Savvy Londoners know that there is no such address as 221B Baker Street to be found anywhere in the city. (At least there wasn’t until recently, when it was created specifically for use by the Sherlock Holmes Museum.) It requires less intimate knowledge of London to know that the famous lodger at this non-existent address, the Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes, is equally fictitious. Yet even today the Royal Post Office receives letters addressed to the literary detective at the imaginary address, sent by people claiming to have been wrongfully accused of some crime, and asking Holmes’ help in solving the case.

In the early years of the 20th century, however, one such desperate man penned a more practical letter, addressing it not to Sherlock Holmes, but to his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, events would prove, shared many of Holmes’ special talents.

The petitioner was George Edalji, the 27-year-old son of the vicar of Great Wyrley. Edalji’s story began even before he was born, when his father, a man of Parsee ancestry, married an Englishwoman, converted to Christianity, and ultimately became the spiritual leader of his small Staffordshire community. His parishioners, perhaps thinking that the elder Edalji’s Parsee heritage made him an unsuitable Christian preacher, had little liking for him, and at least one of them made he and his wife’s lives miserable. In 1892, when George was 16 years old, the Edaljis began receiving threatening letters in the post. At the same time, other Staffordshire clergymen received abusive letters over Edalji’s forged signature, earning him the hatred of his peers. Mocking advertisements appeared in local newspapers, also purporting to be submitted by the disliked vicar. George shared in the family’s troubles, seemingly earning someone’s special resentment by becoming a successful solicitor with a fine professional reputation.

The harassment directed against the Edalji family came to a head following several incidents of animal mutilation throughout Great Wyrley. In the wake of these incidents, the police received anonymous letters accusing George Edalji of the crimes. The local Chief Constable not only acted on the accusation, but also reasoned that George had written the mysterious correspondence himself. This all fitted in with his long-held belief that George had been the one responsible for the earlier threatening letters that had been sent to his father.

Acting on his suspicions, the Chief Constable assigned no less than six policemen to keep the Edalji house under surveillance. Despite this, a labourer heading to work in the early hours of a summer’s day stumbled upon another mutilated animal, a pony this time, whose stomach had been sliced open.

The police, already preconditioned to believe George Edalji was the culprit, investigated the scene hastily, then returned to the vicarage to arrest the preacher’s son. By this time, George had already left for work, so the investigators searched the house and confiscated a pair of muddy shoes, a pair of pants with dirt around the cuffs, and various other clothes on which they found blood and horse hair. With these items in their custody, the police then proceeded to George’s Birmingham office, where they arrested their suspect.

If the evidence collected at the vicarage looked damning superficially, the police showed a remarkable lack of interest in reasoning out the facts of the case to a logical conclusion. When studied in detail, the evidence was far from convincing. George’s whereabouts during the previous evening were corroborated by several witnesses who placed him far from the crime scene. George had then retired for the night at 9.30. He slept in the same room as his father, who locked the door to the bedroom each night. The elder Edalji swore that his son could never have left the room after 9.30.

Presuming, however, that he was able to slip past his father and out of the room, he would then have had to sneak undetected past all six of the policemen who were watching the house, and then repeat this feat of stealth on the return trip. This is exactly what the police alleged had happened, and George Edalji was tried on 20th October, 1903, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years in jail. In addition, the verdict effectively destroyed his law career.

The injustice of the sentence was obvious to many outside Great Wyrley. Ten thousand people signed a petition demanding that the case be retried. Newspapers carried stories upholding Edalji’s innocence as well, but to no avail until the third year of his sentence, when he was released without pardon, apology, or explanation.

In an effort to clear his name, Edalji wrote his own version of the incident, which was published in The Umpire. Subsequently, he posted a clipping of the article to Arthur Conan Doyle. ‘As I read,’ the Sir Arthur remembered, ‘the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention, and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right.’

At the time, Conan Doyle was grieving over the death of his wife, and perhaps questioning whether he had done all that he might to make her last days as comfortable as possible. If so, the Edalji case came to his attention at a time when he was acutely conscious both of his own responsibilities and the consequences of taking a cavalier attitude toward someone in need. He launched himself into a personal investigation of the case with the same enthusiasm with which Holmes might shout, ‘Come, Watson, the game is afoot!’

He began by studying Edalji’s own account of the case. As he did so, several questions came to mind. Painstakingly, he wrote to everyone involved in the case who might be able to shed light on some of the oddities he perceived in George’s description of the evidence and the trial. His investigation turned up some very startling defects in the case against Edalji. The razor that the police claimed the defendant used to mutilate the pony had contained not a trace of blood. The mud found on Edalji’s clothes was of a completely different type of soil than that found at the crime scene. Most absurdly, Conan Doyle learned that the police had wrapped a piece of the dead horse’s hide, taken for evidence, in Edalji’s clothes, thus accounting for the hair that had been found on them. As to the small traces of blood on the same clothes, Sir Arthur commented that ‘The most adept operator who ever lived would not rip up a horse with a razor upon a dark night and have only two threepenny-bit spots of blood to show for it. The idea is beyond all argument.’

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