Conan Doyle for the Defense

In this heady true-crime procedural, the creator of Sherlock Holmes uses his unparalleled detective skills to exonerate a German Jew wrongly imprisoned for 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, Fox illuminates a watershed moment in the history of criminal justice, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.