Long after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes, the author received invitations to investigate real life mysteries. While these requests seem to reflect some readers’ conflation of author and protagonist, Doyle did take on the role of inspector for certain criminal cases. Among the most notable was that of George Edalji, a British solicitor wrongfully convicted of writing slanderous letters and, worse, of mutilating local livestock, in 1903. In Julian Barnes’s 2005 historical novel Arthur and George, the character modeled on Doyle suspects that Edalji’s arrest may have to do with his racial hybridity: he was born to a Parsi father and a Scottish mother. Edalji fretfully wonders to himself, “How is he less than a full Englishman? He is one by birth, by citizenship, by education, by religion, by profession. Does Sir Arthur mean that when they took away his freedom and struck him off the Rolls, they also struck him off the roll of Englishmen?” Following his exclusion from the English collective, Edalji “struggle[s] with the sense that, slowly yet irrevocably, his story was being taken away from him.”
The paper explores Barnes’s subversive novel as a hybrid itself: a fusion of the classic detective story—for which Doyle was famous—and the postcolonial novel that offers a collection of perspectives, not a single privileged view. This reading investigates the ambivalent nationalisms represented in Barnes’s dialectical work, and the self-reflexivity of historical narratives that argue the past is not an open and shut case.