The Case of the Novelist, the Solicitor, and a Miscarriage of Justice

In 1903, when Sherlock Holmes retired to the Sussex Downs to keep bees, Conan Doyle took under close scrutiny a strange case of horse mutilation. Doyle would play the role of a real Holmes many times, but the case about George Edalji displayed particularly well the fusion of Doyle's talents with his character. "The doll and its maker are not identical," he admonished a critic, yet he confessed to having "some possibilities" of the character he invented. They both thought, as Holmes said in A Study in Scarlet, that "the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards." Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1960) wrote about the case to illustrate his point that Doyle himself was "the hound of justice on the trail of injustice and official apathy."

Julian Barnes has made the Edalji case the centerpiece of his novel Arthur and George. Librarians might wonder whether to file Barnes's story under the category of mystery, true crime, or historical novel. When both characters are historical, it is appropriate to wonder if too much is known about them to give the novelist enough room for a literary imagination to function. Or will the writer have too much of a voracious imagination to keep speculation from overwhelming documentable history? Barnes explains in a note that all his quotations from letters (with one exception), from public documents, and from the writings of Doyle are authentic. He knows that the historical elements are intriguing enough without his having to spice them up for contemporary readers on the run. He not only brings the two men to life, but he provokes us to think about the complexities of both in a fresh way.

The Edalji case is contested, uncertain, and incomplete enough to give a novelist room for filling in and raising questions. One recent historian of the case (Peter Costello) accepts Doyle's belief that Royden Sharp was guilty of the horse slashings; he suspects that because George's brother Horace gave the police dubious evidence against George and left the country, he took the real secret of the family to the grave. Another historian of the case (Stephen Hines) notes that Harry Green admitted to having committed the mutilation and then repudiated his confession, while Edalji's own solicitor believed that Edalji wrote an obscene letter that his brother had turned in to the police. This historian concludes that unspecified neighborhood hooligans had gotten away with the slashing crimes. Neither historian, however, mentions the man who, after Doyle died in 1930, confessed to writing the obscene letters, as reported in the London Times for 7 November 1934. Given this domain of doubts, it is easy to see why Barnes thought there was room for a novelist to dramatize the consciousness and conversations of his historical characters in a moving way.

His novel has three major threads—the trial of Edalji and Arthur's role in it; Arthur's chaste love affair with Jean Leckie while he is married to his first wife; and Arthur's growing interest in and crusading defense of spiritualism, a cause which seems to contradict Holmes's demystification of every apparently supernatural element in the crimes he investigates.

Arthur has read the material George has sent him about the case and suspects that he is the victim of a trial which was distorted by racial prejudice against a dark-skinned man whose father was a Parsee from Bombay. On meeting the accused solicitor, Arthur notices at once, as a doctor trained in ophthalmology, how close to his eyes George is holding a newspaper, evidence of severe myopia. Arthur concludes that Edalji could not have found his way in the dark to attack the horses, as the perpetrator had done. When George asks if Arthur thinks or believes in his innocence, Arthur replies "I know you are innocent."

We follow Arthur's reasoning as he convincingly undermines the case against the solicitor, but Barnes does not settle for melodrama. In a debate...