My thanks to the publishers for a review copy of this very readable account of an unsettlingly modern miscarriage of justice, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century.

The book warns the reader it describes cruelty to animals but the crux of this history is about years of repeated, soul destroying, intimidating, mindless and violent racist abuse. It started with anonymous letters and progressed to nuisance deliveries, the planting of stolen goods and forged letters, before leading eventually to the ludicrous accusations linking the vicar’s son, by now a solicitor, with the horrific maiming of horses and his fundamentally flawed conviction.

For George Edalji’s father came from a family of Parsees from Bombay and George was a mixed race boy. His father was the first South Asian vicar in the Church of England. His mother, Charlotte, came from a white English family of parsons. All Shapurji Edalji’s parishioners were white. So, at best the police did not care. At worst, the Chief Constable orchestrated other anonymous letters to entrap the Edaljis and manipulated safe conduct for other potential perpetrators of the crimes.

I was fortunate to have enjoyed Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, a fictionalised account of the same story, published in 2005, focussing on the disparate lives of George Edalji and Arthur Conan Doyle who championed the campaign to clear his name.

With the benefit of access to letters and other material related to the case, which came into the public domain quite recently, Shrabani Basu has detailed its actual history in the context of its time and the book answers many of the intriguing questions which come to mind. How on earth, for example, did the Rev. Shapurji Edalji, by birth a Parsee in Bombay, wind up in Great Wyrley, where he spent 42 years ministering the faith in the Church of England? What attracted Conan Doyle, a man capable of describing concentration camps as refugee shelters during the Boer War, to take up the case? Where were the fault lines of race and class, which enabled so much liberal support to be mobilised for Edalji after his conviction but meant that he never received any compensation after his release and that he was very quickly forgotten after Doyle’s death.

The book makes commendable efforts to set the action in context as the English Dreyfus case and the perspectives on relevant history of the period are useful. This was the case which more than any other led to the creation of a Court of Appeal.

Some of the black history material mentioned, however, is only tangentially relevant and I suspect it more reflects the author’s other interests and writings.

That apart, this is a good read and shows how little has changed about our institutions of state and maybe our small village life too.

The Victorians and Edwardians may have known a thing or two about industrial innovation and empire building but when it came to detection and policing they were woefully inept. How did Britain's most famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper, escape justice? And what of the innocents wrongly convicted, and sometimes sent to their deaths?
George Edalji would be forgotten today we're it not for the involvement of Arthur Conan Doyle in his fight for justice. His story is a tragedy. A terrible miscarriage of justice. The terrible events in Great Wyrley still unsolved, with more questions than answers.
The author writes with honesty, integrity and compassion. A fascinating, at times gruesome and horrific story of animal mutilation and a family persecuted.