 Hello and welcome to the second day of HIST Fest 2021. My name's Rebecca Adeel and I'm the director of HIST Fest and I am so excited to share with you today's events. We have a fantastic assortment of talks and discussions. So please do check out everything else that's going on via the website, which is www.histfest.org. Before we get started, on behalf of HIST Fest and the British Library, I'd like to acknowledge the passing of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh and pay tribute to his long public service. Now, just a couple of pieces of housekeeping before we get on with the first talk. Using the menu above, you can provide feedback on the event and also if you wish, donate to the British Library. The Library is a charity and your support really does help to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone. Your feedback's also incredibly important in helping to plan future library events. You can also find a tab at the top with a link to the library's bookshop where you can browse a range of titles by all of the festival's authors and speakers. Without further ado, I am truly delighted to introduce our first event of the day, the real world of Arthur Conan Doyle. Panelists on this event include the best-selling author of Victoria and Abdul and the mystery of the Parsi lawyer, Shribani Basu, and historian and award-winning author of late Victorian crime fiction in the shadow of Sherlock, Dr. Clare Clark. The event is chaired by BBC broadcaster, historian, and author of Inventing the Victorians, Dr. Matthew Sweet. Enjoy. Hi, my name is Matthew Sweet and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this histfest event. And on this one, we're going to be looking at the consequences of two crimes and use them as a way of looking into the culture in which they took place. Now, one of those crimes was a crime of passion, a murder that rocked late Victorian England to its foundations, as they say, a horrible murder committed by a frustrated middle-aged Scotsman who'd grown tired, also very tired of being dominated by a man called Sherlock Holmes. And you know what he did, he pushed him off a massive waterfall in 1893 and then resurrected him in 1903. And just as a mark of respect to him, I could put this on for the rest of this introduction. And it's also the year of our second crime, 1903, all crimes, a series of animal mutilations in the countryside around Birmingham, of which a man called George Adalogy is accused and convicted. But the perp from our first crime, the literary one, is in a way the detective in this case. The investigation is as one that's as much to do with institutional racism as it is into who put the knife into Staffordshire livestock. Well, on the case, we have Sherobani Basu, whose books include Victoria and Abdul. And I find it very easy to imagine her new one about the Adalogy case, the mystery of the Parsi lawyer ending up on the big screen too. And with her own casebook comes Claire Clark, assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her first book, Late Victorian Crime Fiction and the Shadows, Sherlock, was awarded the HRF Keating Prize in 2015. Now, our purpose today is to use Doyle's life and his writings to try and say something about culture at this moment. And I think perhaps this is our first very chewy bit because we've all got that history of home's adaptations in our heads to negotiate. We've got the rather odd publishing history of these narratives and their relationship to the time in which they were written. So, Sherobani, I think to ask what is Sherlock Holmes' historical moment is quite a tricky question. It is. I think there's a part one and a part two. Of course, there's the first book, the birth of Sherlock Holmes, the introduction to him. And then as you said, there's the murder because he's thrown off. But nobody is prepared to accept that Holmes is dead. Clark's in the city of London where these black armbands to mourn for him. This is a fictional character, but he has sort of entered everybody's lives. And so, he has to bring him back. And I think that's part two. I think that is the crucial moment when you actually kill somebody, but the author has begun to hate his own creation and he's tired of him, but he's killed him off, but now he's got to bring him back because he's popular, he's money, he's everything. So, part two. And I think this is the crucial moment is when he comes back to life. I think it is so Holmesian the way he comes back in this, when he recreates him. So, I think that is the crucial moment. But how do we sort out, Claire, what the contemporary world of Sherlock Holmes is because these short stories are, the ones written in the 19th century, they're sort of contemporaneous with their moment of production. Then we get ones that are set in the past that we're reading at the very beginning of the 20th century. When Holmes comes back, does he come back to the Edwardian period? Or where are we in time? All of this is so, his timeline is extremely complicated. Absolutely. It's an incredibly complicated timeline as you say, and one that you would have difficulty, I think, trying to plot out when exactly was Holmes alive, when was he dead, when was he working? We have watched him kind of throwing a various dates around at various times and sometimes making a mistake, which adds to the complexity. But yeah, I think that when, especially after Doyle had resurrected Holmes, we had entered the kind of post-Victorian age at that stage, Queen Victoria was dead, but it was a sense of nostalgia. I think he was looking back to that moment in the 1890s