The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer

by Shrabani Basu

Bloomsbury 320pp £20

The Week Bookshop £15.99

“It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus affair,” said Andrew Lycett in The Spectator. In 1903, a young solicitor named George Edalji was imprisoned for mutilating farm animals in the Staffordshire village of Great Wyrley. His conviction was based almost entirely on his skin colour: Edalji’s father, the local vicar, was an Indian-born Parsee who had converted to Anglicanism, though Edalji’s mother was English by birth. Just as Émile Zola campaigned on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus (a French-Jewish artillery officer convicted of treason in 1894), so Edalji’s case was taken up by a literary celebrity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who led a successful campaign for Edalji’s pardon following his release from prison in 1906. It’s a story that has been aired before – most notably in Julian Barnes’s 2005 novel Arthur & George – but Shrabani Basu’s retelling is pithy and engaging, and “nails the nastiness of a peculiarly English scandal”.

Edalji was an improbable perpetrator of the crimes he stood accused of, said Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Times.

A bookish 27-year-old whose main passion was railway law, he commuted every day to his office in Birmingham and otherwise rarely left home. Yet his family had long aroused suspicion in the area (for years, they’d received poison-pen letters), and the authorities didn’t attempt to look beyond Edalji’s face. Captain Anson, Staffordshire’s chief constable, referred to him as “n*****ish in appearance”, and the prosecuting lawyer at the “amateurish local court” managed to twist a seemingly unarguable alibi – that he’d been in a locked bedroom when one of the crimes was committed – into “evidence of his cunning foreign ways”. While Conan Doyle’s “powers of deduction” couldn’t rival those of his creation, Sherlock Holmes, he proved an effective champion of Edalji, said Peter Carty in the I newspaper. Having proved that the young lawyer couldn’t have committed the crimes (for one thing, he was too myopic to wander across fields at night), he established that a former butcher who was known to own a lancet was far likelier to have mutilated the animals. Basu lays out these complex events with “great economy and skill”, even if her writing at times has a journalistic feel, said Jonathan Barnes in the Times Literary Supplement. Informed by a sense of “cool outrage”, her book is a thorough, “well-told account” of an episode that alighted on many of the “pressure points of early 20th century England”, such as race, class and empire.