I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere

Episode 149: Conan Doyle for the Defense

Interview with Margalit Fox

Scott Monty: The case of Oscar Slater was like something out of a crime
novel.

Margalit Fox: On a cold, rainy December night, just before Christmas in 1908,
Marion Gilchrist, an 82-year-old, wealthy, reclusive, Scottish
woman was murdered brutally, bludgeoned to death in her
opulent Glasgow flat during 10 minutes when her maid had
stepped out to buy the evening paper. Now, when the maid
came back and the police were called, although Marion
Gilchrist was a great collector of jewelry and had a personal
collection that in today's American money would be worth
nearly half a million dollars, despite the presence of all of this
masses of jewelry, the maid testified that only a single piece
was missing. A brooch in the shape of a crescent moon set
along its length with diamonds.

Margalit Fox: Woe betide Oscar Slater. By pure coincidence he had recently
pawned a brooch of his, a crescent moon set along its length
with diamonds. Although the police ascertained within a week
that the two brooches were different they pursued Slater
 anyway knowing he was not guilty. He was tried in the Spring
of 1909 and sentenced to hang. In a detail that still gives me
chills, he literally had made arrangements for his own burial 48
hours before he was slated to hang. He was reprieved, his
sentence was commuted to life at hard labor, and he was
dispatched to His Majesty's Prison, Peterhead. This Dickensian,
Victorian fortress on the raw northeast coast of Scotland. It
was later known as Scotland's Gulag. There he stayed at hard
labor in the prison quarry and eating the Dickensian diet of
broth and gruel for 18 and a half years.

Scott Monty: Why does this case, from over 100 years ago, require another
look now?

Margalit Fox: Every Conan Doyle bio has anywhere from a paragraph to a
chapter on Conan Doyle's involvement in the Oscar Slater case,
which of course began with this terrible Glasgow murder in
1908, through Slater's conviction the next year, through Conan
Doyle's entry into the case in 1912, and the scathing
indictment he wrote about that. Through Slater smuggling out
a message in the mouth of a fellow prisoner saying, "Go see
Conan Doyle," in 1925, he'd been rotting in jail for over a
decade by then, to Conan Doyle's winning Slater's freedom in
1927. The case plus its aftermath spanned pretty much the last
two decades of Conan Doyle's life.

Scott Monty: Join us as author, Margalit Fox, explores the story behind
immigrant, Oscar Slater, the blue wall that sought to bring him
down at any cost, the fear and suspicion that taints the human
mind, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's attitude about the whole
case.

Burt Wolder: Support for this episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere is

made possible by the Wessex Press, the premiere publisher of
books about Sherlock Holmes and his world. Find them online
at wessexpress.com. And The Baker Street Journal, the leading
publication of Sherlockian scholarship since 1946.
Subscriptions available at bakerstreetirregulars.com.
Scott Monty: I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, Episode 149: Conan Doyle for
the Defense.

Mycroft Holmes: I heard of Sherlock everywhere since you became his

chronicler].

Narrator: In a world where it's always 1985 comes, I Hear of Sherlock

Everywhere, a podcast for devotees of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
the world's first unofficial consulting detective.

Dr. Roylott: I've heard of you before, you're Holmes, the meddler. Holmes,
the busybody. Holmes, the Scotland Yard jack-in-office.

Narrator: The game's afoot as we discuss goings on in the world of

Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, the Baker Street Irregulars, and
popular culture related to the great detective.

Dr. Watson: As we go to press sensational developments have been

reported.

Narrator: Join your hosts, Scott Monty and Burt Wolder, as they talk
about what's new in the world of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes: You couldn't have come at a better time.

Scott Monty: Oh, hi there, and welcome once again to I Hear of Sherlock
Everywhere, the first podcast for Sherlock Holmes devotees
where it's always 1895. I'm Scott Monty.

Burt Wolder: I'm Burt Wolder.

Scott Monty: And we are panting our way to August. The dog days of
summer. Which canonical canine do you think would be most
appropriate for the dog days of summer?

Burt Wolder: Well the temptation is to say The Hound of the Baskervilles,
but I like Toby. I'm very fond of Toby.

Scott Monty: I like that. I'm thinking of that hangdogged bloodhound look.
That could do it. Of course, there was a bloodhound also used
 in "The Missing Three Quarter." There's that famous, both
Paget and Steele famously drew the picture of Holmes being
led by the hound on the leash that was taut, as he was tracing,
I think it was Dr. Leslie Armstrong, through the streets.

Burt Wolder: Right. Yeah, I like that Steele picture, although it really does
show Holmes probably not particular well attired for where he
was walking, but I thought it was nicely done nonetheless.

Scott Monty: Indeed. You know, the Steele drawing has that leash so tight
that it almost seems like it's a stick that stands between homes
and the dog, you know? Well, that's neither here nor there, we
are here of course to speak with a celebrated author whom
you will meet in just a moment, but just so you know, the
show notes for this episode are available at ihose.co/ihose149.
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hear from you.

Scott Monty: You know who else would love to hear from you?

Burt Wolder: Who? Who?

Scott Monty: Well, this time around our friends at the Wessex Press. We'd
remind you to please frequent our sponsors. Helping them
helps us, so do all you can.

Narrator: Here in the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex we have

just marked the Festival of the Seven Sleepers. Those hardy
souls who entered a cave in the year 250 and slept until they
were awakened in 479. But you won't worry about
oversleeping when your bedtime reading includes The Science
 Fiction Worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells by Dana
Martin Batory. These essays explore landmark science-fiction,
including the last Professor Challenger story, When The World
Screamed. It's available right now at wessexpress.com. And
around, and around, and around they go. Heel to heel and toe
to toe. Now's the time to dance into summer and enjoy a new
book from the Wessex Press. Choose yours today.

Scott Monty: Oh, those golden days of yesteryear in the sublime area of
Essex. Wessex, not Essex.

Burt Wolder: Yes, right.

Scott Monty: Now wouldn't that be neat if they were the Essex Press?

Burt Wolder: Oh, the Essex Press.

Scott Monty: Or the Sussex Press. Boy, this could get confusing rather
quickly.

Burt Wolder: Or if there was a merger. You know, the Sussex, Essex, Wessex
Press.

Scott Monty: All the sex presses.

Burt Wolder: Yeah.