when Sherlock really rose to prominence and was famous, and there was a nostalgia for that moment that he wanted to recreate in those later stories, which is part of the reason why they were then set back in time again. So, Shrabani, for that audience in 1903, which is kind of the year of your story that we're going to talk about, and also the year that Holmes kind of returns as a recurring character, who we can expect to stick around for a bit, do you think that his readership in that moment regard him as a figure of the present day or as one of the recent past? I think it's recent past, because by 1903, we have the first, not the resurrection, but the last famous book. I mean, his most famous book, The Hound of the Baskerville, has been published, and Conan Doyle actually sets it very carefully, predates the Reichenbach fault. So he makes it very clear that this happened before, and so he set the timeline in that phase. So people, I think, are still very much in the late Victorian period. That is how they relate to Holmes, and so he is going to set it, the rest of it is this little model, but he's going to more or less do the late Victorian. Let's reflect a bit of what has happened between his death and resurrection, Claire. This is really your area of specialism. Tell us a bit about all the detectives who came in to fill that vacuum, once Doyle had decided to throw his hero into a great column of Austrian spume. Well, yeah, as you say, Doyle was plotting Sherlock's demise really quite soon after he started to be successful, and his mother persuaded him to hold off a little while, but after he visited the Reichenbach falls with his wife, he decided that that was the tomb for Sherlock. And he wasn't too worried about Sherlock. He said, I don't care about killing him, even if I do bury my bank balance along with him, but the editors of the strand were extremely concerned about this. They were basically losing their cash flow. This is the magazine that all these stories had appeared in up to that point. Right, exactly. This was the magazine for Sherlock was appearing monthly, and they were extremely worried about how they would fill that void. And other magazines like the strand, there were a number of competitors which probably weren't doing as well as the strand, were rubbing their hands together and thinking, well, perhaps we can get another Sherlock for our own magazine. So the strand magazine filled the void with a couple of writers, Grant Allen and Elizabeth Thomasine and a mate, who is an Irish writer, but really they didn't exactly have the same kind of... Je ne sais quoi? A sketch in a couple of those interests. Maybe they didn't get as big, but just give us a little sketch of who those people were. What kinds of subs are coming in on to his path? OK, so Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt would be one of the first replacements for Holmes. And he could be identified by a series of opposites. So Holmes is tall and thin, Hewitt is short and fat, Holmes is a genius, Hewitt is an everyman. Holmes works by kind of mysterious processes. Hewitt explains everything. So authors were keen to kind of replicate Sherlock, but also add some kind of a twist to it. In the case of Martin Hewitt, Arthur Morrison's detective he did it by sort of doing all of these opposites. But it ended up really being quite boring. One of the other things that people did was create female detectives. And they were able to detect in different kinds of ways. So there were various kinds of twists that were put on this. Supernatural detectives would be another one. Sherlock only investigated very material things, but they would investigate the crimes that were involving the spirit world. So we've sort of said I think that when Holmes comes back in the run of stories that we know is the return of Sherlock Holmes that it is something that harks back to the late 19th century. But Shrabani, can we detect how the world has changed between these two great strokes of stories? If you were looking in those stories, the ones that are contemporaneous with the case that you've written about, where can we see something, ideas that are distinctly Edwardian? Well, you know, Queen Victoria is gone. This is the, you know, she symbolized empire. So for me, you know, I have written on Queen Victoria as well. And for me, her death 1901 marks this big turning point. It's actually the beginning of the end of the empire. So things are happening. There is a big change. Edward the 7th, it's quite symbolic because the first thing he does as soon as he takes part within hours is to destroy the letters that his mother has written to her trusted confidant Abdul Karim. And he sends him packing, sends him back to Agra, sends all the Indians away. So suddenly there is a change. There's a change in the palace, no more curries, no more turbines, no more color. It's a colder place in a sense. And at the same time in India, things are happening. Historically, this is also a time of rising nationalism in India. The revolutionary movement, especially in Bengal, are picking up base. I think as soon as, you know, the death of Victoria marks a big change in India as well. Though the biggest memorial to Queen Victoria is in Calcutta. It's the Victoria Memorial. And it was subscribed to by ordinary people. There is in Calcutta, in Bengal itself a revolutionary movement growing in the early 20th century. And Khazanstar has the partition of Bengal to actually on religious lines Hindu and Muslim to actually curtail this revolution. So things are stirring in India. Things are happening in, you