This book blew me away. If you're of a certain type and find Victorian true crime irresistably juicy, this won't be a hard sell: this is the true and incredible story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and how he helped vindicate Oscar Slater, a German Jew, who was wrongfully accused of murdering an eccentric, unpleasant, and wealthy old lady in Glasgow and imprisoned nearly twenty years. Fox skilfully weaves the main narrative - Oscar Slater's trial and imprisonment - with much-needed context about the Victorian age and its fascination with Lombrosan criminology, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's real-life detecting skills (I'd known about his mentor, Joseph Bell, who had served as the inspiration for Holmes, but I didn't know that A.C.D. himself was such a good detective), the nature of the demi-monde that Slater inhabited, and Glasgow itself.

The book also provides thrilling anecdata about the world of detective problem-solvers: first, that Dorothy Sayers (!), crime novelist and queen of my heart, had donated some money to raise publicity around Slater's case, and second, that 'a young person of the theatre' was a euphemism for sex workers, which as Fox points out rather underlines the Holmesian designation of Irene Adler as 'this young person'. The book is full of wonderful tidbits like this for the dedicated detective mystery fan.

Two things that I took issue with: Fox's distinction between criminology (backwards-looking, racist, othering) and criminalistics (logical, scientific, would go on to foster the development of forensic science in the twentieth century). For the most part, Fox is fairly astute in her description of police bungling and her succinct and insightful indiction of eyewitness testimony, but... she probably also underestimates the extent to which Victorian criminology was both scientific and unscientific, in the sense that "science" as it was practised by the Victorians, even at the highest level of ability, was... very much a product of its time.

The second thing was Fox's deliberate choice to hold back on key pieces of information and introduce that decision as cliffhangery ends-of-chapter. "The week before she died, she had in fact told others that she thought she would be murdered." End of chapter! Great. Then no mention of it for another good third of the book because Fox switches focus to Oscar Slater or Conan Doyle or whoever. All very fascinating, but wasn't Fox a little too pleased with herself for pulling that punch? (And relatedly: Fox's determination in being agnostic as to 'who really done it' in the afterword made me roll my eyes a little; I agree that this probably wasn't the point so much as Oscar Slater's story was, but it seemed - or at least she made it appear so - that all the contemporaries involved in that case who WEREN'T complete idiots were totally convinced that the one person did it.)

All that being said, this was compulsively readable. And that ending! Now that was a punch. Highly, highly recommend.