Scott Monty: Wait a minute. Well, let's get away from that and over to our
interview guest. Recently retired as a senior writer for the New
York Times, Margalit Fox is considered one of the foremost
explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism
today. As a member of the newspaper's celebrated obituary
news department, she's written front page sendoffs for some
of the leading cultural figures of our age. Conan Doyle For the
Defense, her new book, is in many ways a fond belated
obituary for the long overlooked Oscar Slater, an immigrant
every man treated inexcusably by history. You'll hear exactly
why in just a moment.
Scott Monty: Fox's previous book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, won the
William Saroyan International Prize For Writing. She lives in
Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic, George
Robinson. She is here to speak to us about Conan Doyle For
the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, A
Quest For Justice, and The World's Most Famous Detective
Writer.

Scott Monty: Margalit, welcome to the show.

Margalit Fox: Thank you so much for having me. Of all the podcasts in all the
towns in all the world, this is the one I am most delighted to be
on.

Scott Monty: I love it. Well, lest Sam get going on the piano there, why don't
we delve into the question that we start every interview with
and ask you how you first came to know Sherlock Holmes?

Margalit Fox: I don't have a specific memory, but it's a very safe bet that it
happened as, for so many of us, in childhood. My father was a
physicist and a mathematician so he adored anything to do
with logic. A lot of these stories that he and I read when I was
an even younger child was things like Lewis Carroll's Alice
books because of course, Carroll was a magician and a
mathematician, and my father absolutely loved that kind of
logic, that kind of linguistic play wherever he could find it in
literature. So I strongly suspect, reasoning abductively, that it
was from him that I was introduced to the master.

Scott Monty: Tell us about the link then that finally exposed you to Arthur
Conan Doyle and this case of Oscar Slater?

Margalit Fox: Well this is something your listenership will appreciate more
than any other group for whom I've answered that question.
The origin of Conan Doyle For the Defense goes back more
than 30 years, to when I had just left graduate school in the
west and settled in New York as a young person in my 20s. I
was making my daily commute to a rather uninspiring entry
level job in book publishing, and the book I had brought with
 me to read on the subway that week was John Dickson Carr's
1949 bio of Conan Doyle. As many of you will remember,
toward the end of the book when we're getting into the 20th
century history, Carr says almost as an aside in this very
cavalier way, in effect, "Oh, by the way, Sir Arthur also made
the real life investigation of a wrongful conviction for a terrible
murder, and using the methods of the master, freed this
wrongfully convicted Jewish immigrant who had rotted in jail
for almost 20 years." Well I almost dropped the book in the
middle of the A train.

Margalit Fox: I thought, "My god, the creator of Sherlock Holmes himself
played Holmes, successfully righting a scandalous wrongful
conviction. Why in the world isn't this case better known?" At
least in the States. However, I had not yet even gone to
journalism school, much less embarked on a career as a writer,
so I was not at all in a position to do something about it. I filed
it away in my brain attic, in a dusty recess toward the back.
Fast forward almost 30 years to 2013 when my previous book,
The Riddle of The Labyrinth was finished and I was casting
about for a new subject for a narrative non-fiction book, I aired
out the dusty corner of my brain attack, and by then I had
written two books, I was a senior writer at the New York
Times, and I thought, "At last, now I'm in a position to tell the
Oscar Slater story.

Scott Monty: I know a lot of our listeners are going to be fascinated with
this, but how does one come to become an obituary writer for
the New York Times?

Margalit Fox: It is very true that the child has yet to be born who comes
home from first grade clutching a theme in his little fist that
says, "When I grow up I want to be an obituary writer." I fell
into it, as most of us do. I am certainly old enough to be aware
that historically the obit department was Siberia in every
newsroom at every newspaper across America. It was where
they sent you if you messed up on a grownup part of the paper
but they didn't quite have enough on you to fire you. It was
 also where they typically farmed people out to pasture when
they were judged to be a whisker away from needing a obit
themselves. Happily, that has changed, particularly at the New
York Times.

Margalit Fox: I first joined the Times 24 years ago, in 1994, and I spent my
first 10 years there as a copyeditor on the Times Sunday Book
Review. While it was a wonderful job, being surrounded by
books and lively, smart colleagues, I had very much been
trained for, at that point, and been banking on a writing
career. So I began contributing advance obits to the section on
a freelance basis, because there is this Sisyphean need for
obits of the newsworthy undead, the people whose work is so
complex and so rich, so vast, that we don't want to have to get
caught short writing them on deadline. Although of course, the
gods being noncooperative in this repsect, very often we did.
Obit departments always have a need for journalists from
throughout the newsroom to contribute advanced obits.

Margalit Fox: 10 years of doing that go by. In 2004 a staff job in the obit
section opened up and because I by then had a track record, I
was lucky enough to get it.

Scott Monty: Along the way you had a lovely piece in the Times at the end of
June, you have written, you have reported more than 1,400
obituaries for-

Margalit Fox: That's right.

Scott Monty: ... for the Times. Now you are-

Margalit Fox: That's right, that's conservative.

Scott Monty: Okay. Now you're a hero and an idol to many of our listeners
who've also dreamed of this, you're following your long held
dream of writing books exclusively. One of the things I loved in
the piece that you had in the Times at the end of June, and
now we should say that you have been away from the Times
for three whole weeks.
Margalit Fox: Right, this is my three week anniversary, so-

Scott Monty: Right. I'm curious how it feels, but I also want to point out that
in this great piece you had at the end in the Times you wrote,
"And so it is, the free song makers, history's backstage players,
whom we writers love best of all, those unsung heroes and
heroines are rarely household names, yet in ways large and
small they've changed history. They're people who, for good or
ill, have put a wrinkle in the social fabric." That really sort of
gets us right to Oscar Slater in a way.

Margalit Fox: It does indeed. He, poor, hapless guy, had a terrible, seemingly
permanent wrinkle that he couldn't get out of, put in for him.

Scott Monty: When you revisited this sort of corner of your mind and said to
yourself, "Okay, now I'm looking for another non-fiction
subject. What about Conan Doyle and Oscar Slater?" How did
you sort of begin your journey? Because it's quite a thing to
pursue, particularly so many decades later.

Margalit Fox: That's right. Well, first of all I read a lot of secondary sources.
As you folks well know, better than civilians do, every Conan
Doyle bio, and there are what? Dozens, if not scores of them.
Has anywhere from a paragraph to a chapter on Conan Doyle's
involvement in the Oscar Slater case, which of course began
with this terrible Glasgow murder in 1908, through Slater's
conviction the next year, through Conan Doyle's entry into the
case in 1912, and the scathing indictment he wrote about that.
Through Slater smuggling out a message in the mouth of a
fellow prisoner saying, "Go see Conan Doyle," in 1925, he'd
been rotting in jail for over a decade by then, to Conan Doyle's
winning Slater's freedom in 1927. The case plus its aftermath
spanned pretty much the last two decades of Conan Doyle's
life.

