Conan Doyle for the Defense

Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer- Margalit Fox
Random House
Release Date:June 26, 2018

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Synopsis: For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no recent book that tells this remarkable story—in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case. In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step by step inside Conan Doyle’s investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time—a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias.

In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home. The police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater—an immigrant Jewish cardsharp—who, despite his obvious innocence, was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a brutal Scottish prison. Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Using the methods of his most famous character, he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications by police and prosecutors. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater’s freedom.
 
Margalit Fox, a celebrated longtime writer for The New York Times, has “a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York). In Conan Doyle for the Defense, she immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in the history of forensics, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.

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Conan Doyle for the Defense tell the true story of the violent murder of Marion Gilchrist and the wrongful imprisonment of Oscar Slater for the crime, despite his clear innocence. Conan Doyle created one of the most famous detectives of all literature with his Sherlock Holmes.  Yet less well known is that, thanks to Holmes' fame, Conan Doyle himself also occasionally stepped in on cases where he thought he could be of use.  Oscar Slater's is one of those cases.  The brutal murder of Marion Gilchrist in 1908 Glasgow was certainly worthy of Holmes himself- a rich, reclusive, elderly lady who lived in a nearly impregnable house was found beaten to dead in that home in the 10 minute window of time when her maid stepped out to buy a paper.  Slater never heard of Miss Gilchrist, yet because he had pawned a brooch with a superficially similar description to one stolen at the crime scene he was named the killer. It didn't matter that the brooch had been pawned months before the murder (and its theft), that there was no way Slater knew of the brooch or the woman, that no eyewitness could agree on the man they saw in the neighborhood (or even if there was one or two men).  Nor did it matter that almost as soon as they named Slater as a suspect the police knew he had to be innocent.  Slater was arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for nearly 20 years for a crime he couldn't have committed. 

Margalit Fox tells the story from two angles: following Slater and the crime and following Conan Doyle's attempts to bring to light the farce of justice that was Slater's case. While overall the book is interesting, Fox never seems able to decide what kind of story she's telling.  Is this a murder mystery where ominous statements and cliffhangers are needed at the end of every chapter?  Is it a biography of two men who only met in person once, but had a deep impact on each other's lives?  Is it a new literary critique of Conan Doyle's Holmes and his place in the canon of detective fiction? Is it a history of the development of forensic science and the criminal justice system of Scotland and England?  Fox wants the answer to be: yes, it is all of those.  The result is an interesting, though often rambling, Conan Doyle for the Defense- a story of crime that is probably more memorable because of the crime that happened after the murder- the criminally negligent (at best) railroading of an innocent man.

Although the draw of the story will be, for most people, Arthur Conan Doyle, and though Conan Doyle is on nearly every page of the book, he really had very little to do with the case as a 'case'.  The actual murderer is never caught- although Doyle and others on Slater's side had their suspicions.  Doyle does not produce the true killer and clear an innocent through any Holmesian insights.  What he does that is remarkable for the time is to step above the reflexive prejudice against Slater as a foreigner, a gambler, a Jew, and a scoundrel.  Unlike the judge, the jury, supposed 'eyewitnesses' and the general public as a whole, Doyle argued that a man was innocent until proven guilty and should not be a scapegoat for the police simply because they had no other convenient man on hand to blame.  The case against Slater was not even built on a house of cards- solid if looked at in the right light.  It was as solid as a house of Swiss Cheese.  But, as Fox goes into repetitive detail to show, because Slater was Other and could be made to fit the image of the turn of the century bogeyman, he was convicted.  

An interesting look into turn of the century British criminal justice and morals, Conan Doyle for the Defense is a highly receptive, not always well-written, slightly rambling account of a terrible miscarriage of justice and a stubborn writer's work to help champion the correction of that miscarriage.   Despite this, it will be interesting to history lovers (and especially to lawyers) and interesting to those readers looking to discover more about the life of Arthur Conan Doyle.     

I received an ARC of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review