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Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case — Saturday Night Theatre (6 January 1996)
Listen to Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case
Arthur Conan Doyle created the greatest detective in fiction. Then real life handed him a case worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
In 1903, young solicitor George Edalji was convicted amid the strange and disturbing Great Wyrley outrages—a campaign of anonymous letters, threats and animal mutilations. The evidence was questionable, prejudice shadowed the investigation, and Edalji maintained his innocence.
Then Conan Doyle entered the case.
In one wonderfully Holmesian moment, Doyle noticed something almost everyone else had overlooked: the extraordinary way Edalji held a newspaper close to his eyes. His severe short-sightedness raised an obvious question—could this man really have committed the nighttime crimes the prosecution attributed to him?
From The Little Station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas, this Saturday Night Theatre Companion explores the remarkable true story behind Tony Mulholland’s BBC drama Conan Doyle’s Strangest Case, featuring Peter Jeffrey as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
We follow Doyle as he examines evidence, challenges the official story and uses his considerable public reputation to fight what he believed was a miscarriage of justice. We also look at the uncomfortable ending: Edalji received a pardon, but the mystery was never tied up as neatly as one of Holmes’s adventures.
And we ask the irresistible question:
Was Arthur Conan Doyle really Sherlock Holmes?
Along the way, we explore the Edalji case’s place in British legal history, the fading years of BBC Radio’s legendary Saturday Night Theatre, and the story’s later rebirth in Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George.
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