Margalit Fox: I was staggered to discover that although every bio pays lip
service to the case, in the United States there is not a single
freestanding book that I have ever been made aware of on the
 case. Even in Britain there were a couple of pretty good early
books on the case. Of course the Scottish journalist, William
Roughead did four editions of his masterful book, the Trial of
Oscar Slater, that is full of transcripts and agenda and so on.
Peter Hunt's book is also quite good. The more recent books in
my opinion, the few that there are in Britain are of, what I call
the grassy knoll variety, speculating rather recklessly with
again, adducing little evidence that would make the master
blanch in horror, but speculating rather wildly and seemingly
randomly on who did kill Marion Gilchrist, the rich old lady
who was murdered in Glasgow in 1908.

Margalit Fox: As I say in my book, if Conan Doyle knew well enough, which of
course he did when he entered the case in 1912, that his job
was not to find out who done it, but to prove who had not
done it, then my job 110 years after the crime is certainly not
one that should be directed toward identifying and indicting a
culprit. It would only be the product of undiluted speculation.

Margalit Fox: Once I had read these secondary sources and convinced myself
that there was a real niche that this book should fill, because
particularly in the States the case sort of fell into a crevice in
history and was largely forgotten. Then I went to the primary
sources. The murder took place in Glasgow, there was a
change of venue for the trial which took place in Edinburgh, so
there are very, very deep archives in both of those cities of
trial transcripts, witness statements, police reports, of letters
including Conan Doyle's two decade long correspondence on
the case, and most wonderfully and most movingly, very nearly
every letter Oscar Slater sent and received in his 18 and a half
years in Peterhead Prison in Northern Scotland.

Margalit Fox: Those were a treasure trove, and I make no claim to have
discovered them, they have been there for the taking, they
have been open to the public for quite a number of years now,
but the few recent books on the case in Britain have made use
of them almost not at all. To me, one of the ... Of all of the
many ways in which Slater was wronged, the last way in which
 he was wronged was he was wronged by history, because
chroniclers of his case left him almost as a hollow absence, a
cipher at the center of his own story, as I say. Through these
beautiful letters, through his loving family in Germany, this
barely working-class but loving Jewish family, his parents never
lost faith in him, never stopped loving him.

Margalit Fox: Then when you see the parent age and die because he's in
prison for so long, then his sisters start writing, and he's in
prison for so long that then his sisters' children start writing.
You see three generations of family life and of Oscar Slater's
own life through these beautiful, beautiful letters. Those I was
particularly grateful to get from the archives.

Scott Monty: For our listeners that haven't read the book yet, and perhaps
who aren't as familiar with this case in Conan Doyle's history,
can you give us a brief synopsis as to what happened and why
it was that Oscar Slater was accused and convicted of this
crime that he did not in fact commit.

Margalit Fox: Absolutely. Therein lies the tragedy of the whole story. On a
cold, rainy December night, just before Christmas in 1908,
Marion Gilchrist, an 82-year-old, wealthy, reclusive, Scottish
woman was murdered brutally, bludgeoned to death in her
opulent Glasgow flat during 10 minutes when her maid had
stepped out to buy the evening paper. Now, when the maid
came back and the police were called, although Marion
Gilchrist was a great collector of jewelry and had a personal
collection that in today's American money would be worth
nearly half a million dollars and had it secreted in odd hiding
places all around her apartment, things pinned behind drapes,
tucked into coat pockets and whatnot, despite the presence of
all of this masses of jewelry, the maid testified that only a
single piece was missing. A brooch in the shape of a crescent
moon set along its length with diamonds.

Margalit Fox: Woe betide Oscar Slater. By pure coincidence he had recently
pawned a brooch of his, one that he had bought for his lady
 companion, a crescent moon set along its length with
diamonds. Although the police ascertained within a week that
the two brooches were different, and as an Conan Doyle said,
therefore the very bottom of the case against Slater should've
dropped out, they pursued Slater anyway knowing he was not
guilty. He was tried in the Spring of 1909 and sentenced to
hang. In a detail that still gives me chills, he literally had made
arrangements for his own burial by the time a reprieve came.
There was enough public sentiment and public doubt about
the case that a petition was got up, it went all the way to King
Edward VII who was the only person authorized to grant him
reprieve.

Margalit Fox: ... who was the only person authorized to grant him reprieve.
Shocking as it sounds, there was no criminal appeals court in
Scotland then. Not in England then either. Very distressing to
us today. So a death sentence really meant you were going to
die. 48 hours before he was slated to hang, he was reprieved,
his sentence was commuted to life at hard labor, and he was
dispatched to His Majesty's Prison, Peterhead. This Dickensian,
Victorian fortress on the raw northeast coast of Scotland. I've
been up there, it's cold and raining all the time. It was later
known as Scotland's Gulag, it had a reputation of being one of
the most brutal penal institutions in all of Britain. There he
stayed at hard labor, breaking up granite in the prison quarry
and eating the Dickensian diet of broth and gruel for 18 and a
half years.

Scott Monty: Wow. Wow. I mean, it's almost cliched in that regard, but this
is what happened, and it was a tragedy really. One of the
things that struck me is I got to the end of the book and read
the acknowledgments. You mention that it was Hilary Redmon,
your editor at Random House, glimpsed the heart of this story.
What is it that she kind of picked out and said, "You know, this
is probably what you want to pursue as you're writing this
book"? How did she frame it for you?
Margalit Fox: Well there were several things. She's a terrific editor, she's
been my editor for my last two books. One thing she had me
do was put in much more about what his life in prison was. Of
course because I had been living with the material for several
years at that point and was so close to it, to me the conditions
in His Majesty's Prison, Peterhead, seemed self evident. But of
course, as she so rightly reminded me, other people won't
even have heard of this prison, much less what goes on inside.
So I did a lot more research on conditions, I found inmates who
were ... Including a political prisoner, John Maclean, who's a
great hero of Scottish socialism. He was there for sedition
around World War One, time that overlapped with Slater's
tenure there. He wrote all sorts of pamphlets about how bad
the conditions were. Those were a god send.

Margalit Fox: I actually went up there on a second trip to Scotland just at the
end of last year. It is a fascinating place, it stayed open as a
prison from its inception in 1888 until 1913 when it was known
widely as one of the worst penal institutions in Britain. It is
now a museum. Absolutely fascinating, they make no bones
about how terrible the prison's history was. Indeed I had the
nervous making privilege of standing in the very cell that Oscar
Slater lived in for 18 and a half years. It is small. It's about six
by seven, you can barely stretch out in it.

