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 is a nonfiction book about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement with the case of Oscar Slater, a man who was falsely imprisoned for murder in 1909. This book provides a glimpse into the world of criminal justice during the early 1900s. It gives limited insight into Arthur Conan Doyle, other than painting him as a person of many contradictions. However, it does a very good job of showing how fear of the “other” caused Slater, like many others, to become a scapegoat for Victorian and post-Victorian fears in a way that is all too relevant to our own times .

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known as the creator and author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He also has a role in history as a firm believer in spiritualism (see my review of The Witch of Lime Street for more on this). In his spare time, he solved real crimes. Conan Doyle for the Defense deals with his involvement in the exoneration of Oscar Slater, as well as his involvement in solving some other true crimes.

Oscar Slater was a Jewish immigrant from Germany. He was a petty criminal who dressed like someone from the upper classes during a time when increasing class mobility was a source of anxiety for those in the upper class. This combination of factors made him an attractive scapegoat for the murder of Miss Marion Gilchrist, an elderly woman who was killed in her home. Slater was arrested and despite considerable evidence that he could not been the killer, he was quickly found guilty. Slater spent over eighteen years in prison before Doyle and others secured his release.

The book discusses how Conan Doyle developed the method of detection used by Sherlock Holmes, and how he applied to real life methods. It also describes the justice system in England in the early 1900s, and how, as the Victorian Age drew to a close, the justice system was challenged by new detection systems and by warring philosophies on why people commit crimes and what to do with those found guilty. Finally, the book addresses the question of why Slater was found guilty even though within a week police knew that he was innocent.

One thing this book does very well is highlight the fact that all kinds of people from all kinds of religious and ethnic backgrounds lived in the England of the late-1900s, even in rural areas. Prior to taking on Slater’s case, Doyle assisted a man named George Edalji. Edalji had an English mother and Indian father. His father became a parish vicar and for many years the village seemed to take the mixed-race family in stride. However, eventually the family received a long series of threatening letters in conjunction with a series of animal killings around the area. Edalji was arrested for the killings and accused of writing the threatening letters to himself. Papers described him in stereotypical and racist terms. He was found guilty but thanks to a petition signed by his supporters he was freed after three years. Doyle went on to help Edalji be reinstated to the bar (at the time of his arrest, he was a lawyer).

As a Jewish immigrant, Slater faced similar discrimination. During the time of his trial, England was experiencing a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. This xenophobia shows up in the “invasion literature” subgenre, which appears in books as varied as Dracula, by Bram Stoker, and The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. It was also a time of rampant anti-Semitism. On top of that, the upper class English were uneasy with the increased amount of class mobility. Slater checked a lot of boxes that made the upper class English who were increasingly confronted with class mobility uncomfortable:

To post-Victorian sensibilities, Slater’s foreignness, his Jewishness, and his intemperate livelihood were disturbing enough. But what may have rattled the public even more was that in a period still highly dependent on social signifiers, Slater was unsettlingly beyond category. To outward appearance he was a superlatively well-tailored man of leisure, yet he was no gentleman. For all his alleged debauchery, he had seemed, until the murder case against him, neither desperate nor depressed-he appeared, in fact, almost constitutionally cheerful.

I would recommend this book to Sherlock Holmes fans, as well as people who want to know more about the lives of immigrants in England, and people who have an interest in the history of criminal justice. I’d also recommend it to people with an interest in how we persist in scapegoating those we perceive as “other”. Observe the following, which I’d argue applies just as well to many problems in the criminal justice system today as it did then:

In a criminalistic investigation, detection precedes identification. By reading “infinitely little” traces at the crime scene, the investigator homes in on the culprit’s identity. That is the logical order of things.

Victorian criminology reversed the process. Criminology sees only the big taxonomic picture – the foreigner, the gambler, the pauper, the Jew. This approach, and unsavory exercise of the diagnostic imagination, is the time-honored refuge of the bigot. By criminology’s hall-of-mirrors logic, detection now follows identification, a topsy-turvy arrangement that recalls the Queen’s biting line from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Sentence first-verdict afterwards.”

With criminology as their primary tool, the Glasgow police knew that they could never use it to prove Slater’s guilt. But they could use it, masterfully, to construct hisguilt. And thus, by the bourgeois imperatives of the day, the apprehension of Oscar Slater was a grand success, whether he had killed Miss Gilchrist or not. For if Oscar Slater was no murderer, then he was at the very least a convenient Other writ large.

The book struggles to shine a light on Sir Arthur Coyle Doyle’s personality and basically comes up with “It’s complicated.” This is not a biography of Doyle, and while I didn’t need it to be a complete biography I could have used more context about the rest of Doyle’s life. His involvement in Slater’s life consisted of a mix of righteous indignation at the justice system for falsely condemning an innocent man, and righteous indignation at Slater for not behaving as Doyle thought a gentleman should (Doyle had extremely rigid views with regard to “gentlemanly” behavior). The book points out that while Doyle’s work on Salter’s behalf was literally life saving, Doyle was not devoid of his own biases. In classic White Savior syndrome manner, he dealt with his unease by idealizing Slater, only to be outraged when Slater turned out to be a real and complicated person.

I’m not sure how well this book would appeal to the general reader, but history fans and Sherlock Holmes fans will find much to enjoy. The author includes pictures as well as letters to and from Slater in prison, which paint a poignant picture of a lonely, suffering man. The book’s closing chapter ends on both happy notes and somber ones, pointing out that the prejudice Slater faced was not unique to England. Slater spent the rest of his life in England, where he was interned briefly during WWII as an “enemy alien.” Slater outlived at least two of his relatives who were murdered in camps in Germany. He died in 1948, happily married and popular in his community.