know, the biggest empire. There's Jewel in the crown. There is a movement. Edward has sent Abdul packing. So there is a change of mood. I think, you know, all the things that were happening in Victoria and England are slowly changing. So I think that is quite important. I think this is the time that trouble is also beginning in in Georgia Dalje's life. And I find that quite significant. We move on to Georgia Dalje. Let's try. I just want to know a bit more, Claire, about where all of the processes, all of those shifts that we've just heard described might be showing up in Doyle's fiction. I mean, are there ideas from this later period? Is he more, is he attuned to the idea of a crisis of empire? The idea of degeneration pops up more in this period of Doyle's writing, doesn't it? Than it does in the previous one. How is he more, how has he attuned to the ideas of his moment in that, in the stories of the return? Doyle is an incredibly complicated figure when it comes to his views on empire. And I think we can see that in the Sherlock stories where there are a number of stories where people visit the imperial outposts and become in some way tainted by them. They, like Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, go native to some extent and bring that badness or madness back to the imperial center. So that's a very common trope in Doyle's writing in his Sherlock Holmes stories. And Doyle, I think as well, has a great sense of himself as a public intellectual and a public writer and is writing to newspapers constantly about the Congo, the Boer War, all of these kinds of events. He wants to insert himself into the public discourse at Home Rule as well, of course, in Ireland was something where he famously changed his mind about that. So he's engaging with all of these kind of debates about the kind of dwindling of empire coming into the early 20th century. And I suppose also fiction has changed so much, hasn't it, since he began these stories? He started in the world really, the three-decker novel, didn't he? And yet by the time he's out of it, you've just mentioned Conrad, the whole atmosphere, the whole tone of English literature has changed, the processes of production has changed. Claire, it's a transformed environment. It is, yeah. Like you say, the triple-decker novel was kind of dying by the 1890s. The 1890s was a perfect moment for short stories. And I think that short stories and magazines is part of the reason for Sherlock's enormous success in that period. But by the time we get to kind of the Baskervilles and later on, the short story is dying off, or certainly the popular short story is dying off. And it's about to be replaced with modernism. You know, the concerns of modernism are starting to creep in as we move towards the First World War. And that kind of adventure, boyzone fiction that Doyle enjoyed and wrote is starting to feel somewhat an agronistic, I think. OK. And Shribani, what is Doyle's role in the culture at this point? Claire's mentioned that he was an inveterate letter writer. I mean, his letters to the press are a rather chunky part of his collected works, aren't they? You can go through that and find stuff on everything from his proposal for a channel tunnel, I think, and all sorts of military and imperial ideas. What do you make of what his relationship is with the rest of culture at that point? It's also interesting, you know, just to take up on this trail of Doyle and Empire, his writing, his nonfiction writings, he writes about the Boer War. And that was a major turning point because the Boer War was seen as something that was, you know, people were really critical of Britain's role in it. They were critical of these concentration camps that were set up. Lloyd George and others were all, you know, the liberal politicians, liberal writers were all very critical. But here comes Conan Doyle and he travels there and he comes to the defense. So it is defense of empire as well in this, you know, where he justifies what happened. And as a doctor, when he says that these were not concentration camps, this is actually the disease spreading, he actually makes the Boer War. He turns the chapter in the thinking of the Boer War and he is knighted for it. So here we see him as being very part of the establishment, part of writing these, you know, this big volume book that he writes. I think it was about 60,000 words or something. It was a bestseller sold everywhere, translated as well, went to France, went to the continent. So he became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He didn't want to accept the title. He didn't want a knighthood, but his mother persuaded him and said, no, it would be insulting the king if he didn't. So he had to take it. So here we see, you know, the other dog, who is very much part of the establishment, part, you know, believes in empire, believes, of course, in this concept of very benevolent empire, but he is, he is very much part of it and ready to, ready to stick up for it, as he does with the book on the Boer War. It's interesting that he should be there and like John Buchan, who in many ways is one of his successors, is also kind of wound up in this, I mean, very literally part of that, of that camp system, isn't he? Sort of doing its PR, isn't he, I think? But what is going, I mean, people I think will know if they know anything about Doyle's life, we'll perhaps see it as something in a series of stages. Are we yet at the phase where he's interested in spiritualism and fairies and moving beyond the veil? Or is he in some different position intellectually at this point, Trevani? I