Every time I reorganize my books I pick it up and think that now will be the time I read it, and it inevitably gets hidden in the back behind Barrie and Baum until the next reorganization. Arthur was willing to play the detective for the first time in his life, and hopefully George would get his name cleared when they were done.Īrthur and George is one of those books that have been sitting on my shelf for ages. He was at the end of his rope with waiting and here came George with something to distract him. Arthur had just suffered the loss of his wife while also feeling guilty that during the past ten years he had loved another and was just waiting for propriety's sake till the day he could make Jean his bride. Therefore George took the only drastic measure he ever did in his whole life, he wrote to the creator of Sherlock Holmes asking for his help. All he wanted was to be pardoned and for his simple life to begin again. They had no evidence, no logic, and yet George ended up spending three years of his life in prison. The local police decided that George was behind these crimes.

Animals were attacked so viciously that they had to be euthanized due to their wounds. The persecution eventually stopped and life seemed ready to go on as normal. Yet George kept his life on track, going to college and then working for a firm in Birmingham, finally setting up his practice and even publishing a guide on railway law. The local police did nothing, and in fact suspected George of persecuting his own family. His family received hateful and horrible anonymous letters. He kept his head down and studied, being a decent, not excellent, student. As Arthur rose to fame, taking his family out of the gentle poverty of Edinburgh, getting married, having children, establishing his career, George had far smaller ambitions.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the second greatest writer of his age after Rudyard Kipling, and George Edalji, a half-caste solicitor from Birmingham whose Parsi father became a vicar in a small Staffordshire village, would unexpectedly change English law and bring about the court of appeal in England. To Buy (different edition than one reviewed) Book Review - Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk.Movie Review - Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the.Book Review - Paul Magrs's Welcome Home, Bernard S.Book Review - Julian Barnes's Arthur & George.Book Review - George Mann's The Will of the Dead.

Barnes arthur and george