Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was also a physician and amateur criminal investigator. He helped exonerate George Edalji and used his deductive reasoning skills to free Oscar Slater from prison. However, Slater never reimbursed Conan Doyle for expenses incurred in freeing him. Additionally, Conan Doyle wrote his first novel at 23, fell in love with a fake photo of fairies, and became a surgeon after being deemed too overweight for military service.
Sherlock Holmes is known around the world as the greatest fictional detective in history, but in the real world, his creator wasn’t far behind. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was best known as a writer, but he was also a physician and, in two notable cases, an amateur criminal investigator. In 1906, Conan Doyle helped exonerate George Edalji, who had been wrongfully convicted of animal mutilation. And most famously, Conan Doyle used his “Holmes method” — and his money — to petition for the release of Oscar Slater, who was accused of killing 82-year-old Marion Gilchrist in 1908. Slater had already of the black marks against him, including running an illegal gambling operation and possibly being a pimp. He thus became an easy target for the police and was sentenced to death, although this was later changed to life imprisonment. The case eventually caught the attention of Conan Doyle. He used all his deductive reasoning skills to uncover a number of inconsistencies, including questionable witness testimony, and used his considerable influence – both publicly and politically – to get Slater released in 1927. The ending was not entirely happy, though. Slater was never legally cleared, and although he received compensation from the government for his conviction, he never reimbursed Conan Doyle for the expenses incurred in freeing Slater. In other words, even Conan Doyle learned not only that crime doesn’t pay, but neither do alleged criminals.
A closer look at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
Although he wrote his first novel at 23, Conan Doyle’s manuscript got lost on the way to a publisher and he rewrote it from memory.
Doyle fell in love with a fake photo of a girl surrounded by fairies and allegedly spent $1 million to prove their existence.
Too overweight to be admitted to military service as a soldier, Doyle became a surgeon and left for Africa as a ship’s medical officer.
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