Truth Stranger Than Fiction

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

Truth Stranger Than Fiction is an article published in The New-York Times on 2 february 1907.


Truth Stranger Than Fiction

The New-York Times (2 february 1907, p. 8)

The TIMES begins this morning and will complete to-morrow morning the extraordinary "Case of GEORGE EDALJI," which is the work of Sir A. CONAN DOYLE, best known as the creator of "Sherlock Holmes" and as the author of the most interesting series of detective stories in English literature. "Sherlock Holmes" is a character in English literature who is quite sure of taking an honored place in that great portrait gallery. The Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a great literary achievement, beyond the range of most novelists, in extent, and sometimes in intensity, beyond the range of POE, and still more beyond the pair of "railway novelists" ANDREW LANG has celebrated:

These twain have lightened many a mile, Miss Braddon and Gaboriau.

The reader of "detective stories" must often have wondered what the detective novelist who shows himself so clever at unraveling mysteries of his own fabrication would do with a real mystery which he had not made but which was presented to him by life. Now this is just what Sir CONAN DOYLE shows in this amazing and true story of English life, of English crime, of English official stupidity. He demonstrates, in a way more interesting, more thrilling, than marks his treatment of the most sensational of the imaginary adventures of the imaginary Sherlock Holmes, that an innocent Englishman has been prosecuted and condemned to a shameful punishment, has had his name stricken from the rolls of an honorable profession, has had his life wrecked and his family disgraced, for a crime which he could not possibly have committed. Not only do the British constables of actual fact, in this wonderful story, exceed in stupidity and obstinacy any of the Lestrades and Joneses of his fiction, but the official stupidity and obstinacy are shown to extend "higher up," to have infected the Home Office under two successive administrations, to have resulted in a miscarriage of justice and a denial of justice as outrageous as those of the Dreyfus case itself. The Interest intensifies and the thrill becomes more poignant as the demonstration goes on to its triumphant climax. It is the most sensational story of its time. And it is all matter of fact.