Scott Monty: Amazing.

Margalit Fox: To get back to something you asked me about vis-a-vis the
Glasgow Police, why Slater? This too was the beating heart of
the story that both Hilary, my editor, and I honed in on kind of
simultaneously, each without realizing the other was also on
that track. It was a very, very good thing we did. Why Slater,
out of all the people in Glasgow? You have this brutal murder.
You have reason to suspect a man because he's reported to
have pawned a brooch believed to be the one that was stolen.
Okay, that's a not unreasonable assumption. You take the maid
to the pawn shop the day after the murder, which is what the
cops did, and the pawn broker gets out Slater's brooch and the
 maid says, "Oh no, that's not my mistress' brooch. The
mistress' brooch was set with one row of diamonds, Slater's
was set with three, so they were very clearly not the same.
And it had been in continuous pawn since a month before the
murder, a month, in other words, before Oscar Slater ever
heard the name of the victim, Marion Gilchrist.

Margalit Fox: Yet, the $64,000 question, given that, why did police and
prosecutors in Glasgow choose to hound Slater anyway, and
hound him almost into the grave? The reason is this, it was a
high profile case just as we always see on Law and Order and
all those shows we like, the cops were under huge pressure to
close it, it was a media sensation, a rich old lady, spinster lady
murdered brutally in a nice part of town. It absolutely distilled
to a fine concentration all of the kind of anxieties about class,
and modernity, and crime, and the tensions of urban life that
were very much playing out in cities in the last 19th and early
20th century, Glasgow being no exception.

Margalit Fox: In Slater, although they knew he was innocent, they had a
sublime suspect. Why? Because he was what the historian,
Peter Gay, calls the convenient other. He was a foreigner at a
time of rising xenophobia, a Jew at a time of rising anti-
Semitism, he was reported to earn his living as a gambler at a
time of class consciousness, and this was a murder of a very
high class woman, and he was tarred with the reputation,
although it was never proved, of being a pimp at a time still
when these Victorian and post-Victorian sensibilities about
sexual mores were still alive and well. Slater was as if sent from
central casting, the epitome of the very kind of man the police
of Glasgow in 1909 wanted off their streets anyway. So they
simply, as the Scottish journalist, William Park actually proved
with Conan Doyle's help in the late 1920s, they simply made
the very conscious decision to ensnare him in this existing case
anyway and thereby killed two birds with one stone.

Scott Monty: Wow. Well, I know you mentioned this in the introduction. As
much as we like to think of ourselves as having become more
 civilized and recognizing that that kind of behavior, that kind of
overreach by the authorities is in our past, there are still some
parallels around today, even as we speak-

Margalit Fox: That's right.

Scott Monty: ... that are going on, which makes this all the more relevant.

Margalit Fox: Little did I think, I've lived with this material for about six years,
and little did I think when I started six years ago that this story
of anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and ultimately the
enactment or threatened enactment of laws to keep
immigrants out altogether or at least reduce their numbers in
Britain, little did I suspect that it would be so painfully relevant
to our own time. I think that realization for me helped answer
a question of, here's this extraordinary story of Conan Doyle
being personally involved in righting this great wrong, a
crusade at the center of which is a sensational murder. The
question lingered for me for all six years I worked on this, why
on earth wasn't this case better known?

Margalit Fox: My conjecture is this. When Conan Doyle died in 1930 and at
mid century there started to be the first wave of a number of
mostly very admiring biographies of him, my conjecture is that
these mid century writers kind of discarded the Slater case as
this dusty, Edwardian relic. Yet, the savageries towards civil
liberties by the Glasgow cops and prosecutors, the racism, the
xenophobia, the framing of an immigrant simply because he
was different from the culture and power, I'm sure they
thought, "Oh, those are things of the past. That doesn't
happen to enlightened 20th century folk." All I have to say to
enlightened 21st century folk is, look around.

Scott Monty: Yeah. Undoubtedly. Well-

Burt Wolder: Yeah.

Scott Monty: Go ahead.

Burt Wolder: Look around indeed. I mean one of the things that comes
across when you read this book, which we should remind our
listeners is, Conan Doyle For the Defense, just published by
Random House, is what I pick up is your affection or
admiration for Conan Doyle. In the book you point out that in
one of many anecdotes and insightful observations about
Conan Doyle, that there came a point in his life where he
defined the three tests of a gentleman. His chivalry to women,
his rectitude in finance, and his courtesy to the lower orders.
Tell us a little bit about how you view Conan Doyle? I mean I
note that back on your way to graduate school you were
reading the Dickson Carr biography, and what you think about
the way he got engaged in the Slater case.

Margalit Fox: Well that's one of the things that's fascinated me the deeper I
got into this case and something I really want to remind
readers, perhaps especially American readers about Conan
Doyle is remembered, and loved, and venerated today for the
Holmes stories as well he should be. But he is I think somewhat
less well remembered, perhaps greatly less well remembered
as being this social crusader. Of course, the first thing that has
to be remembered is certainly by the first decade of the 20th
century when this case began, he was one of the most famous
men in public life, not only in Britain but in the world. His
weighing in on any issue carried a tremendous amount of
gravitas. He was this tremendously moral person.

Margalit Fox: That said, he was far from perfect. He was a kind of echt-
Victorian man in many ways. I think the fact that he grew up
dirt poor and not an Englishman, it's important to remember
he himself was Scottish, grew up dirt poor, the son of this
alcoholic, mentally ill father who couldn't support the large
family in Edinburgh. Struggled through economically to get
through medical school. He never forgot where he came from
in that sense and he was absolutely committed to being a
champion of the downtrodden. He was this kind of medieval
knight in shining armor. He was almost like a character out of
one of the history narratives that he also wrote, for which of
 course he hoped to be better remembered than for Holmes,
and obviously history has not borne it out, it's probably a good
thing.

Margalit Fox: He certainly was not without Victorian prejudice. He clearly

was influenced by the anthropological view of reading
character by the shape of someone's head. There's passage
from his memoir, Memories and Adventures, that I quote in
my book where he's on a visit to New York and he goes to Sing
Sing Prison, just north of New York city. He says, "Occasionally
among the inmates I would see a kindly or even a good face.
One wonders how they got there." He was very much a
product of the way people were socialized in the Victorian
period to think about criminals. He was largely able, however,
to transcend that because his basic humanism trumped ... You
should pardon the expression, that verb has been ruined for us
now ... By his basic humanism, trumped this kind of narrow
Victorian socialization that everyone had back then.

