Detective under scrutiny
In the first decade of the 20th century, Arthur Conan Doyle was possibly the most famous man in England. His Sherlock Holmes stories sold in shiploads. His lucid, logical mind had already helped solve a real-life murder and a series of racist outrages.
Then just before Christmas in 1908, a rich, unpleasant woman was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat. Victorian criminology, obsessed with the “typical criminal” rather than the actual crime scene, quickly saw an equally unpleasant drifter called Oscar Slater arrested and charged.
The fact he was a German Jew only aggravated prejudices against Slater. He was convicted after prosecution and judicial addresses, later described as “a cocktail of preposterous logic”, and sentenced to death. Public disquiet meant his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, breaking granite at Peterhead Prison, Scotland’s Gulag.
A note smuggled out of prison under the dentures of a fellow inmate helped bring the case to Conan Doyle’s attention. For the next 18 years, he analysed and publicised the grotesque injustice involved. In 1926, Slater was finally freed — with no pardon and no apology.
New York journalist Margalit Fox has assembled a thorough, sympathetic narrative of this “disgraceful frame-up, in which stupidity and dishonesty played an equal part”. It’s an engrossing portrait of Conan Doyle, “bighearted, big-bodied, big-souled” yet thoroughly Victorian/Edwardian.
He recoiled from risque jokes and snapped his son Adrian’s pipe in half when Adrian dared light it in the presence of ladies.
Fox’s study shows his forensic approach, which “persuaded objects to speak” and annihilated key points of prosecution evidence. She quotes extensively and pertinently from trial transcripts, newspaper coverage and Doyle’s own writings. Sherlock Holmes makes several neatly relevant appearances. Fox isn’t above breathing heavily at dramatic moments but it’s a narrative marked by balance and clarity.
It’s also provocatively relevant. The authorities’ obtuseness and character attacks may make you think of Nicky Hager. The distorted, manufactured evidence may recall Arthur Allan Thomas. The contemporary rantings that England had “opened her arms to foreign scum” may evoke a US President.
The irony of the story is that after Slater was freed, he and Conan Doyle quarrelled about the use of Slater’s compensation money. The breach between them was rancorous and absolute. Truth became not only stranger but less satisfying than fiction.