Glasgow, Scotland: 1908 A wealthy, and extremely paranoid elderly woman is brutally murdered in her home. Clues that would prove to even the untrained Glasgow, Scotland: 1908 A wealthy, and extremely paranoid elderly woman is brutally murdered in her home. Clues that would prove to even the untrained to be blatantly false lead the police to a suspect, Oscar Slater - immigrant German Jew with a shady reputation. Slater finds himself imprisoned for a life of hard labor in one of Scotland's worst prisons...barely escaping hanging for the crime. After 18 and a half years, and close to suicidal, Slater manages to get a cry for help out....to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A well known crusader for justice, despite the blows to his reputation concerning his fascination with the afterlife....and a faked photograph of "fairies", Doyle takes on the case....applying the same investigative tools used by his fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes. Battling the rabid anti-Semitism and anti-immigration bias that gripped Scotland, and the entire British Isles at the time....along with a police department and prosecutors more willing to frame a man on questionable circumstantial evidence rather than find the real perpetrator, Doyle would spend his final years seeking justice, finally freeing Slater in 1927.
A remarkable work of biography, history and true crime that captures the time and place that this travesty of justice occurred, and revealing the honorable man Doyle was, along with the innate genius for deduction that he was blessed with, a genius that lives on in his most famous creation.
Overall, a highly recommended read...for Doyle fans, Holmes fans, history buffs and true crime aficionados everywhere.
An uproariously funny and loving stroll down memory lane for any horror fan who remembers, or wishes they were there, for the wild and wooly heyday ofAn uproariously funny and loving stroll down memory lane for any horror fan who remembers, or wishes they were there, for the wild and wooly heyday of horror in paperback. Exploring the changing scene as horror rose and fell, featuring the magnificent covers that whet the appetites of horror aficionados, the authors immortalized or forgotten, the publishers who brought us the bounty of dark fiction, and the cover artists who illustrated our nightmares, and called to us from the shelves, offered up with reverential good humor, this is a must-have for every horror fan young and old.
Reviewer is not responsible for the money you'll spend hunting for these wondrous artifacts of horror's greatest literary moment....more
Jon Recluse
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