Margalit Fox: Slater was one of only many causes that he championed in his
life, that George Edalji wrongful conviction is of course much
better known. He also wrote a book about the Belgian
depredations in the Congo, what today would be called human
rights violations, perhaps even genocide. He was agitated for
divorce reform to make divorce laws more favorable to
women who were trapped in what now would be called
abusive marriages. He ran twice for parliament, although he
was not successful either time. During the Boer War he put on
his doctor hat again and actually went and worked in a military
field hospital in South Africa. There's this wonderful quote
that's in the book and it's just Conan Doyle to the letter with
the god, king, and country. He says, speaking of the British
soldiers in that war. "For them the bullets, for us the microbes,
and for both the honor of the flag." He really was a man of
passionate convictions, very moral, who absolutely lived by
that moral code and tried to impose it on the world.
Scott Monty: We're just going to pause here a minute for a brief word from
our sponsor.

Narrator: You'll want to listen closely before you hit that fast forward
button this time. If you've been with us before you've heard
our extolling of the Baker Street Journal as the premiere
publication for Sherlockian scholarship, where professionals
and amateurs alike have been writing their treatises about the
Sherlock Holmes stories since 1946. We're not going to stop
now. The journal is the place where you can find a wide variety
of writing, updates, and thoughts about the great detective
and his friend and colleague. But now, now you can do it on a
new site. That's right, the classic site bakerstreetjournal.com, a
site that came into being in 2001, is being retired. Although,
nothing ever disappears completely from the internet.

Narrator: There's a new site, bakerstreetirregulars.com where you can

find all things related to the Baker Street Irregulars including
the dozens of books from the BSI Press, events that you can
participate in, and of course the Baker Street Journal itself. The
format will look familiar. We didn't say the BSI was a design
shop. You should be able to feel your way around the links.
You might be surprised at what you find. So go ahead and be a
street Arab, and go everywhere, and see everything on
bakerstreetirregulars.com today.

Burt Wolder: What was the path that took him to the Slater case? How did
that come about?

Margalit Fox: What is almost certain is after Slater was convicted in 1909, his
lawyers were still working behind the scenes on his behalf,
although since there was no appeals court they were very
hamstrung in what they were able to do. It's pretty clear that
in late 1911 or early 1912 Conan Doyle entered the case at the
behest of one of Slater's lawyers. Again, this shows the duality
of Conan Doyle in a nutshell. Being this good Victorian,
eminently moral man, he deplored what he knew of Slater's
life. Pretty much everyone knew that he was supposedly a
 pimp. Conan Doyle actually calls him in his book in support of
Slater, a disreputable rolling stone of a man. Yet, as Conan
Doyle also wrote, the more he read of the case the more
horrified he became and the more persuaded he became that
a grave injustice had been done. Again, he was such a moral
man, such a man who not only talked the talk but really lived
by his ardent convictions, that the imperative for justice and
for righting this terrible wrongful conviction superseded any
personal distaste he had for someone who lived the way slater
allegedly lived.

Burt Wolder: It's absolutely fascinating, that these aspects of Conan Doyle's
life and the way that you have gone into the background and
brought all of this back to life again, and the research that
you've done. The wonderful thing about the book ... Many
wonderful things about the book, and the fact that it's actually
a real book, I mean it's just beautifully laid out and there's
some fabulous illustrations here, but you have obviously gone
back, you said you'd made at least several trips back to
Scotland and so on, but you found many of the original notes,
that first note, the note I think that Slater smuggled out of
prison.

Margalit Fox: That was extraordinary. I actually held that in my hand. In

1925, when Slater had been breaking up granite at Peterhead
since 1909, he managed ... A fellow prisoner who had become
his friend, a man named William Gordon, who was in for
presumably a less serious crime because he got there well
after Slater but was paroled well before, so I think he was only
doing a short stretch, this man, William Gordon was paroled in
January 1925. As I say in the book, he probably would've
passed into history unremarked, he was just a guy, except for
the invaluable asset that he wore dentures. Under his dentures
the day he was paroled was this note written on brown tissue
paper that I was later told was probably pattern making paper
from the prison tailor shop. As the man who runs the prison
museum says, it was just lying around. Any prisoner could pick
up scraps. Written in pencil on this brown tissue paper, the
 paper was curled up into a tiny pellet, and then rolled around
that was a scrap of glazed paper that Slater lifted from the
bookbinding shop in prison to keep it dry.

Margalit Fox: It was popped under William Gordon's gums, his dentures
were popped over it, and although of course he was searched
up and down and every which way when he was paroled from
Peterhead, no one thought to look at his gums. So this
message was spirited into the world. Slater had slipped it to
William Gordon at a meeting of the Prison Debating Society.
What did the message say? It said, among other things, "Go
see Conan Doyle." Gordon did. Conan Doyle's son, Adrian, said
he later remembered this convict showing up with the
message. So in 1925 Conan Doyle, who had not been active in
the Slater case for about 10 years was moved to pick up the
case one last time.

Margalit Fox: By this time I think enough time had gone by since the original
crime, the tide of public sentiment towards Slater was starting
to turn and he was now ... As news reports of him in prison
reached the public it was clear he was alone, and aging, and
really a broken man. I think public sentiment had shifted just
enough to give Conan Doyle entrée, give him a pry bar, as it
were. So he enlisted the aid of the Scottish journalist, William
Park, who did another investigation, wrote a book that Conan
Doyle edited every page of, and Conan Doyle personally
published through his own publishing house, The Psychic Press,
which published most of his spiritualist work at that time. That
finally was enough for Slater's sentence to be commuted at the
end of 1927.

Margalit Fox: Now, there is a rather sad and painful epilogue where there
was a rift between Slater, now free, and his great champion,
Conan Doyle in 1928.

Burt Wolder: Yes. Yeah, that is a very sad outcome.

Margalit Fox: It wasn't something I expected. When I was at the end of my
initial research at the National Records of Scotland in
Edinburgh, which has vast files on every court proceeding
relating to the case. Toward closing time I came across that
lost folder in the file box and it had a heading that brought me
up short. It was unthinkable. It was a legal case and the name
of the case was, Conan Doyle v. Slater. I thought, "How could
that be?" I thought, "I don't want to deal with this, I'm going to
go back to my hotel, I'm going to go to sleep, and when I wake
up this troublesome file won't be there. It'll all have been a
bad dream." Of course when I went back the next day, it was
there and I had to deal with it.

