The loving letters he [Slater] wrote from jail to his parents and sisters in Silesia, sampled by Ms. Fox, form a poignant counterpoint to the impersonal rhetoric of the police report, law court and newspaper story. Ms. Fox, a former obituary writer for the New York Times, has an eye for the telling detail, a forensic sense of evidence and a relish for research. She weighs the material evidence that, at one point, put Slater’s life in the balance ... Along the way, she explores conflicting schools in early 20th-century criminal investigation as well ... As for the Slater case, the approach was a hodge-podge of inadequate evidence and testimony and opportunistically wishful thinking, as Ms. Fox shows so vividly. So in the end, whodunnit? ... If you fancy yourself a second Sherlock Holmes—or Conan Doyle, for that matter—the game is still afoot.

One of the great successes of the book is the way it balances narrative drive with the wider social and criminological context ... She also delves into Victorian and Edwardian criminology, noting how police did not then seek clues in the crime scene, as they might do today, so much as read them 'directly off the criminal' — off his character, his morals, even the shape of his head ... This is a first-class book: pacy, insightful and lucid. And although it is never done heavy-handedly, it reveals some of the disturbing ways in which the Edwardian era echoes in our own.

All of this is developed with brio by Fox. She is excellent in linking the 19th-century creation of policing and detection with the development of both detective fiction and the science of forensics ... Fox’s historical knowledge skates on thin ice ... phrases like the vague 'industrialization had urbanized Glasgow' are simply filler ... A more rounded — perhaps even more jaundiced — picture of Conan Doyle would also have been welcome.

An elderly woman whom no one liked was bludgeoned to death in her smart Glasgow flat. Within hours a man whom no one liked either was identified as her killer and, in due course, condemned to hang. The Oscar Slater case is often invoked as an example of how easy it was for the police to fit someone up in an age before DNA, when crime scene protocol mostly consisted of slapping handcuffs on the nearest wrong ’un. But its broader message is perhaps: if you want to stay alive, it helps if people like you ... Within a few days of Gilchrist’s murder it became clear that Slater’s pawn ticket did not relate to the stolen brooch, that his trip to New York had been planned weeks earlier and that he bore no resemblance to the man seen fleeing the flat. Put simply, the police were fitting Slater up, quite possibly to cover for the real murderer who was rumoured to be a member of Gilchrist’s own family ... the flaws in the police case are so blindingly obvious that even Dr Watson would have smelled a rat ... Fox has worked hard to reshape a classic Edwardian murder case to make it fit with our times.

William Roughead (a Glasgow Lawyer and writer)...attended the trial of Oscar Slater in Glasgow in May 1909, writing it up for the Notable Scottish Trials series. He believed that the guilty verdict, arrived at after barely an hour of deliberation, was wrong ... Roughead broadcast his disbelief in Slater’s guilt from the first, to anyone who would listen, enjoining the most famous detective fiction writer in the world, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his cause. Conan Doyle For the Defense cannot resist structuring itself as a detective novel, though the whodunit is less about who killed Marion Gilchrist and more about who framed Oscar Slater ... The ingredients are too good to pass up: a famous detective novelist actually playing detective, a man serving time for a murder he did not commit, and a criminal justice system slowly, and reluctantly, reckoning with the advent of forensic science—fingerprints were around when Slater was arrested and convicted, but in one of so many missed opportunities to right the wrong, never used ... How the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories fought for—and ultimately turned against—a man wrongfully convicted.

...82-year-old Marion Gilchrist was beaten to death in her Glasgow, Scotland, home. A brooch was stolen during the crime, and when police learned that Oscar Slater, a foreign-born gambler, had a similar item, they arrested him. It soon emerged that Slater had pawned his brooch before the murder, but the authorities were undeterred. A jury deliberated for about an hour before convicting him, and he was given a life sentence...Three years later, encouraged by Slater’s lawyer, Conan Doyle studied the case. He came to believe that Slater was innocent, and when he said so in print, Conan Doyle became the prisoner’s most prominent advocate. Were this one of Conan Doyle’s fictional tales, logic would’ve prevailed after the publication of his book. In reality, 'The Case of Oscar Slater' had little immediate influence. Conan Doyle stepped away, then redoubled his advocacy before the saga took a final twist — one that reshaped Slater’s life and the British justice system’s appeals process. A brisk account of the celebrated novelist's campaign to overturn a controversial murder conviction.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, didn’t just concoct fictional mysteries — he solved real ones ... In her entertaining new book, Conan Doyle for the Defense Margalit Fox accounts the real-life case of Oscar Slater, wrongly imprisoned in 1909 for a murder he did not commit, and the efforts of Conan Doyle to win Slater his freedom. The details of this judicial travesty...unreliable witnesses, dodgy evidence and a series of coincidences that led to Slater's guilty verdict — seem ripped from one of Conan Doyle’s Holmes tales. But it’s a true story.

...page-turning account of how mystery-writer-turned-real life sleuth Arthur Conan Doyle helped exonerate a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder. Early into the investigation, the police centered their suspicions on Oscar Slater, a German Jew expat and known gambler, who was eventually convicted of the murder (of Gilchrist), based on such shoddy evidence as the fact that he’d pawned a brooch similar to one owned by Gilchrist that was missing from the scene of the crime. Taking a cue from Conan Doyle, Fox then uses the brooch to show how Slater was likely framed for the crime, and how both class bias and anti-Semitism influenced the rush to convict him. ... The author’s exhaustive research and balanced analysis make this a definitive account, with pertinent repercussions for our times.