Inside, they found a battered and dying Miss Gilchrist. 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 neighbor, alerted by noise overhead and the sight of a man rushing past on the stairs. The murder took place around Christmas 1908, and was both brutal and tawdry. 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. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion.”Īnd 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. 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. 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 By Margalit Fox Illustrated.
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