Margalit Fox: What happened was this. When Slater was released in 1927
and again in 1928 largely through Conan Doyle's agitation his
case was formally reviewed by a five judge panel and the
conviction was actually quashed or overturned as we would
say. He was given a clean slate. He then received £6,000
compensation from the British government, which was a lot of
money in 1928. Conan Doyle, again, ever the man of honor,
demanded not for himself, but demanded that the various
people who had worked on the case, his lawyers principally for
the appeal and the reversal of the conviction, certain
journalists whom Conan Doyle had enlisted to do legwork,
Conan Doyle insisted that they be paid. He, Conan Doyle, had
paid them provisionally. When Slater got his compensatory
monetary award, Conan Doyle insisted, as a matter of
principle, that he be reimbursed.

Margalit Fox: Slater would have none of that. He was a threadbare

immigrant all his life, had lived the last 18 and a half years of
life in prison, and he felt he was entitled to every penny of the
money and he was going to hang onto it. Conan Doyle, he
knew was a rich man, he could well afford the several hundred
pounds he had laid out. What Slater didn't understand was
again, it was this question of what defines a gentleman? One
of the three points, as you've mentioned, that were Conan
 Doyle's lodestars for gentlemanly behavior was absolute
rectitude in financial matters.

Margalit Fox: The two had a vitriolic exchange of personal letters, some of
which are quoted in the book, and then it escalated to open
letters in the newspapers. It was the most painful outcome to
this case where Conan Doyle had behaved absolutely
heroically and absolutely morally. He was still, by his lights,
behaving absolutely morally. Of course, he couldn't really get
his head around the fact that someone in Slater's situation
who had been poor for so long, in prison for so long, and
wronged so desperately, might behave less than honorably
and worse still, less than rationally.

Margalit Fox: Eventually Conan Doyle had to sue for the money. Fortunately
Slater's advisors prevailed on him to settle, and they prevailed
on Conan Doyle to accept the settlement, so the case actually
never went to trial. That would've been incredibly painful. By
the time all of this was resolved, we're well into 1929, Conan
Doyle has barely a year to live at that point. It was really a very,
very painful coda to his heroic case that came very nearly at
the end of Conan Doyle's life.

Scott Monty: It's almost as if Conan Doyle was seeing himself as some
Pygmalion penpal, that he wished to see Slater's very character
transform, simply by virtue of a letter writing relationship that
the two of them had, because they only met in person once,
and that-

Margalit Fox: That's exactly right. They had met once when in 1928 at the
rehearing of the Slater case to have his conviction quashed,
and in Edinburgh Conan Doyle traveled there from his home in
the south of England to cover the case for a British newspaper.
They met then, and at that point things were still very cordial,
and then after that their relationship deteriorated. Conan
Doyle wrote Slater saying, "If indeed you persist in holding
onto the money, you are a very foolish fellow, and I have no
wish to know you further." Very, very painful, painful stuff to
 read. They had both grown up in strikingly similar
circumstances, very poor, marginalized for their religion. Slater
was a Jew, Conan Doyle a Roman Catholic. Both came from
nothing, but as I say, one became a knight, the other became a
knave, and at that point, despite their similar origins, at that
point the social chasm between them was very nearly
unbridgeable.

Scott Monty: Yeah, I mean it seems odd. Conan Doyle, knowing his character
and in a few cases writing almost that he turned up his nose at
Slater, acknowledging that he had some rather questionable
judgment with regard to his livelihood. But Conan Doyle still
understood that justice should be blind, and he wanted to fight
for him anyway. Knowing that, knowing that Conan Doyle
already had this predilection toward looking down his nose at
Slater for his station in life, one would have thought that
Conan Doyle could see a little more clearly why Slater was
being so difficult in the end.

Margalit Fox: Well, he did eventually. It took time. I would argue a different
body part than the nose. I would argue that throughout his
involvement with Slater, Conan Doyle didn't look down his
nose, because that he was too much of a gentleman to do.
Again, one of his three tenets of gentlemanly behavior was you
treat people at a lower station the same as you. But, he did
hold Slater at arm's length, so I would say it's not the nose but
the arm.

Margalit Fox: People in that era, in the Victorian and Edwardian era and
even well into the 20th century, were very, very concerned,
people of a certain social standing, were very concerned with
reputation. I think the heartbreak is that the result of what this
stance of Conan Doyle's, this arm's length, this involved stance
on the one hand yet simultaneously arm's length stance on the
other, was that he came to treat Slater more as an abstraction.
The theoretical ideal of the wronged innocent, and that's
someone worth of crusading for rather than a flesh and blood
human being with human failings, who, after 18 years in jail for
 a crime he didn't commit, would probably behave in a very
irrational way, and in perhaps a money grubbing way.

Margalit Fox: To his credit, in the second edition of his memoir Memories
and Adventures, published I think not long before his death in
the summer of 1930, looking back on the case as a kind of post
script, Conan Doyle says, "I have now come to see how
someone who languished so long in jail might well have these
ideas." So he did come to have a somewhat more charitable,
nuanced psychological view of Slater's behavior, but not at
first.

Scott Monty: Well, that's a shame that it took so long. Here's a man, as you
say, who was all about the tenets of what it meant to be a
gentleman, and it's almost as if his pride was ruined. He was
simply arguing that point of pride. I mean, 250 pounds. Come
on. Conan Doyle was a wealthy man by that point. It certainly
wasn't about the money by any stretch.

Margalit Fox: No, it was about principle, and he felt that Slater had failed
him, disappointed him, because he was not acting in a
principled way. It's like the most damning thing a parent or
teacher or authority figure can say to you if you've done
something they don't like is not, you're behaving badly, but I'm
so disappointed in you. It was that kind of stance.

Scott Monty: Had Conan Doyle been in that unfortunate position and been
eventually released from prison, it would have been natural
according to his own code of honor to recompense the people
who had labored on his behalf.

Margalit Fox: That's right. Slater didn't ... There's a fine line between
commendable crusading behavior and righteousness. One
doesn't even ... Honorable people don't always come down on
the right side of that line, and it is certainly with the benefit of
historical hindsight, it's certainly possible to see Conan Doyle's
stance as overly righteous in this case. As I said, he did mitigate
his stance on Slater in his later memoir.
Scott Monty: One thing, since you've read so widely, one thing I wanted to
comment to about the book is the fabulous references and
notes, and even a glossary of Scottish terms that you have to
help your reader here. But I'm curious. You've read so widely,
and I notice in the references that you've delved into the Baker
Street journal in several articles. Do you think of yourself as a
Sherlockian? If not, what do you think about all of that, all of
this writing on the writing?

