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In Great Wyrley, a small village in the depths of Edwardian Staffordshire, a dead rabbit is found skewered to the vicarage lawn with a garden fork. Bodies of blackbirds are left in a milk churn and a soup tureen. Three broken eggs are laid out on the front step. Anonymous letters — obscene, misspelled, sometimes rabid with religious mania — slither through the letter box. Gallons of black paint and slurries of coal are disconcertingly delivered. In the local paper, advertisements announce that the vicar is running a matrimonial agency, is selling horse manure and will dispatch specimens of ladies’ corsetry on demand. When cattle in the vicinity are viciously slashed, things take an even more macabre turn. Soon the press is clamouring about The Great Wyrley Outrages. It sounds like a case for Sherlock Holmes. And, indeed, the sleuth who eventually sets out to disentangle the gruesome affair is Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. Unlike Holmes’s exploits, though, the situation at the centre of Julian Barnes’s richly accomplished new novel isn’t fantasy but fact. Taking a real-life whodunit, Arthur & George transforms it into a dazzling exercise in detective fiction of more kinds than one.

During the quarter century since his debut with Metroland (1980), Barnes has proved himself a virtuoso of fictional versatility. He has written novels about London suburbia, lethal jealousy, a Flaubert fanatic, a female aviator, a communist dictator on trial and a capitalist tycoon on the rampage. Technically, he has been busily miscellaneous as well. Two of his novels — Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000) — consist of monologues their characters address to the reader. His most structurally audacious work, the masterly A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), intricately interlinked narratives that range from medieval France to present-day Latin America, from Noah’s Ark to the afterlife.

Amid this dizzying diversity, preoccupations recur. One is a penchant for writing fiction that openly colonises actuality — especially the lives of creative prodigies. Delius inspired a story in Barnes’s collection Cross Channel (1996), soas did Sibelius and Turgenev in The Lemon Table (2004). Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) paid elaborate homage to hisBarnes’s favourite novelist. Now he turns his admiring attention to two authors: Arthur Conan Doyle, who stamped his image of the great detective on the world’s imagination, and George Edalji, who made a more modest impact with his 1901 publication, Railway Law for Tthe “Man in the Train”, a manual on the rights of the travelling public.

In most respects, the men seem opposites, as the novel’s deft intercutting of scenes from their early lives conveys. Arthur, born into shabby gentility in Edinburgh, comes from a Catholic family conscious of its aristocratic lineage; George is the half-Indian son of a Parsee immigrant now a Church of England vicar in Staffordshire. Where Arthur is imaginative, keenly responsive to his mother’s stories and later pouring out his own, George is earnestly factual and becomes a solicitor. Vigorously participating in boxing, football, golf and cricket (he once bowled out W G Grace), Arthur bounds with energy; staid and myopic, George is sedentary. Exuberant Arthur, pukka in appearance with his tweeds and walrus moustache, is a family man; shy, nervy, odd-looking George remains a bachelor.

Having vividly established the gulfs between his protagonists, Barnes chronicles the events that draw them together. Powerful pages document the ordeal that George undergoes after the Edaljis report the harassment of their vicarage to the police. Startlingly, he learns that he himself is under suspicion. Although he lacks motive and opportunity and the evidence against him is derisory, this solicitor of impeccable probity is charged with mutilating local livestock. Further travesties of justice result in his being sentenced to 7seven years’ hard labour. Public outcry gets him released after three years. But, with the guilty verdict still standing, he exchanges prison for legal limbo.

A matching account of how Arthur has been faring reveals that, in another way, he, too, has beenwas imprisoned. As nurse-attendant to his consumptive wife Touie, he spent 13 chaste, dutiful years keeping her and their debilitated marriage alive. Sixteen stone of wholesome, pure-hearted manliness, Arthur was Sir Galahad surviving into the 20th century. Chivalry — especially towards women — was his watchword. Faithfully, he stayed at Touie’s side despite falling in love with another woman, Jean, with whom he shared 10 years of semi-secret platonic devotion. After Touie’s death, guilt at what he sees as his dishonourableness holds him back from marrying Jean and plunges him into depressive lethargy.

What galvanises him out of it is a new appeal to his chivalry and sense of fair play. A letter from George, seeking help in clearing his name, arrives. And in no time, the game’s a-foot. Pausing only long enough to be dissuaded from equipping himself with a false beard, Arthur hurtles down to Great Wyrley and probes, as Holmes might have done, the murky circumstances of the Edalji affair. What emerges is a racist welter of yokel malice, police ill-intention and gross prejudice in high places. George’s innocence is proved (as a consequence of his case, the Court of Criminal Appeal was put in place) but a blandly equivocating Home Office Iinquiry merely grants him what Arthur bitterly calls “a free pardon for a crime he never committed”, refuses compensation and deems everyone implicated in the blatant miscarriage of justice entirely blameless.

Arthur’s investigation is only one of many in this novel, which explores the lasting effects of upbringing, the importance of scrutiny and evidence, and the role played in lives by narratives and beliefs. Around these, Barnes captures an era with extraordinary sure-handedness (except for one surprising slip: no young man schooled by the Jesuits at Stonyhurst would have thought the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception to be the same thing, as Arthur and a clever classmate there are seen to believe). doing there).

Handsomely got up to resemble a volume from an Edwardian bookcase, with its dark mustard cloth binding embossed with what looks like an illustration from Punch, Arthur & George has strong affinities with Edwardian fiction. Its central figures — contrasting types of stoical decency — are portrayed with a leisurely fullness redolent of the period. Like many Edwardian novels, it is about close-to-home savagery behind the imperial facade, and unruly impulses festering beneath the veneer of decorum (in a brilliant scene, as Arthur confronts Staffordshire’s Ddeputy Llieutenant in his lamp-lit study, toxic assumptions horribly surface through formidable urbanity). Barnes’s suave, elegant prose — alive here with precision, irony and humaneness — has never been used better than in this extraordinary true-life tale, which is as terrifically told as any by its hero Conan Doyle himself.

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