The Casebook of Conan Doyle

Not only did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle create the most famous private detective of all time, he, perhaps inevitably, involved himself in several real-life crimes, mostly those in which a miscarriage of justice had taken place.

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The most infamous of these was the case of George Edalji, the son of a Parsi father and Scottish mother. His father had converted to Christianity to the extent of becoming the vicar of Great Wyrley, a village in Staffordshire. Later, Conan Doyle was to reveal his own prejudices when writing of the case, stating that ‘the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situations.’

 During George’s childhood, a spate of crudely written poison pen letters had been directed at the vicar and his family. The Edalji’s maid, Florence Foster admitted writing them but then retracted her confession. Some years later, more obscene letters followed, and now it was thought that George was responsible, even though many of them were directed against himself, ‘the blackman’. The furore over the letters eventually died down and all went quiet for years.

Then, in 1903, when George was twenty-seven, a series of animal mutilations took place around the village. Although he had trained as a solicitor and had set up independently in Birmingham, he was still living at home, even sleeping, strangely enough, in the same room as his father. Suspicion for the maimings soon fell upon George. He was, after all, different, with his brown skin, bulging eyes (he suffered from acute astigmatism) and solitary personality – being given to taking long evening walks. The local police were so convinced of his guilt, indeed, that they happily twisted the evidence to incriminate him. He was found guilty – of the letter writing as well as the mutilations – and was sentenced to seven years hard labour.

There was an immediate outcry among certain eminent members of the legal profession and other well-known figures, and they set up a Support Committee. The evidence, they argued, was dubious, the sentence far too harsh for the crime. Edalji served three years and then, inexplicably, was released but not pardoned. The case then came to the attention of Conan Doyle – in Julian Barnes’s engrossing novel on the subject, Arthur and George, it provided a welcome distraction from the agonies of his secret love affair with Jean Leckie, later his second wife. He met up with George, and having covertly watched him trying to read a newspaper, concluded, as a trained ophthalmologist, that the man’s poor eyesight would have rendered him physically incapable of clambering through fields at night to maim livestock. ‘I do not think you are innocent,’ as he tells him in the novel. ‘I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent.’

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Eventually, in 1907, thanks in part to Conan Doyle’s efforts publicising evidence against the conviction in the press, George Edalji was found innocent of the maimings and exonerated. However, no compensation was paid because he was still reckoned to be guilty of writing the letters, thereby bringing suspicion upon himself for the other crimes. Innocent but guilty: it was a bitter victory, but at least George was able to resume practicing as a solicitor, which he did for the rest of his quiet life.

That wasn’t the end of it, however. Conan Doyle and the other worthies, incensed at the inadequacies of the appeals system – the requirement that all appeals be made to the Home Secretary – had long been agitating for the setting up of a Court of Criminal Appeal. This was finally achieved in August 1907, thanks in part to the perceived injustice meted out to George Edalji.  

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