Book Notes
Partners in crime
Local authors Steven Womack and Stephen Hines have done a sly bit of detecting. Their new book, The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Berkley, 290 pp., $22.95), illuminates a rarely seen side of the granddaddy of mystery writers while examining the case-cracking strategies that made his whodunits so famous. A collection of the esteemed author’s writings on two British criminal cases that occurred in the early 1900s, True Crime Files was compiled by Hines, while Womack provided an introduction and background material on Conan Doyle’s life.
As far as collaborations go, this one seems, well, elementary. Womack, no stranger to the deucedly elusive intricacies of the detective genre, has earned a name for himself as a New York Times notable writer. Hines, who works as director of communications for the State of Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services, calls himself a “literary prospector”; he has had considerable success searching for the overlooked work of famous authors, including Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But his biggest find yet may be a number of articles penned by Conan Doyle for the London Daily Telegraph.
The articles, written in 1907, were part of Conan Doyle’s efforts to defend a timid East Indian lawyer named George Edalji. Convicted of a series of animal mutilations, Edalji had been framed by the police and ill-served by an incompetent judge—a turn of events of much ado to the British press. The illegality of it all aroused Conan Doyle’s ire, and he set out to prove Edalji’s innocence. His writings on the case, as well as responses from the public and the authorities, comprise the first part of True Crime Files. The story of Oscar Slater, a decidedly unsavory character to whom Conan Doyle offered his Sherlockian services a few years later, makes up the second part. A jewel thief, an inveterate gambler and a German Jew, Slater was apparently framed by the Glasgow police and convicted of murder. The man Conan Doyle himself called “a blackguard” fit the profile of a killer, and he had served 16 years of a life sentence when the famed author came to his rescue with a letter-writing campaign and a fresh investigation of the case.
True Crime Files presents a portrait of a writer who, in fact as well as in fiction, tirelessly sought out justice. Through his efforts on behalf of Edalji and Slater, Conan Doyle helped lay the groundwork for the creation of a court of criminal appeals in England. As for the final verdicts in each case, Hines and Womack let readers weigh the evidence and decide for themselves. A capital idea, indeed.
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