The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer
by Margalit Fox
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Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2018
352 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
In this thrilling true-crime procedural, the creator of Sherlock Holmes uses his unparalleled detective skills to exonerate a German Jew wrongly convicted of murder.
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.
"Starred Review. The author's exhaustive research and balanced analysis make this a definitive account, with pertinent repercussions for our times." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Expertly constructed, this work will appeal to Conan Doyle fans and is ideal for all true crime collections." - Library Journal
"I cannot speak too highly of this remarkable book, which entirely captivated me with its rich attention to detail, its intelligence and elegant phrasing, and, most of all, its nail-biting excitement." - Simon Winchester, author of The Perfectionists and The Professor and the Madman
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Margalit Fox is a public speaker and an award-winning reporter in the famed obituary news department of The New York Times as well a former New York Times Book Review editor. Fox has a master's degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a masters degree from Columbia Journalism. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
Author Interview
Link to Margalit Fox's Website
Name Pronunciation
Margalit Fox: mar-gar-leet
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