Book Review: 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
True crime

This is a pretty good book, but it's probably a better book if you haven't already read a half-dozen other pretty good books covering the same material. For one thing, the Oscar Slater case isn't truly a  "forgotten cause célebrè". For another, Arthur Conan Doyle's role--while certainly extremely important--isn't quite what Margalit Fox would like you to think. 

Finally, Margalit Fox is intent on fitting Doyle, Slater, and the crime into an overarching narrative about Social Justice and The Victorian Mind and Other Big Important Issues. She's far more right than wrong; but the real world is not actually this neat, and she has to do some judicious editing, hand-waving, and generalizing to make everything go where it's supposed to.

To summarize quite a bit, here's Fox's story:

1. The murder in question was a sensation at the time and a major event in the evolution of he justice system. (Exaggerated)
2. The choice of Oscar Slater as culprit had more to do with contemporary social attitudes, particularly anxiety towards aliens, than anything else. (True)
3. The police investigation was a travesty. (True in spades)
4. Slater's guilt was not discovered but constructed. (True)
5. Conan Doyle was a genuinely admirable person, and exemplifies the virtues of his time as much as the bogus investigation and trial exemplified its vices. (Largely true, but incomplete)
6. Without Doyle, Slater would never have been released. (Exaggerated)

The truth is that many, many people other than Doyle knew that the verdict was a gross miscarriage of justice. Doyle's major contributions were to write an outstanding and devastating summation and analysis of the case, which nonetheless didn't get Slater released, and to lend his enormous prestige and his connections to the cause.

Look: I liked the book. It has great pacing, a generally sound thesis, some magnificent character portraits, pathos, and a fine sense of time and place. Whether it would be a better book if it were more restrained and less carefully topiaried into shape is an unanswerable question.