Journalist and author Shrabani Basu’s new book revisits the unlikely friendship between writer Arthur Conan Doyle and a Parsi lawyer in 1903
Writing a good, fast-paced historical thriller means sifting through a mountain of data. Existing literature on the topic, government reports, eyewitness accounts, handwritten diaries; it can resemble a bottomless pit at times. Above everything else, when you finally have everything you need to tell your story, the real struggle begins: How do you ensure your story does not read like a dry, officious, sanitised version of events?
Shrabani Basu’s solution in her latest work of non-fiction, The Mystery Of The Parsee Lawyer, is to combine a novelist’s eye for interesting details with an experienced journalist’s instinctive “big-picture” sprawl. The author of Victoria & Abdul (2010) and Spy Princess: The Life Of Noor Inayat Khan (2006), Basu knows how to write thorough, engaging, well-researched historical non-fiction. This book is about the false conviction of George Edalji, a mixed-race solicitor of Parsi descent—in 1903, Edalji was sentenced to seven years in prison after being falsely accused of a series of animal mutations in the Staffordshire coal miners’ village of Great Wyrley (Edalji was the son of the local vicar) in the UK. The racial prejudice around Edalji was, of course, a big factor in all this.
Order at https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-mystery-of-the-parsee-lawyer-shrabani-basu/book/9781526615305.html
