Street Journal), Margalit Fox immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in its history, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.
Praise for Conan Doyle for the Defense
“Artful and compelling . . . [Fox’s] narrative momentum never flags. . . . Conan Doyle for the Defense will captivate almost any reader while being pure catnip for the devotee of true-crime writing.”—The Washington Post
“Developed with brio . . . [Fox] is excellent in linking the 19th-century creation of policing and detection with the development of both detective fiction and the science of forensics—ballistics, fingerprints, toxicology and serology—as well as the quasi science of ‘criminal anthropology.’”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Fox] has an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Gripping . . . The book works on two levels, much like a good Holmes case. First, it is a fluid story of a crime. . . . Second, and more pertinently, it is a deeper story of how prejudice against a class of people, the covering up of sloppy police work and a poisonous political atmosphere can doom an innocent. We should all heed Holmes’s salutary lesson: rationally follow the facts to find the truth.”—Time
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times senior writer Fox (The Riddle of the Labyrinth) brings to life a forgotten cause c l bre in this page-turning account of how mystery-writer-turned-real life sleuth Arthur Conan Doyle helped exonerate a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder. In 1908, Marion Gilchrist was found bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow home. Early into the investigation, the police centered their suspicions on Oscar Slater, a German Jew expat and known gambler, who was eventually convicted of the murder based on such shoddy evidence as the fact that he'd pawned a brooch similar to one owned by Gilchrist that was missing from the scene of the crime. When Slater's attorneys reached out to Conan Doyle after the trial, the author investigated the case using the method of rational inquiry that was inspired by his medical training and was the hallmark of his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. Through "Holmesian acumen and Watsonian lucidity, dismantles the Slater case plank by plank," Fox writes, starting with the brooch, which he deemed inconsequential: first, because it was not a match for the missing one, and, secondly, because it had been pawned by Slater before Gilchrist's death. Taking a cue from Conan Doyle, Fox then uses the brooch to show how Slater was likely framed for the crime, and how both class bias and anti-Semitism influenced the rush to convict him. The author's exhaustive research and balanced analysis make this a definitive account, with pertinent repercussions for our times.