Margalit Fox: I flatter myself that I'm a sympathetic, and I hope a congenial,
fellow traveler. I don't have the depth or the breadth of
knowledge. Of course, I read the whole Canon during the years
I was working on the book. I took it with me on the plane to
Scotland. I think it was the ... Yeah, the Penguin one volume.
I'm looking at it on my shelf right now. I took it with me. I was
working on the book so long, I was on jury duty twice. I was in
the jury pool room with the Canon. So I went through it, but I
certainly don't have the level of detail of knowledge that true
adherents have. But again, being a journalist for better or
worse is a kind of enfranchised trespass, and so I do hope that
the community will feel a respectful and accurate trespasser. I
have so far been quite warmly welcomed, for which I am very
grateful.

Scott Monty: That's funny that having a copy of The Complete Sherlock
Holmes on your person does not disqualify you from jury duty.

Burt Wolder: I would have thought you would have been immediately
disqualified if you would have said, "Yes, Your Honor. You
know, I'm busily working on someone who languished in prison
18 years falsely convicted. I'm writing a book about it." I would
have thought you'd be out on the street in a minute.

Margalit Fox: It happened that neither of the times I was on jury duty with
that book was I actually impaneled, so I never even got to that
point in the voir dire. But indeed, I do hope that the master
will get me out of jury duty from here on in, because I can say I
wrote a book on a scandalous wrongful conviction, and I think
 cops and prosecutors are all monsters. Not really, of course,
although in this case they unequivocally were.

Scott Monty: The 1981 edition that you had, and I noticed it in the notes, it
was with you certainly over the last six years as you
mentioned, working on the book. How did that come into your
possession? Was this a used book store sale? Was it something
that you bought during an early time in your journalism
career? What's the story there?

Margalit Fox: I just seemed to have always had it. Maybe I was born with it?
No, no, because I anti-date that by two decades. I always say
when I met my husband and we moved in together almost 35
years ago, it was not even so much a marriage of cohabitation
for us; it was a marriage of two libraries. We have in New York
just for the two of us, and one little cat, a three bedroom
duplex, and it's for the 20,000 books. So among the 20,000
were some from him, some from me, various editions of the
Canon, including the one volume Penguin.

Scott Monty: Wow, that's great. Well, folks, if you would like to pick up a
copy of the book, certainly it's available at Amazon, Barnes and
Noble, all the places you would normally expect to see it. Of
course, Penguin Random House has their own link as well. We
will have links to all of those in the show notes, and Margalit
Fox, you can find her on Twitter at Margalit Fox. You can find
the book Conan Doyle for the Defense on Facebook as well.
Before we let you go, Margalit, what's your next project?

Margalit Fox: Well, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. It's also narrative
non-fiction. Alas, I don't have the fiction gene. I wish I could
have the luxury of making stuff up, but I have no aptitude for
that. It is narrative non-fiction. This one is a prisoner of war
escape story.

Scott Monty: Sounds like a good follow on to Conan Doyle for the Defense.

Margalit Fox: I think things do have a way of dovetailing rather seamlessly,

and just as it's a good thing to get out of jail if you're
 wrongfully convicted, if you're in an enemy prison camp it's a
very, very fine thing indeed to be able to escape.

Scott Monty: Well, we congratulate you on making it nearly an hour with us,
and now is your chance to escape.

Margalit Fox: Well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. As I
say, I really mean it. Of all of the podcasts I've been asked to
be on, or might be, this is the one that makes me the happiest.

Scott Monty: Well, that's very kind of you, and it makes us very happy to
have had this conversation with you.

Margalit Fox: Well, thank you both very much.

Scott Monty: Thank you!

Burt Wolder: Well, that was a great conversation. By the way, I have to point
out before we talk a little bit more about the book, that you
and I have now spoken to someone who has spoken with the
great, great, great, great- granddaughter-

Scott Monty: Keep going. What?

Burt Wolder: ... of bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian.

Scott Monty: What? Is that so?

Burt Wolder: Yeah! In Margalit's piece at the Times, when she sort of
summed up her career on the eve of leaving the paper, she
said, "The single greatest reward writing obits, I've learned, is
the chance to touch history. This was brought forcibly home to
me in 2013 when I reported the obituary of a man named Tom
Christian. Mr. Christian was the long time chief radio operator
on Pitcairn Island, responsible for keeping that speck of rock in
the Pacific in contact with the world. As might be expected for
someone from that place with that name, he was a direct
descendant, the great, great, great-grandson of the bounty
mutineer Fletcher Christian. It's our policy to speak wherever
 possible with our subject's family, so I dialed Pitcairn 6,000
miles from New York and reached Mr. Christian's daughter,
who gave me, in a lilting accent that to my uneducated ears
sounded pure New Zealand, the biographical details I sought. It
wasn't until I hung up that I realized whom I had been speaking
to, and I ran around the newsroom in high excitement,
shrieking, "I just got off the phone with the great, great, great,
great-granddaughter of Fletcher Christian!" You know what,
it's not a movie! It's real!"

Scott Monty: That's something. That is something.

Burt Wolder: Isn't that great?

Scott Monty: Yeah! Well, you know, I meant to ask Margalit what the most
memorable obituary was that she wrote? I don't know if that
would qualify, or if there was something else that was in her
repertoire of, as you say, over 1,400 obituaries written?

Burt Wolder: She covered that in the story.

Scott Monty: Oh!

Burt Wolder: She wrote, "In my 14 years in the job I've had the immense
moving privilege of sending off men and women who were
witness to major events in the 20th century. Also, in a deeply
pleasurable vein, were obits for the inventors of the frisbee,
the pet rock, Etch A Sketch, and, she says, Stovetop Stuffing
and the crash test dummy. She says she recalls that the obit
for the inventor of the Etch A Sketch was given the most
wonderful headline design ever to grace a news obituary. The
headline was a photograph of an Etch A Sketch with the
headline ... I don't remember exactly what the headline said,
but it was something like, Inventor of Etch A Sketch Dies.

Scott Monty: Wow.

Burt Wolder: ... which they had drawn on the top of an Etch A Sketch.
Scott Monty: Well, the beauty of an obituary on the Etch A Sketch is that
you just shake it around and you start from scratch, so ...

Burt Wolder: Yes.

Scott Monty: Well, why don't we get ourselves over to the newsroom, and
see what we can unearth.

Scott Monty: It looks like you had shared a link with me that there is a movie
coming out based on Stephen King's The Doctor's Case?

Burt Wolder: Yes, it's due September 1st, and I picked this up, I can't
remember where. I had been at the priory's scholar's meeting
last Saturday or so. I wasn't familiar with the story, but
apparently the gist of this is, I believe ... What I've been told, is
that Stephen King permits one story of his a year to be
dramatized, and this particular short story called The Doctor's
Case is the subject. It will be available on the first of
September.