think he's always been interested in spiritualism, but this, I think it increases and he finds his calling if that's after the First World War, when he's losing family. But the interest, you know, the Victorian sciences, this, you know, this need to reach out to the dead, that there is this spiritualism, there is this other world, he was fascinated by Buddhism. He thought about reincarnation. You know, all these things were going on in his mind at a very early stage when he was writing essays before he'd even written the Sherlock Holmes books. But I think he made it his calling and sort of identified himself with it much later in life. And that is after the First World War when family are lost and he just, you know, he just, he has a shrine to them and he just wants to appeal, you know, just try to reach them. And he is ridiculed for it. You know, people say this was the man of science, but he takes it on. He is quite committed. Professor Challenger met the fairies, didn't he? And he went to Atlantis and did the, went to these places that Sherlock Holmes, I feel kind of couldn't go. But Claire, these ideas do seep into the stories, don't they? We get, we get, even if there's a kind of Russian explanation, the Hound of the Baskervilles takes us into that kind of territory. And perhaps, you know, perhaps it's there in those short stories too, a taste for the more outlandish. Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, the guests of the word outray there, I think reminds us, you know, he was a huge fan of poem. So, yes, he likes in the Sherlock Holmes, I think, to play with the suggestion of the supernatural, but it's usually disavowed. But at the same time, he was writing incredible Gothic short stories, where he was fully exploring these ideas, you know, so a lot of the same ideas to do with empire, and so on with haunted mummies, haunted objects returning from India, and so on, where he was able to give expression to that interest in the more kind of supernatural, spiritual side of things. I mean, you know, I think it's a shame in a way that the Gothic stories are overlooked compared to the Sherlock stories, because he was an incredible writer of that genre as well. Shribani, let's get the hero of your story into our conversation properly and get him to meet Conan Doyle, George Adalje. Now, we know that lots of people wrote to Sherlock Holmes, asking for help of one sort or another, occupying a strange kind of dream, really. But he wrote to him with a very particular kind of plea. Can you tell us what that was and why he made it? Right. So, just, you know, for all those listening who don't know what has happened to George Adalje, I'll just sort of give a brief summary. So, in 1903, George lives in this village of Great Worley, which is a few miles from Birmingham. He's a 28-year-old solicitor who goes, leads a very ordinary life, goes every day by the 845 train to Birmingham, works in a law firm as a solicitor, and comes back home. He doesn't go to the pub. He doesn't have many friends. He's a bit of a loner. He's a little, you know, odd as compared to his other friends, other colleagues and peers. His father is a Parsi, and so he's an Indian. He's come from Bombay. He's converted to Christianity. And his father is the vicar of Great Worley. So, this family, and he's married to an Englishman. George lives with his father. He's 28-year-old, but he lives in the vicarage with his father and his two other siblings. And in 1903, there is terror in this village because someone is coming out there and slashing cattle. So, they're mutilating horses and leaving them to die in the fields. And this goes on for six months, and the police have no handle on it. They don't know who it is. They can't catch the killer. And the village, as you can understand, they're terrified. And what happens when, you know, some people are living under terror, there's rumors, there's everything. And all suspicion suddenly points towards the only Indian family in this village. And they live in the vicarage. And here's George. He's a bit of, you know, he's got no friends. He's a loner. He likes to walk at night in the countryside, which suddenly becomes translated into prowling in the dark. You live in the countryside, you walk, but of course, you know, that gets translated into that. And basically, suddenly anonymous letters start and they start accusing George of committing this crime. George, who has nothing to do with animals, has no motive for slashing them, but the police catch him. They arrest him. He's tried. He's found guilty. In 55 minutes, the jury decides that this man has done this. He's written anonymous letters and he's slashed cattle. And he is in prison for seven years. But a campaign starts. And in three years, he's released. People realize that this trial is really flawed. The evidence isn't up to it. And a lot of legal minds sort of question this. And he is released on parole. But of course, he's been struck off those solicitors' roles. He can't practice. He can't even live in Great Wurley anymore. He goes to London because he says, suppose the cattle get slashed, I'll be blamed again. He doesn't know what to do. So he writes to Arthur Conan Doyle. And that's how Arthur Conan Doyle enters the story. He writes to him and he says, you're the only one who can help me. Help me clear my name. We need Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery. And so among the pile of letters, apparently Arthur Conan Doyle would get about 60 letters at the very least every day. And many of them would be of help. Others would be fan mail. His