How I Learned About the George Edalji Case

How I Learned About the George Edalji Case

 

When I first learned about the George Edalji case over thirty years ago, I never thought that I’d be writing about adaptations of it.  I was in middle school, and I found Peter Costello’s The Real World of Sherlock Holmes in a bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin.  I read it that summer and enjoyed learning about actual crimes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really investigated.  I thought a novelization of it might make for a great book, but I was much too young to write such a book, and several years passed, and one day I learned that Julian Barnes had written a novel about the case.  Over the next twenty years, I discovered other television and radio adaptations of the case, but I realized that all of them played fast and loose with the facts.  So I decided to write a book about how the story of the George Edalji case has been told time and time again, but never completely, and rarely accurately.  That book is The Last and Highest Court of Appeal.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

 

Chris Chan’s history of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Absolute Justice, was published on March 10^th!   His flash fiction collection 156 Homicides will be published soon! His book Sherlock Poems retells the entire Sherlock Holmes Canon in verse.  He is also the author of the CWA Dagger Long Listed The Autistic Sleuth, written with the professional guidance of his mother Dr. Patricia Meyer Chan, and he has also written the Agatha, Macavity, and Anthony-nominated book on the Columbo killers, Some of My Best Friends Are Murderers! He is the author of the Funderburke and Kaiming novels Ghosting My Friend and She Ruined Our Lives and Well-Behaved Children Seldom Make History, released by Level Best Books.  He is also the author of the comedic novels Sherlock’s Secretary and Nessie’s Nemesis, published by MX Publishing, as was his anthology Of Course He Pushed Him and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories Volumes 1 & 2.  His Agatha-nominated book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.