Conan Doyle Detective in Real Life
Conan Doyle Detective in Real Life is an article published in Lewiston Saturday Journal on 6 june 1914.
Conan Doyle Detective in Real Life
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lady Doyle as they appeared on board the "S.S. Olympic" on their arrival in America May 27th. They are visiting the United States for the first time in twenty years. After visiting the principal cities of the United States they will go to Canada where they contemplate a camping trip in the wildest part of the Canadian Rockies. On this trip they will be accompanied by a friend of Sir Arthur's, a forester, who was at one time in the British army. William J. Burns, the detective, went down on a revenue cutter to meet the creator of the famous Sherlock Holmes and the equally famous Dr. Watson of Baker Street.
Former Ambassador Joseph H. Choate in proposing the health of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the luncheon given in his honor by the Pilgrims Society on Thursday, May 28, at the Whitehall Club described him as more widely known in the United States than any other Englishman. This is undoubtedly true. For there is hardly a man, woman or child in America who is not acquainted with his name, as that of the creator of that world-famed sleuth, Sherlock Holmes.
But Conan Doyle has many other claims to popular attention on this side of the Atlantic besides the conception of this great detective, so familiar to every American playgoer and reader of fiction, and it is upon these features of his useful career that F. Cunliffe — Owen touches in the following brief notes, reprinted from the New York Sun:
It is to Conan Doyle, more than to any one else, that his compatriots are indebted for the creation of a court of criminal appeal. It is difficult for Americans to realize the fact that until four or five years ago there was no means in Great Britain of quashing the sentence of any one convicted of crime thru a judicial error. Judgment in civil suits 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; a court created by act of Parliament, in the face of a considerable amount of opposition.
It took him some years to accomplish his atm. But ultimately his efforts were crowned with success; and now every convict who is either the victim of a judicial error or who has received an unduly harsh sentence can bless the name of Sir Conan Doyle when the wrong is righted by the court of criminal appeal — Sir Arthur's offspring.
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 country parish in the Midlands.
It is unnecessary to state that Conan Doyle keeps himself thoroly informed about all criminal cases. His Sherlock Holmes stories show that. Certain features in the evidence on the strength of which these two men were convicted, the one or cattle maiming and the other of a number of cruel frauds upon women, created doubts in his mind as to their guilt. The possibility that they might be innocent aroused his sympathy in their behalf, and accordingly he devoted those powers deduction and of sleuthing which he ascribes in his books to Sherlock Holmes, to the unravelling of the tangle.
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 and that there was no connection whatsoever, beyond that of resemblance, between the unfortunate Adolph Beck and the real culprit, a swindler of the name of Smith. It was not until Beck, had served two years of the term of ten years' penal servitude passed upon him for the crimes of Smith that Conan Doyle was able to convince the secretary of state for the home department that Beck was innocent and to obtain for him a free pardon from the crown.
With regard to George Edalji he was convicted at the Staffordshire quarter sessions in October, 1903, of cattle maiming of a particularly atrocious character. Anonymous letters, in some of which the name of George Edalji appeared, while in others there were threats of murder against the local police force, played an important role in the trial. The evidence against Edalji was purely circumstantial in the sense that there was no direct testimony of any kind. But owing to the intense animosity of the Staffordshire police against the Edalji family and of the popular prejudice in the entire district against the rector and his son George owing to their Indian, that is Parsee, origin the jury rendered a verdict against the accused lawyer and he was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude.
The fact that the horrible horse and cattle maiming outrages in the Wyrley district of Staffordshire continued after the incarceration of George Edalji convinced Sir Arthur that the man was innocent and that the testimony of the police in the case had been totally unreliable. He set all his wits to work and procured the most incontrovertible proofs that Edalji could not possibly have committed the crimes. Not only that, but he secured 18 months later the conviction of a man of the name of Farrington for the perpetration of the cattle maiming outrages committed after Edalji had commenced to serve his term of penal servitude, the presumption being of course that Farrington had also been guilty of the crimes ascribed to Edalji.
In this particular instance it was impossible to get the secretary of state for the home department to take any action toward the obtaining of a free pardon for Edalji until Sir Arthur had gone to the extreme length of securing thru the force of public sentiment the appointment of a parliamentary commission to inquire into the matter, To this commission Conan Doyle submitted all the evidence that he had gathered in behalf of Edalji's innocence, and after a number of sessions extending over a period of several months the commission finally reported to Parliament to the effect that Edalji ought never to have been convicted and that he was guiltless of the crimes with which he was charged. Thus for the last three months he has been engaged in getting up an agitation among all the literary men in England, that is to say the writers, for the purpose of forcing the government to provide for the participation of Great Britain in the Panama exhibition at San Francisco. In spite of all the pressure brought to bear upon the administration, however, it has been found impossible to induce Premier Asquith to reconsider the decision of the cabinet to decline the invitation of the United States to the world's fair at the Golden Gate.
Sir Arthur is not only a writer of singularly wholesome and virile novels but is also something of a poet, a fact which is generally ignored.