secretary would sort out his mail and leave something that he might find interesting. And he found George's letter interesting, kept it for him at his table. And Arthur Conan Doyle rose to this challenge. So he is quite fascinated by this Farsi family. That's been victimized. He feels that a miscarriage of justice has happened. And he's going to rise to this occasion. And he's going to defend Georgia Dalgi. And that's how it all starts. The story has been treated before, hasn't it? Julian Barnes wrote a novel. I remember radio play about it. A while ago as well. But you have so much new material on this. And a focus on the whole of the Dalgi family. And then earlier history, which puts this story into such a sharp and brilliant context. Because before these mutilations begin, there's already a history of this family being besieged, really, in this village, isn't there? You reproduce all kinds of poison pen letters that they... Exactly. So it all starts when George is just 12 years old. So suddenly the vicarage, they start receiving these poison pen letters. And they're targeted at the vicar. There's also the usual graffiti painted. The ideologies are wicked, painted outside their house. There's excreta sort of thrown in through the windows. Objects left outside, abusive, really abusive letters. And quite frightening, some of them. Saying they're going to bet $50 that I'm going to send George to his grave. He's just a 12-year-old boy. And if it's catches, lewd, sometimes bordering on the completely maniacal letters. But so this family are besieged. And they've got no one to turn to. They go to the police who actually just don't believe them, don't do much, and then think that it's George who's been writing these letters to them. And that's the theory the police have. Which is why many years later, when there is a actual crime in the village and these letters start appearing, they just say, oh, it's him again. Yeah. I mean, why would George be writing these letters as a 12-year-old? There is absolutely no logic in it. But it is just blind prejudice. And it's Arthur Conan Doyle who actually brings these up when he takes up this case. He says he brings up this history. And he says that this was racial prejudice. This is what happened. This is what happened to the family even before these crimes happened. And the fact that these were not brought up at the trial, he says these were absolutely not brought up at the trial. The other thing that's not brought up at the trial is the fact that he is myopic. He's severely myopic, George. He could never have walked in the dark and slashed horses on a dark windy stormy night, which is typical English summer in August. So these points are brought up by Arthur Conan Doyle. And it's thanks to him that all these come up again. He goes to the vicarage and he tells him, he shows him these letters and he says how we have been under siege and nobody has helped. So he really feels that a lot of injustice has happened to this family and he has to help them. So what do you think the case reveals about the period? Because it was so interesting to be made much more aware of all of these events that happen way before these mutilations begin. And to be reading a story that's really about a case of kind of English rural racism, which I would venture to say isn't a phenomenon that has been entirely extinguished. Yeah, sadly not. I think what we're looking at here is the result of decades of the press and popular fiction, creating the idea of the foreigner as other. I think a significant event is the 1857 uprising in India, where we have people as famous and beloved as Charles Dickens, describing Indians as needing to be exterminated. So those kinds of prevailing attitudes were popular and in the press, in the public imagination, for decades before that, it becomes ingrained into the public imagination then. How many Parsi converts were there in the Church of England in positions like this? It seems quite a surprise to find this family here and this vicar with this backstory in the Middle East. Yeah, well, it's his backstory. Actually, Shapurji himself is what several pages in my book. I had to cut him down. There was so much on him. But because the Parsi is basically, they're a very westernized community in India and they came from Persia, their followers of Zoroastrianism. They left Persia because of Arab persecution and they came to India and they settled in Bombay and Karachi. They were very enterprising, so they became wealthy quite quickly. And the British worked with them. They found that they could work with them. So they have business in tekotin textiles, even the opium trade. They applied the ships. And Shapurji is sent to this Elphinston College, which is one of the elite colleges of Bombay. And they thought he would become a lawyer just like the rest, go to the bar, etc. But the Parsis were actually targeted by missionaries because they were ripe for conversion. So there is a manual for the Parsis, how to convert them, which I found fascinating. So I think Shapurji, as a teenager, going to Elphinston College, found many of his peers, other students getting converted, and he himself then wants to join. So he runs away from his house in Colaba. He leaves his family and he goes to Reverend Wilson and says, you know, baptize me. So he is baptized. And of course, he is quite evangelical in, you know, a new convert is always sort of more fierce. So he denounces his faith and says, how uncivilized it was, etc. And he wants to embrace civilization and Christianity. And he travels. He funds his own way. He writes a dictionary