About this item
In this heady true-crime procedural, the creator of Sherlock Holmes uses his unparalleled detective skills to exonerate a German Jew wrongly convicted of murder, and sound a victory for reason over reflexive prejudice.In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow apartment. The police found a convenient but innocent suspect in Oscar Slater--an immigrant Jewish cardsharp--who was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a merciless Scottish prison. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. He scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater's freedom. Conan Doyle for the Defense immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection, telling the story of how Conan Doyle managed to overturn a murder conviction in the era before modern forensics--simply by employing the methods of his most famous creation. Along the way, Margalit Fox illuminates a watershed moment in the history of criminal justice, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.
About the Author
Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times's celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of three previous books, "Conan Doyle for the Defense," "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" and "Talking Hands," Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
