‘Writing is a good way to process what’s going on in your own life’Kate Hamer Q&A: ‘Write the story that is burning inside you’Frequently asked questions about your digital subscriptionSpecially selected and available only to our subscribersCarefully curated selections of Irish Times writingSign up to get the stories you want delivered to your inbox “Dear parents, do not grieve, this makes me still far unhappier than I am al­ready,” Slater wrote in another letter. As it played out, his story is also about the manner in which these biases can be enfranchised by legislatures and the courts.In its confluence of Victorian passions and prejudices, the case endures as a remarkable double faced mirror of its time. When you have reset your password, you can Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. Dreyfus trial locale. Conan Doyle himself thought Slater a blackguard: “a disreputable, rolling-stone of a man,” he called him — seven words that speak volumes about the reflexive cultural assumptions of his era.In addition, Conan Doyle, creator of the ultra-rationalist Holmes, had become something of a laughingstock in the last decades of his life for his vigorous endorsement of spiritualism.

Where today many wrongful convictions have been overturned through DNA analysis, Conan Doyle managed to free Slater with little more than minute observation and rigorous logic—precisely the kind of brainwork that had made his hero world famous.Conan Doyle for the Defence tells a fourfold story. Where George Edalji was an educated professional man of unimpeachable character, Oscar Slater was an affable Continental rascal: a habitué of music halls and gambling rooms and, it was alleged (though never proved), a pimp. “I am feeling very depressed & low-spirited,” Slater wrote to his sister. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has won 11 of them. “The Slater affair,” one of Conan Doyle’s biographers has written, “was to give Conan Doyle the chance to play a similar part in England to Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus affair in France” — invoking the great writer’s support for Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army falsely convicted of treason in 1894 amid a climate of roiling anti-Semitism.Conan Doyle remains venerated today as a crime writer, but he is less well remembered as a crusader — “that paladin of lost causes,” as one British criminologist memorably described him. Please enter your email address so we can send you a link to reset your password.

This name will appear beside any comments you post. your username. It also reveals much about the Victorian mindset, for the Slater story, which straddles the twilight of nineteenth-century gentility and the upheavals of twentieth-century modernity, is at its core a tale of Victorian morality. We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation if it violates the As investigator, author, publisher, and backroom broker in the loftiest corridors of British power, he is credited with having done more than anyone else to win Slater’s freedom in a case that many observers deemed hopeless. Commenting on The Irish Times has changed. At the same time it looked longingly backward, to a time when the war’s technologized carnage and other dubious attainments of science were unknown. This miscarriage of justice would, in his words, “remain immortal in the classics of crime as the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy.” It would also consume him — as private investigator, public crusader, and ardent nonfiction chronicler — for the last two decades of his life.The case, which has been called the Scottish Dreyfus affair, centered on the murder of a wealthy Glasgow woman. For the best site experience please enable JavaScript in your browser settings Bell’s tutelage would serve Conan Doyle brilliantly in a string of real-life mysteries, medical and criminal.

(Pardons, when they were occasionally granted, were by prerogative of the British mon­arch.) Renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, very likely the most famous character in Western letters, Conan Doyle was repeatedly beseeched by members of the public to solve real-life mysteries — deaths, disappearances, and the like — performing successful feats of amateur detection on more than one occasion.By the time he cast his lot with Slater, Conan Doyle had helped right another wrongful conviction born of bigotry, that of George Edalji, an Anglo-Indian lawyer imprisoned for maiming livestock. first name in the dreyfus affair.