of Gujarati and English and he sells it and he funds his travels and he comes here. He wants to train to be a priest. He sees there's a bit of a missionary success story. Yes, he is. He very much is. And he speaks for them. So he's noticed because he gets his curiosity in Oxford, in Burkart, and he's noticed by, you know, the other priests. So he rises quite quickly. And then he marries an English woman, also the daughter of another vicar. So he's moving in church circles. I think that helps him, you know, gives him a leg up in that sense. So it's because reading your account of it, there was no, there's no kind of resistance to this marriage. There's no, there's no, there's no Romeo and Juliet angle on this. Absolutely. I think they had connections with India as well. And it's also she's in her 30s. So, you know, the father is quite happy that she's found somebody she loves. She likes Sharpojji, who's a very, you know, he's a gentleman. He's good. He's, he's honest. And so the marriage goes ahead. It's, it's written about and covered in the local press. And well, because of her connections, I would say it's definitely his wife's connections that he rises and becomes the first vicar. So he is the Parsi vicar. But interestingly, Matthew, the Parsis have done so well that the first Indian MP in the House of Commons is a Parsi. Dadavai Naroji in 1892. He becomes the first Indian MP. And the only three Indian MPs who are there before independence were all Parsis. So Dadavai Naroji is succeeded by Mancha Jeebhavnagri, who was a Tory. And then the third MP is Sharpojji Sakulatwala, who was for the, the communist party of Britain. So these three Parsis represented, you know, different political parties, but it just shows how educated and politically active they were that they came here, they joined politics. And so it's a community that is doing very well. It's very westernized as well. And it also, it adds to our understanding of the complexity of Victorian culture as well, doesn't it? But there is, there is an institution that is bumped against quite, quite brutally by this family. And this one seems to kind of ripe one for discussion in the light of Dr. Tony Sewell's report that came out a few days before we recorded this discussion. But, you know, there is a, the police as an institution in Staffordshire clearly have a problem with this family, don't they? Absolutely. And, you know, Arthur Conan Doyle actually writes it that he says, he says the appearance of a coloured flageman with his half-caste son in a rude and unrefined parish was sure to have it set of problems. And he's put his finger on the spot. This is it. I mean, can you imagine this brown man, Sharpojji Sakulatwala, Sharpojji Adalji speaks English in a sort of broken way with a very pronounced Indian accent with his white wife, three children, and coming to this, you know, preaching to a completely white parish. So it's bound to happen. It's an amazing picture, isn't it? I mean, there's something. A brown man spreading the word of Christ to a, preaching this to a white parish. It's incredible. So it is going to have its repercussions. I mean, this may not have happened in London. We don't know. I think it is very, this severity of this crime, the hate letters happened because of it being a little rural enclave, but they've never seen something like this. Claire, reading about the particular officers who seem to have a problem with the Adalji family, who Doyle develops this very combative relationship with. And I wonder whether you could see in that any kind of replay of his, the ideas or the way that we see the police portrayed in the homes stories where, you know, there are always kind of one, usually one step behind everybody, aren't they? Lestrade and Gregson and all of those guys, they're really just there to make him look good, aren't they? They're not malicious, but do you think that he is in a way playing out something from his own fiction? Yeah, I think that's certainly a possibility. Like you say, the police in the Sherlock Holmes stories are not malign, but they are stupid. They are, you know, at least one step behind Sherlock. And, you know, he says that they are limited in their thinking. And I think that in itself comes from the kind of, the public perception of the police after its formation in the early 19th century where policemen were drawn from the working classes. And there was this idea that they were not highly educated. They were not special people. And that really the idea of them having the ability to intrude into the lives of middle class people was kind of an affront, which is, I think, a part of Sherlock's appeal in the stories that the people who come to him see him as a social equal as opposed to the police and perhaps an intellectual equal. And he has powers of imagination, intelligence, and discretion that the police simply do not. Is that happening in the Adalji story? Do you think, Trebani, that George recognized, George is kind of going over the heads of these, you know, these kind of flat footed policemen to somebody who is more of an intellectual? Absolutely. But in George's case, we have the sergeant on one side, the illiterate, you know, sort of the policeman on the job in the field. But we also have the police chief, Anson. Anson. He's the villain of your story, isn't he? Easily. Because he is an aristocrat. So he's the other end of the scale. He is an aristocrat. He has, he's the son of the Lord of Lichfield. He has all the trappings of the imperial mindset. And he dislikes, he intensely dislikes, I should say, the fact that a brown man