Conan Doyle's defence of a murderer

In 1890, one of fiction’s first, and certainly greatest, “consulting detectives” proclaimed his place in the world: “I am,” Sherlock Holmes announced, “the last and highest court of appeal in detection.” When the police are out of their depths, Holmes declared, “the matter is laid before me. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion.”

And twice in the following decades, Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was to put himself in the same position in the real world, harrying the police, examining data and giving a specialist’s opinion to correct what he saw as travesties of justice.

Margalit Fox, a recently retired obituaries writer for The New York Times, is adept at disinterring the bones of long-buried bodies, and in Conan Doyle for the Defense she sets out to follow him in righting wrongs.

When Conan Doyle made his first foray — in the case of George Edalji, a solicitor convicted of sending anonymous threats and maiming farm animals — Edalji had already been paroled, and the author’s intervention won him a swift pardon. The great detective-story writer was not to find it so easy a second time: He had to fight a legal machine with vested interests in obstruction, and the convicted murderer he was supporting was not a genteel professional but a gambler, a foreigner and a Jew.

The murder took place around Christmas 1908, and was both brutal and tawdry. On the last night of Marion Gilchrist’s life, the elderly woman was left alone when her maid went to fetch the evening newspaper; on her return, the maid met a neighbour, alerted by noise overhead and the sight of a man rushing past on the stairs. Inside, they found a battered and dying Gilchrist. A doctor identified a chair leg as the murder weapon; money lying in plain sight was untouched, as was Gilchrist’s substantial jewellery collection, save for a single diamond brooch. The crime seemed impulsive, and not for gain.

Or was it? It was the missing brooch that doomed Oscar Slater. Slater was 36, a cheery rolling stone who had previously lived in New York, Paris, Brussels and in Glasgow at least twice before. On one of those stays he had married an alcoholic Glaswegian, and now, to avoid her demands for money, he had taken an assumed name. The police thought he was a pimp, in part because his music-hall entertainer girlfriend was said, shockingly, to entertain men at home in his absence.

They rented a flat not far from Gilchrist, and Slater bought some tools to fix it up, pawning a brooch to keep himself liquid. This lack of income, or the financial demands of his wife, might be why Slater had already booked himself a ticket to America. 

Searching for the stolen diamond brooch, the police heard of a man attempting to sell a pawn ticket for exactly that, and they thought they had hit the jackpot. Why, the man was even living under a fake name and was planning to leave the country — all the evidence they needed to conclude he was a criminal ready to flee.

When the pawnbroker was located, however, Gilchrist’s maid was firm: The brooch he held was not the one belonging to her mistress. Not remotely daunted, the police, as Fox so neatly summarises, followed the (il)logical syllogism: “All murders are committed by undesirables; Oscar Slater is an undesirable; therefore, Oscar Slater committed the Gilchrist murder.”

And so in 1909, after a brief and farcically prejudiced trial, Slater was convicted. It would be about another two years before Conan Doyle’s interest in the case was piqued, and he published The Case of Oscar Slater, detailing some of its more egregious elements: the lack of any evidence that Slater knew of Gilchrist and her jewels; the police’s assertion that the murder weapon was the hammer Slater had bought to make repairs to his flat, yet without any evidence that this bloody tool had stained his clothes when he carried it away again; the claim that the reason the jewels were untouched was that Slater, a stranger, did not know where they were. (Conan Doyle dryly pointed out that this was the case for “practically every man in Scotland.”)

It was to be another three years before police files revealed that the man on the stairs, who had suspiciously vanished from all testimony, had early on been identified as both a member of Gilchrist’s family and someone with considerable connections to those in power. Instead of Slater being exonerated, the policeman who brought this to light was hounded out of his job, and the Establishment went to work once more on what it did best, covering up.