Conan Doyle for the Defense, by Margalit Fox, tells the gripping story of Oscar Slater, a German-born Jew who was arrested in Glasgow for the brutal murder of an elderly, wealthy woman, Marion Gilchrist. Sentenced to death, Slater won a reprieve at almost the last minute when his sentence was changed to life imprisonment at the notorious Peterhead Prison, where convicts labored in all weather to hack out chunks of granite to build a breakwater. For 18 years Slater suffered at Peterhead, until – almost miraculously – he found himself released and eventually exonerated in a second trial. His good fortune was due largely to the efforts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had already made a name for himself as an amateur detective capable, at times, of the same feats of ratiocination that characterized his most famous fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle* was brought into the case soon after Slater's conviction and quickly became convinced of his innocence. He wrote a scathing book on the subject, but changed few minds. Years later, a personal message from the convict – smuggled out in the form of a rolled-up scrap of paper hidden under a paroled convict's dentures – convinced Doyle to renew his involvement in the controversy. This time he was assisted by an intrepid journalist, William Park. Together the pair put out a new book on Slater that succeeded in rousing the public.
There seems little doubt that Slater was the victim of a frame-up by the police and the courts. Originally the police pursued him after hearing that he had hocked a diamond brooch at a Glasgow pawnshop; a diamond brooch was missing from Miss Gilchrist's personal effects. They quickly learned, however, that the pawnshop brooch was not the same one, and moreover, it had been hocked nearly a month before the Gilchrist murder. Doyle scathingly wrote,
Already the very bottom of the case had dropped out. The starting link of what had seemed an imposing chain, had suddenly broken … The original suspicion of Slater was founded upon the fact that he had pawned a crescent diamond brooch … It was not the one which was missing from the room of the murdered woman, and it had belonged for years to Slater, who had repeatedly pawned it before. This was shown beyond all cavil or dispute. The case of the police might well seem desperate after this, since if Slater were indeed guilty, it would mean that by pure chance they had pursued the right man. (emphasis in original)
Nevertheless, authorities continued to see Slater as the prime suspect, for no evident reason beyond an unwillingness to admit they'd made a mistake. Slater's conviction ultimately rested on eyewitness testimony that had changed markedly between the night of the murder and the day of the trial, months later. A competent defense attorney would have brought out these damning changes of memory, but Slater's lawyer fell down on the job. Slater's fate was sealed by the instructions given by the presiding judge, who told the jury:
About [the defendant's] character … there is no doubt at all. He has maintained himself by the ruin of men and on the ruin of women. And he has lived in a way that many blackguards would scorn to live …
I use the name "Oscar Slater." We do not know who that man is. His name is not Slater … He is a mystery … We do not know where he was born, where he was brought up, what he was brought up to, whether he was trained to anything. The man remains a mystery as much as he was when this trial began … A man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favor which is … a reality in the case of the ordinary man.
Most of this was simply untrue. By the time of the trial, Slater's birth name (Oscar Leschziner) was known, as were the circumstances of his early life.
The judge's instructions point to one reason why the police were so keen on Slater as a suspect, even in the absence of any tangible link between him and the crime. Slater was widely seen, not without reason, as a shady character. He had used multiple aliases, of which the name Oscar Slater was one; others included Otto Sando and A. Anderson. He had told his neighbors he was a dentist, but this was not true, and his actual source of income was unknown. It was rumored that he was a gambler and loan shark and, less plausibly, a pimp who used his own common-law wife as a prostitute. Beyond all this, he was a foreigner and a Jew in an age when xenophobia and anti-Semitism were rampant.
In the book, Fox does her best to broaden the scope of the story by relating the Slater case to conflicting trends in the police methodology of the era – on the one hand, the analysis of physical characteristics as evidence of criminal tendencies, an approach pioneered by Cesare Lombroso**, who believed that certain physiognomical features, such as a protruding brow or sloped forehead, correlated with "primitive" personality types; and on the other hand, the scientific study of the crime scene and the subtle physical clues it might afford. Naturally, she disparages the first approach, which has no adherents today, while celebrating the second approach, which served as the foundation for modern forensic criminalistics of the CSI type.
The trouble is that the Slater case doesn't serve as a very good illustration of either point. Slater was not suspected by the police, or arrested or convicted, because of his physiognomy, except perhaps in the limited sense that he looked "Jewish." He was suspected for entirely different reasons, as mentioned above. Moreover, forensic criminalistics did him no favors; the highly regarded criminalist who testified at his trial misstated the evidence left at the crime scene so badly, and made so many questionable or even absurd inferences, that he was instrumental in securing a guilty verdict. Among other things, he insisted that a small, fragile hammer found in Slater's possession could have been the murder weapon, while ignoring a chair in the murder victim's room, the legs of which were spattered in blood. The extensive damage done to Miss Gilchrist was obviously the result of being battered by the chair, which was in fact the conclusion of the first doctor on the scene. But the criminalist never even mentioned the chair or the doctor.