Burt Wolder: It is described as Stephen King's non-canonical gift to the

Sherlock Holmes multi-verse. He wrote it originally for an
anthology called The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and
it was then republished. The premise is that Dr. Watson, who's
now in his 90s, is relating to the readers a story of the one and
only time he can recall solving a case before his famous
companion. Now, of course inaccurately, the story tells us, and
it's obviously a Stephen King story so it isn't really by Watson,
tells us that Holmes at this point has been dead for 40 years.
Oh, well, that's ... It's a locked room murder mystery, and
apparently this dramatization stars among the cast Denise
Crosby, who many will remember from Star Trek, The Next
Generation, among others.

Scott Monty: Well, I'm pleased to know that Watson could solve the case
when Holmes was dead for 40 years. I'm glad he solved it
before Holmes. No, I know it's being told in retrospect.
Scott Monty: This story, actually, and the reason I'm aware of this is because
someone in a comment thread ... I can't remember if it was
here on the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere website, or if it was
over on the Trifles website, commented about Stephen King
and Sherlock Holmes.

Scott Monty: No, perhaps it was a comment that we received in email from
Warren Nast. He wrote to us to say, "I want to share an IHOSE
moment, an I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere moment, in the
new Stephen King novel The Outsider on page 205, where the
character quotes, 'Once you eliminate the impossible,
whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the
truth.'" Then, there's a zinger about Arthur Conan Doyle
believing in fairies. Warren wrote to ask, "Do you know that
Stephen King has a pastiche in this book of short stories called
The Doctor's Case in the book called Nightmares and
Dreamscapes?"

Scott Monty: That was, in fact, included in Nightmares and Dreamscapes,

but it was also first included in The New Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes, the centennial edition. It was authorized by
the Conan Doyle estate in 1987, where The Doctor's Case first
appeared. Perfect, perfect book ending there.

Burt Wolder: Oh, very good! I take it you, like I, have never read this story.

Scott Monty: I have not, no. But now I feel like I should, to prepare.

Burt Wolder: Well, you can wait for the movie.

Scott Monty: That's true, I can.

Scott Monty: In other news, this was blasted all over the Sherlockian world
on the 20th. The Baker Street Irregulars have finally entered
the 21st century. We're almost a quarter of the way through it,
and the BSI has its own website now,
bakerstreetirregulars.com, which of course you heard in our
intro, and in the ad for the Baker Street Journal. It's been a
long time coming. It brings together the BSI Press, the Baker
 Street Journal, all the events that the BSI does, and well, the
BSI Trust has its own standalone website. But now we have,
kind of, the umbrella of branding for the Baker Street
Irregulars, and everything that they are cranking out.

Burt Wolder: Now does this mean I can no longer use my 2400 broad
modem to get to the Baker Street Irregulars BBS?

Scott Monty: Oh, you can still do that. You can still write them letters on a
typewriter, and it will take about the same amount of time to
connect either way.

Burt Wolder: Good! That's great!

Scott Monty: This was a long time coming, and Randall Stock oversaw the
efforts. It's absolutely wonderful to see this, and to see the
Irregulars really updating a site that frankly, whose
architecture went back 17 years. I was actually the business
manager for the Baker Street Journal at the time, and
convinced Mike that if you're going to sell a CD-ROM to people
who need computers to use a CD-ROM, then it might make
sense to offer them the ability to buy it online. It was all I could
do to throw this website together. I am not a website guru by
any stretch of the imagination, but we put it together and it
stuck for quite some time. I handed over the reins to Randall in
2008, and he's updated it since then. It just got to a breaking
point where other things had to be done, and so here we are.

Burt Wolder: Well, that's very canonical, you know? Seventeen years in the
making. That's one year for every step on the way from the
street up to the sitting room on Baker Street.

Scott Monty: I like that. I like that a lot.

Scott Monty: Well, I think we are all out of news, and that means that it's
time to see if we can give away some quiz prizes, shall we?
That means it's time for Canonical Couplets. We of course had
a number of entries last time, and you may recall that the last
Canonical Couplet went something like this, "From this
 important record it appears, that Holmes was pretty good at
60 years." Want to hazard a guess on that one, Burt?

Burt Wolder: Oh, that's the Mazarin Band, isn't it?

Scott Monty: You're narrowing it down. You're getting closer every time
here.

Burt Wolder: Oh, dear.

Scott Monty: It was in fact "His Last Bow." We met Sherlock Holmes as "a
man of 60" in "His Last Bow," which was very clearly set in
1914.

Scott Monty: So we are going to spin the random number generator, put the
names in the barrel here, and give it a big push right around. It
looks like it's coming to rest on number 3. Number 3, and that
is ... Why, it's Rob Nunn, a previous guest on I Hear of Sherlock
Everywhere. Rob, congratulations! We're going to be sure to
get you something that would highlight, or fill out, your
Sherlockian collection from our little treasure trove here. We'll
be in touch.

Scott Monty: That, of course, means that now it's time for the Canonical
Couplet for Episode 149. Here we go. It's better, lad, to stay at
home and cram, then pilfer questions of the Greek exam. If
you think you know which story this Canonical Couplet refers
to, then please, jot us a note, send it to
comment@ihearofsherlock.com, and put Canonical Couplet in
the subject line. Good luck!

Burt Wolder: Excellent.

Scott Monty: I think that just about does it this time around. It's amazing
that we've made it this far.

Burt Wolder: It is. You know, we're getting closer and closer to 150 episodes.
Scott Monty: That is right. Well, this is Scott Monty. Until next time, I remain
less than sesquicentennial.

Burt Wolder: Well, until next time, I remain less than Les Klinger.

Sherlock Holmes: You know, I am afraid that in the pleasure of this conversation
I'm neglecting business of importance which awaits me
elsewhere.

Narrator: Thank you for listening. Please be sure to join us again for the
next episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the first
podcast dedicated to Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes: Good bye, and good luck, and believe me to be, my dear
fellow, very sincerely yours, Sherlock Holmes.

Burt Wolder: I just have to tell you, it's a great book. You know, you've got
so much in here including the best explanation of Holmes'
deductive method, you know, the Charles Person deductive
reasoning, which I've ever read.

Margalit Fox: Oh, please. Right, because why the hell is it even called ... A
brilliant question that my editor Hillary asked, because we're
so used to oh yeah, Conan Doyle just called it deduction. She
said, "Well, why did he, if he knew it wasn't a deductive
process?" Of course, the answer is, he just did. But yeah, that's
fascinating when you realize it's not deduction, it's the
opposite of deduction.