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A sensational Edwardian murder. A scandalous wrongful conviction.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the rescue.
For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no recent book that tells this remarkable story—in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case. In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step by step inside Conan Doyle’s investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time—a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias.
In 1908, a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home. The police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater—an immigrant Jewish cardsharp—who, despite his obvious innocence, was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor in a brutal Scottish prison. Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was outraged by this injustice and became obsessed with the case. Using the methods of his most famous character, he scoured trial transcripts, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness statements, meticulously noting myriad holes, inconsistencies, and outright fabrications by police and prosecutors. Finally, in 1927, his work won Slater’s freedom.
Margalit Fox, a celebrated longtime writer for the New York Times, has “a nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York). In Conan Doyle for the Defense, she immerses readers in the science of Edwardian crime detection and illuminates a watershed moment in the history of forensics, when reflexive prejudice began to be replaced by reason and the scientific method.
(Summary provided by the author)
Considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism, Margalit Fox retired in June 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, the writer Maya Angelou, the poets Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich, the children’s author Maurice Sendak and the advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the inventors of the Frisbee, the crash-test dummy, the plastic lawn flamingo and the bar code.
Before joining the obituary department in 2004, she spent ten years as a staff editor at the New York Times Book Review.
Ms. Fox received the Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2011 for feature writing, and in 2015 for beat reporting. In 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the Times’s history.
She is the author of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2007) and The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2013). That book, a narrative nonfiction account of the decipherment of the Bronze Age Aegean script known as Linear B, was selected by the Times Book Review as one of the hundred best books of the year and received the 2014 William Saroyan Prize for International Writing.
Her third book, 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, was published by Random House in June 2018. Rapturously reviewed, it tells the story of a wrongful conviction for a brutal Edwardian murder—overturned through the personal investigation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The book has been optioned for a major motion picture by Gold Circle Entertainment, producers of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Her fourth book, the nonfiction thriller The Confidence Men, published by Random House, tells the true story of the most astonishing P.O.W. escape of all time—via Ouija board! The book has been optioned by Thunder Road Films, makers of the John Wick franchise.
Originally trained as a cellist, Ms. Fox holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her work is prominently featured in The Sense of Style (2014), the best-selling guide to writing well by Steven Pinker, and Obit., the acclaimed 2017 documentary by Vanessa Gould.
Ms. Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
(Biography provided by the author)