has come to this parish. He calls him the Hindu vicar. Because he's not Hindu. He's not even the Farsi. He is Christian. That's why he's the vicar. But of course, you know, it's the generic word for all Indians, Hindu. So he says the Hindu vicar. He says, why is this Hindu vicar, you know, preaching in this parish who barely speaks any English? So he is very, very arrogant. He dislikes this family. And when this illiterate sergeant sort of says, I think it's George who wrote the letters, he's very happy to believe him. He is convinced without any evidence that George has been writing those anonymous letters and that George has been slashing the cattle. So it doesn't take him very long to immediately say, these are the guys, these are the bad guys. So he's the other end of the scale. And of course, Anson is really interesting because when Arthur Conan Doyle wearing the hat of Charlotte Holmes comes into the picture, he absolutely, he absolutely, you know, is on fire. He is not going to be taught policing by a writer of fiction, crime fiction. So this clash that happens, it is amazing because here are two men, both, you know, sort of stalwart figures, and they are clashing. They come down to name calling. It is highly entertaining in a way. But he's just out to derail Conan Doyle. He wants to make sure that he actually lays false trails for him and things. So it's amazing what he gets up to. It's crazy. It's an, it's an astonishing story. But reading it, I also found myself thinking, you know, I'll put it in this terms, if you were doing your, a little, you know, thumbnail, stool report type sketch on the institution of the clergy in this period, and, and the police. You know, what would you have to say about them from the point of view of, you know, their, their tolerance of difference? Well, I don't know why a sharper, he never appealed to, you know, the rest of the clergy when he was being victimized. I don't know why he just, you know, took it. He didn't drive to any of the Parsi MPs, for instance, and say, you know, this is what's happening to me, help. He didn't appeal to the other, you know, in the surrounding areas. He went to the police. He was very straightforward. He went to the police. He told them this is happening. And he went to the press, which was clever. But, you know, both of them weren't listening really. The police didn't care. They did nothing to help him. The first phase and in the second phase. And the press, of course, I mean, they were on overdrive when, when George is actually arrested of the coverage in the local press. And I have it in my book. It's just, you know, you just think, gosh, this is tabloid media at its worst. The way they describe him as this Oriental with dark secrets, with a debased jaw. And it's so obvious that he did the crime. And they say it's because of his faith. And, you know, it's, it's just pinned to this man's faith. He wasn't even a party. You know, his father had left it behind. There's nothing. He was such, you know, he was a brummy boy in that sense. But goodness, he is dark skinned. He is the foreigner in this village. And, you know, who did it? He did it. Can we put that idea into the context of the, of the popular fiction of the moment at which Doyle is pursuing this case? Because this might also be a way of thinking about the differences between those early home stories and those late ones. Isn't the, isn't the kind of the, the cultural context of those later ones much more bound up with there are plenty more, you know, the, the foreign supervillain, a kind of, a kind of, you know, oriental mutated version of Professor Moriarty who pops up in, in forms like, like Fu Manchu is on his way, isn't he, in this, in this context and figures like Dr. Nicola, you know, these people who really are like supervillains, aren't they? Foreign supervillains. So what's the, you know, what does that tell us about the world through which these real people are moving? Yeah, I think that's another one of the ways in which fiction writers try to fill the gap when Sherlock died is by what on one hand the creation of detectives, on the other hand, the creation of supervillains like Moriarty who had caused Sherlock's downfall. And as you say, these, these supervillains in late Victorian early Edwardian fiction were incredibly racialized. So we have, like you say, Dr. Nicola, who is indeterminately foreign, I don't know. Yeah, he's like Blofeld or something, isn't he? He's very, very much like a, we don't know what he is, but he's bad news, whatever he is, he's bad news. Dark haired man with an evil cat and a laboratory, essentially. And then we have, as you say, Fu Manchu, who plays into the fears of the Yellow Peril. So we have all of these fears of the foreign other that coalesce in popular fiction around the character of the villain at this period, which has bound up with ideas about Britain's kind of declining imperial strength, essentially. When we look back on a story like this, Shravani, we're apt to choose our own heroes and villains. The instinct to choose our representatives in a story like this is really powerful. But as we come towards the end, can we try and muddy that up a bit? Can we try and find a bit of something that's slightly less easy to swallow in a way that Doyle is a kind of anti-racist crusader in the Edwardian period? It's bumpier, isn't it, and chewier than that? It is, you know, when we're talking about the foreign villain to pick up on Claes, actually Doyle himself is guilty of that. Sign of four. We have Donga, the native of the Andaman Islands. Goodness. He is like, you know, he's