Cracked,SherlockHolmes’ Indianmystery

Arthur Conan Doyle, the British creator of the world-famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, was drawn to investigate just one real-life crime during his lifetime and it involved a British Indian man wrongly accused of a series of mysterious crimes in an English village in the early 20th century.

The story of that Indianorigin barrister, George Edalji, has now been dug up in detail and brought to life in a new book by Londonbased historian-author Shrabani Basu, who chanced upon the mystery and pursued it through archival records and letters over the years.

The result is 'The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the case of the foreigner in the English village', which is being released in the UK next week and in India on March 10.

"I think Indian readers will find it interesting that in 1907 Arthur Conan Doyle responded to a letter by a young Indian lawyer appealing to him for help to clear his name, and he took up the cause," said Basu, the author of previous historical accounts such as

'Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan' and 'Victoria and Abdul: The Extraordinar y True Stor y of the Queen's Closest Confidant'. "Even Jawaharlal Nehru, who was an 18-yearold student at the time in Harrow School in London, got fascinated with the case and remarked that George had no doubt been targeted because he was Indian," she said. The story, which revolves around several threatening letters and the distressing killing and mutilation of animals, was one of the most famous cases of miscarriage of justice in Edwardian England which was forgotten over time.

Conan Doyle, whom George Edalji had turned to for help af ter being jailed for crimes he did not commit, encountered a mystery worthy of his fictional detective. The Sherlock Holmes author meticulously pieced clues together to conclude that George had been the victim of racism for being a "Hindoo" - as all Indians were referred to at the time.