A NOVELIST WHO TAKES as his chief characters two men who exist in history, one of them with a resonant name, raises interesting considerations for his readers. How far is this a carefully researched biography — albeit interpreted by the creative imagination of a novelist — and how far is it fiction given a veneer of actuality by known facts? Whatever the problems, Julian Barnes has solved them brilliantly. From the first paragraphs we know ourselves to be in the hands of a major novelist and are borne forward by a compelling narrative, beautifully controlled, which combines the satisfactions of biography, social history and the excitement and ratiocination of a real-life detective story. This novel is Barnes at his best.

The two men whose lives converge with dramatic intensity can hardly be more different and we meet them in the childhood family homes that formed their characters. Arthur Conan Doyle was brought up in late 19th-century genteel Edinburgh with a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who was to become the dominant influence on him to the end of his life. He was romantic, generous and energetic and would achieve acclaim as the creator of the world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

George Edalji was the eldest of the three children of an Indian father and a Scottish mother. He was brought up in the vicarage at Great Wyrley, in Staffordshire, where his father, the Rev Shapurji Edalji, a Parsee convert to the Church of England, was parish priest. The appointment of an Indian to a traditional and rural English parish was a great deal less common in Victorian England than it would be today. George was a shy, unimaginative and earnest boy who suffered in childhood from defective eyesight. He grew up in the peace of the countryside with an affectionate mother and a father who imbued him with his own belief in England as the beating heart of the Empire.

We not only accompany the two men through their careers and rites of passage, we also know what they are thinking, inhabit their minds and are privy to their internal soliloquies about the problems and preoccupations. Barnes’s creative insight is married to respect for known facts. He states that, apart from one letter, all others quoted are authentic, as are quotations from newspapers, government reports and Conan Doyle’s writings.

Both boys were ambitious. Arthur went to Edinburgh University to study medicine and George to Mason College, in Birmingham, to train as a solicitor. The sequence of events that brought their two lives into collision began in 1903 and made sensational headlines as “The Great Wyrley Outrages”. The Edaljis began to receive vicious anonymous letters which George’s father, somewhat naturally, put down to racial prejudice. He appealed to the Chief Constable, Captain George Augustus Anson, but received no sympathy — indeed, there were veiled suggestions that George was responsible. The letters were followed by an outbreak of nocturnal outrages when horses and other livestock were slashed and either died or had to be put down. The possibility that the attacks might be extended to people produced panic. The police busied themselves, but not very effectively, and George Edalji was arrested, tried and found guilty of the maimings. The question of his defective eyesight, which would have made it impossible for him to find his way round farm buildings in the night, was never given in evidence.

George was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude and endured the hardships and indignities of his time in jail with a philosophic determination. After four years he was released suddenly and without explanation, almost certainly because of public disquietude at his conviction. But he was still a convicted felon, forbidden to follow his profession and with no other means of livelihood. He appealed to the creator of Sherlock Holmes and he could not have found a better champion. Ever since Holmes solved his first case, requests for his help had been arriving at 221b Baker Street from all over the world, as indeed they still do.

Conan Doyle embraced the cause with all the enthusiasm and determination of his robust character and in the blaze of national publicity. At the time he was at the height of his fame, a hero of the Boer War, knighted, welcomed in the highest social circles, an indefatigable sportsman and traveller and a famous writer.

He was determined not only to clear George, but to discover the real culprit, and embarked on the task as if he were indeed Holmes, with his loyal, if occasionally puzzled, assistant, Alfred Wood, as his Dr Watson. To vindicate George was an easier task than to discover the real culprit and George, always the lawyer, was perturbed by his benefactor’s unwise zeal in hunting for clues.

The campaign was conducted in the full public eye, and in 1907 a paper was presented to both Houses of Parliament announcing that George Edalji had been granted a pardon. But to Conan Doyle’s disgust, the vindication was grudging. A committee of inquiry took the view that George was the writer of the letters of 1903 and had to some extent brought his troubles upon himself. No compensation was offered and, despite Conan Doyle’s further efforts, interest in the case eventually died. George was able to take up his profession, which he followed quietly to the end of his life, unmarried and living with his sister.

But it is for the Holmes stories that Conan Doyle is remembered. To return to those tales now is to re-enter a vividly evoked world of sinister, occasionally bizarre, villainy, of a veiled woman climbing the stairs to the sanctum of 221b Baker Street, of hackney cabs rumbling over London’s cobbles and the baying of a great hound on a remote, fog-shrouded moor.

We view the stories and their world as through a telescope, at once vividly present, yet infinitely distanced. But the Edalji story is closer in time than we think. The Chief Constable George Anson died in 1937. George survived all the players in his tragedy, dying in 1953. His greatest professional achievement, of which he was touchingly proud, was a book published in 1901 on railway law for “the Man in the Train”. Conan Doyle died in 1930, aged 71, having devoted his final years to spiritualism. But the problems that preoccupied George and Arthur, and which Barnes examines with sensitivity — guilt and innocence, the operation of the criminal justice system, divided loyalties, prejudice, religious belief and the reality of death — engage us still and are unlikely to be solved even by the genius of a Sherlock Holmes.

Jonathan Cape, £17.99; 360pp
£14.39 (p&p £2.25)
0870 1608080 www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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