somebody who's killed by Watson because he's like the devil himself. So, you know, this is... He jumps out of a trunk, doesn't he, in the middle of the night. And he'll say, it's geographical and anthropological nonsense, isn't it? It is, totally. I mean, he's supposed to be poor for something and, you know, face like absolutely hideous. So, again, this is going to Doyle painting this villain. It's very much, you know, sort of Indiana Jones many years later, you know, Temple of Doom and you have these characters. But I think these came to them. It's the concept they had, you know, this, the tuggy girl sacrificing to animals. It all sort of blended in into everything. And, you know, you produce these sort of characters that were nothing, you know, they were just villains. They were foreign villains and you could identify them as such. So I think, in a way, Conan Doyle himself was guilty of doing that in some of his books. But the reason he chose to fight for George is because also because he is part of the establishment, because they believed that the empire rested on... It was good. It rested on sound principles of democracy and justice and law. And, you know, so these things had to be, you know, this is what made them great. And if these were questioned and these were sliding, he had to support this. This is a miscarriage of justice. And so he has to, you know, he has to back this. And in a sense, he is backing it because he is part of empire because, you know, they feel that this is the good that has to happen. And he sort of compares it very interestingly with the Dreyfus affair in France. And he says where a Jewish soldier is accused just because he's a Jew of selling secrets. And Britain at that time is very horrified at the anti-Semitism shown in France. So he says, you know, this horror for this incident happening in France is not reflected here. Here we are doing it to one of our people. He says, that happened to a Jew. This is happening to a Parsi. And he puts it really clearly. So I think it is this, you know, this sense of justice. That is also very much part of being part of the empire is what's driving him. And that's, it becomes obsessive for him. Quite obsessive when you see, you know, how he gets into the case. As we come towards the end, we can conclude just by thinking a bit about how, in a way, Sherlock Holmes and through him Doyle always attends us, doesn't he? He's never gone away. And there has never been a moment when Holmes feels alien to our values. You know, whatever those values are at whatever moment, he always mysteriously seems to be a representative of them. He's always in a way a contemporary figure, isn't he? And I wonder why you think that, why do you think that is? Why does he, why we never fell at odds with this man? Well, he's somebody you can see now. You know, he's troubled. He's brooding. He's often depressed. He's doing drugs. It's, it's, he's almost somebody people can identify with. You know, he is not somebody who's a saint. He's somebody who's troubled. He's very humane in that way. And he's, he's got all, all the faults that anybody can have. And at the same time he has a sense of purpose. He has a sense of good and bad and he's going to, he has a good heart and he's going to do what, you know, what he can do. And of course he has a big ego. So we can relate to that. He's, he's somebody you do love, you know, you can see why Watson would be annoyed with him, but that is part of the charm. You know, he's somebody you relate to. What, what do you think, Claire? Maybe you get, maybe you get the last word here. Why do you think, why do you think this character has never, we've never fallen out with him. We can always find ourselves in him, you know, whether or not, you know, whether it's the war period and Basil Rathbone is, is fighting the Nazis, whether it's the, you know, the recent term Sherlock series where he seems to be effortlessly part of the contemporary world. And yet he also seems essentially Victorian and essentially Edwardian. You know, why, how can he do this, Claire? It's the $6 million question, isn't it? I think Trabani is, is right. He's an anti-hero. He straddles those boundaries between good and bad hero and anti-hero in a way that is appealing. We don't want our heroes to be perfect and, you know, without flaws. And because he has those kind of mixture of good and bad qualities, we're never quite sure if he's definitely going to do the right thing or if he might just do something to please himself. He's endlessly adaptable. As you say, you know, I think who your Sherlock is depends on your generation. Is it Basil Rathbone? Is it Jeremy Bred? Is it Benedict Cumberbatch? Is it John E. Lee Miller? The possibilities are endless in much the same way as they are with the character like Dracula or Frankenstein. They're just something that lends itself to adaptation. It has an X factor that alloys that. And isn't that wonderful? It is. It is. This has been wonderful too. Thank you so much, Claire Clark and Trabani Basu. And I should hold this up again, shouldn't I? The mystery of the Parsi lawyer. Absolutely riveting book. And I'm going to now put back on the dear stalker and hand back over to Rebecca. Perfect. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you to you, our audience for joining us today. And a special thanks to today's panellists as well. Please do remember to send feedback if you can. And also check out the British Library's What's On pages to see what other events are coming up. Please also check out Hisstfest's website as well. www.hisstfest.org. Thank you.