A Detective Himself
A Detective Himself is an article published in The Evening Record (Windsor) on 17 july 1914.
A Detective Himself
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE IS NO MEAN SLEUTH.
One Case on Which the Famous Novelist Exerted Himself Has Resulted In a Sweeping Reform In British Criminal Law — Appeals In Criminal Trials Are Now Possible.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is about to spend some time in Canada, has many claims to popular attention on this side of the Atlantic besides the conception of his great detective character Sherlock Holmes It is to him more than to anyone else that Britain is indebted for the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal. Until four or five years ago there was no means in Great Britain of quashing the sentence of anyone convicted of crime through a judicial error. Judgment in civil suit could always be appealed. But the decisions of the criminal courts were final, and irrevocable.
To-day there is, thanks to Conan Doyle, a Court of Criminal Appeal, where all wrongful convictions and judicial errors can be righted.
If Conan Doyle was led to take a leading part in the public movement for the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal, it was because his interest had been aroused by the fate of two victims of judicial error, namely Adolph Beck, an English citizen of Swedish birth, and a lawyer — a solicitor — of the name of George Edalji, whose parentage was Eurasian, that is to say, his mother was an Englishwoman, while his father was the son of a Parsee merchant of Bombay. After receiving his education at an English university, the father had entered the orders of the Church of England and had obtained the rectorship of a county parish in the Midlands.
In the face of almost insuperable difficulties of an official character, partly due to red tape and partly to the determination of the Government lawyers, of the presiding judge, of the members of the jury, and of the police to uphold their contention that they could not possibly have been wrong in the case of Adolph Beck, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ended by proving that it was a case of mistaken identity.
Conan Doyle, indeed, stirred up so much popular feeling about the matter, especially when he was able to show that the unfortunate Beck had had his entire business ruined through his arrest and conviction, that the Government was led to make him a special grant of $15,000.
Doyle after graduation started out in medical practice at Southsea, and there published his earliest work, "A Study in Scarlet," in which Sherlock Holmes makes his debut. "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes" followed four years later, in 1891, and the book proved so much of a popular success that Doyle to a great extent abandoned his medical practice and devoted himself to writing novels and plays, thanks to which he is to-day a very rich man.
Sir Arthur has been twice married. His first wife died after twenty-two years of wedded happiness in 1906, and about two years later he led to the altar the present Lady Doyle, who was a Miss Jean Leckie. With her and with his two children by his first wife he makes his home at Windlesham, his charming country place in Sussex near Crowborough, while in town he divides his time between the Atheneum and the Reform Club.
He has always been an enthusiastic cricketer, is a veteran member of that premier cricket organization the Marylebone Cricket Club, is a Liberal Unionist in politics, which accounts for the defeat of his attempts to get into Parliament, has traveled extensively to the Arctic regions, in the west of Africa and in the Soudan, did a quantity of shooting in the Rocky Mountains twenty years ago, in the Selkirk Range, north of Banff, which he intends to visit with Lady Doyle before returning home, and takes a leading part in all sorts of public movements, to which his personal popularity and the gift of his pen are invaluable.
