CONAN the humanitarian

The magnificently told true story of how Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle saved the victim of a cruel injustice

Conan Doyle For The Defence Margalit Fox

In 1909, Oscar Slater, a German Jewish immigrant, was convicted of the brutal murder of a wealthy spinster in Glasgow and sentenced to death. The evidence was flimsy, questionable, circumstantial at best, but with a need for a quick resolution to a shocking crime, Slater seemed to tick all the boxes: itinerant, louche, significantly ‘other’. Evident unease over the verdict saved him from the hangman’s gallows, commuting his sentence to life imprisonment, but he still had to endure nearly 20 years of isolation and hard labour in the notorious Peterhead Prison for a crime he did not commit.

In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories and an influential and proven crusader against injustice, was persuaded to lend his support to Slater’s cause. In true Holmesian fashion he investigated the evidence and published an 80-page pamphlet in which he forensically dismantled and demolished the conduct of the police and the prosecution at Slater’s trial. However, his campaign for a retrial came to naught and there the tragic miscarriage of justice may have rested, until, in 1925, Slater managed to a get a desperate message to Conan Doyle, secreted in a released prisoner’s false teeth. This reignited his campaigning zeal and, eventually, in 1927 Slater’s sentence was quashed and he was released.

Fox, a New York Times journalist, has researched her fascinating, fastpaced story with impressive acuity, sketching an informative portrait of the Edwardian mindset. Slater’s poignant letters from prison to his family in Germany are revealed for the first time, and Conan Doyle’s formidable deductive and diagnostic powers are on magnificent show. Most tellingly, she shows the shockingly deep-rooted, institutionalised anti-Semitism of the time that allowed for the conviction of a man the police knew to be innocent.