{"product_id":"conan-doyle-for-the-defence-by-margalit-fox","title":"Conan Doyle for the Defence by Margalit Fox","description":"\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eThe case at the heart of Margalit Fox’s “first-class book” is “just the kind that would have roused Sherlock Holmes”, said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times. On 21 December 1908, a wealthy spinster, Marion Gilchrist, was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow home. The motive seemed obvious – a diamond brooch was missing – and the police, under huge pressure to solve the crime, identified a petty criminal named Oscar Slater as the culprit. Despite little evidence against him, Slater was convicted and sentenced to death – but this was commuted to life imprisonment. The case attracted the interest of Arthur Conan Doyle who in 1912, applying the “methods of his best-known fictional creation”, published a “brilliantly Holmesian” book devoted to proving that Slater had been framed. In the short term this achieved little – Slater remained in the “notoriously tough Peterhead prison” – but Doyle continued to campaign on his behalf, and eventually, in 1927, the conviction was quashed.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eThis wasn’t Doyle’s first foray into real-life detective work, said Paula Byrne in The Times. A few years earlier he had campaigned for the release of George Edalji, a solicitor imprisoned for maiming a pony (a case that would inspire Julian Barnes’s 2005 novel\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eArthur \u0026amp; George\u003c\/i\u003e). Edalji’s background was Parsee and Doyle believed he’d been “treated unjustly in part because of his foreignness”. The same went for Slater, a German-Jewish immigrant whose real name was Oscar Leschziner. This was an age when some still believed that criminality could be deduced from a person’s appearance, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “You only had to look at a man’s shifty eyes, weak mouth and, perhaps most significant at a time of rising anti-Semitism, big nose, to know that he was on the point of doing something very bad indeed.” Yet against this, Fox shows that a new system of forensic science, based on the close reading of clues, was becoming established. Holmes, of course, was its most famous exemplar – and Fox argues that Doyle deployed the modus operandi of his creation in order to establish Slater’s innocence.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"s1\"\u003eThere was an unfortunate coda to the case, said Paula Byrne. After his release, Slater and Doyle became embroiled in a “bitter rift” over the former’s £6,000 compensation, which Doyle felt he should share with those who had helped him. The public slanging match that ensued is the final twist in a “fast-paced”, enjoyable work that is written with the “panache of a Holmes short story”.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Week Bookshop","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54037974057236,"sku":"wfn1789765492602","price":16.03,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1011\/7627\/9316\/files\/conan-doyle-for-the-defence-by-margalit-fox_1.jpg?v=1789765499","url":"https:\/\/straphemfit.shop\/products\/conan-doyle-for-the-defence-by-margalit-fox","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}