In any case, Doyle was for the most part refreshingly untouched by the prejudices of his era, though Fox occasionally tries to paint him in a less flattering light. Quoting Doyle's account of the trial that exonerated Slater, Fox claims that "his description is suffused with the Victorian idea about the link between physiognomy and character." I don't see it that way. Doyle describes Slater's lawyer as "a Pickwickian figure. His face is as pink as a baby's, and a baby might have owned those eyes of forget-me-not blue. A little heavy the face, but calmly and fresh-complexioned withal, redeemed from weakness by the tight, decided lips." As for Slater himself: "It is not an ill-famed face nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible nonetheless for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is." I see no pseudoscientific theories of physiognomy in this description. It is simply a case of a literary man writing (quite ably) in the somewhat florid style of the time.
What comes through most clearly in Conan Doyle for the Defense is Doyle's basic decency and dogged determination to clear a man of a wrongful conviction, even though he had no personal acquaintance with the man and clearly held a low opinion of him. For Doyle, the fact that Slater was a disreputable fellow, even a rogue, did not mean that he could be abandoned to the hellish confines of Peterhead prison for life if he had been denied an impartial hearing. Doyle devoted months of strenuous effort, on and off over a period of two decades, to freeing Slater, even paying most of the cost of Slater's defense in his second trial. (Slater's refusal to defray any of the costs even after he had been awarded a 6000-pound settlement by the state upset Doyle's sense of fair play and brought their association to an acrimonious conclusion.)
Doyle's implacable commitment to justice, undimmed after nearly twenty years of involvement in the case, is readily apparent in his introduction to the book written by William Park (published by Doyle's own company, the Psychic Press). Doyle writes,
It is certain that the case of the alien German Jew, who bore the pseudonym of Oscar Slater, will live in the history of criminology as a miscarriage of justice of a character very unusual in the records of our Courts. There is not one point of the evidence which does not crumble to pieces when it is touched …
I fear very little can be done for Slater. Who can restore the vanished years? But his name may be cleared, and possibly some small provision be made for his declining years … Above all, for the credit of British justice, for the discipline of the police force, and for the teaching of officials that their duty to the public has to be done, a thorough public inquiry should be made into the matter … Only when this has been done will the public mind be at ease … It is indeed a lamentable story of official blundering from start to finish. But eighteen years have passed and an innocent man still wears the convict's dress. (emphasis in original)
You might wonder how Doyle's interest in psychic phenomena figures in the book. The answer is, it scarcely figures at all, because Fox is clearly somewhat embarrassed by it. She prefers to see Doyle as a rationalist and a humanist, and for her, his devotion to spiritualism does not fit this picture. She writes:
On questions of spiritualism, it is clear that Conan Doyle's ardent personal longing eclipsed his scientific acumen. By the 1920s, he had come to believe almost unreservedly in ghosts, fairies, and the reality of life after death.
This is not entirely unfair. Doyle did embarrass himself by his overly enthusiastic embrace of some paranormal claims, most notoriously in the Cottingley fairies fiasco, as well as by defending rather obvious frauds like the Davenport brothers. Still, it would be more correct, I think, to see Doyle's steadfast defense of the essential truths of mediumship and life after death, not as a contradiction of his behavior in the Slater case, but rather as another instance of that same behavior. Just as he became convinced of Slater's innocence and insisted on broadcasting this opinion to the world regardless of the world's indifference or hostility, so he likewise, once convinced of the immortality of the soul, never ceased to proselytize for "the new revelation," as he titled one of his books. The same courage, tenacity, and independence of thought that defined his approach to Oscar Slater also defined his approach to spiritualism.
The book includes an amusing anecdote excerpted from a biography of Conan Doyle written by Russell Miller in 2008. Miller writes:
At Windlesham [Doyle's home], Conan Doyle became accustomed to receiving hate mail [about his spiritualist stand], most of which he disregarded, but there was one particularly vituperative letter, dated 16 December 1919, from Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's former lover and a relatively recent convert to the Roman Catholic church: "Sir, What a disgusting beast you are with your filthy caricatures of 'Christ.' The proper way to deal with such a man as you would be to give you a thrashing with a horse whip."… Douglas accused Conan Doyle of promoting spiritualism for the sake of money and notoriety, "in short for the same purposes and with the same flat-footed low persistence as you worked your idiot 'Sherlock Holmes' business." He went on to prophecy that Conan Doyle's "blasphemous ravings" would bring a "dreadful judgment" on him and signed himself "Yours with the utmost contempt." Conan Doyle replied the following day, with a masterful and succinct dismissal: "Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me."
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* Margalit Fox refers to Sir Arthur as Conan Doyle throughout, explaining that he took the name Conan as part of a double surname. Some other writers refer to him as Doyle, treating Conan as a middle name. Fox is no doubt correct, but I'm accustomed to calling him Doyle and it's a hard habit to break.
** Cesare Lombroso, in addition to his now-discredited work as a physiognomist, was also known as a pioneering figure in psychical research.
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