Julian Barnes: Arthur & George

Although Michael Chabon wrote about Sherlock Holmes in his recent novella The Final Solution, Julian Barnes' 10th novel Arthur & George is inspired by a real-life mystery that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world's most famous detective, attempted to solve himself.

However, unlike Chabon, Barnes is not a dedicated Holmes fan and he was not specifically interested in writing about Doyle, whom one English newspaper has dubbed "the least interesting of eminent Edwardian novelists".

"I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle," says Barnes, when I meet him at his North London local.

"It's just that the story, when it came to me, had Doyle attached to it. I would have been just as happy if it had been about Kipling or not a writer at all. I have no particular desire to write about a writer again after [third novel] Flaubert's Parrot but he was there in the story so he had to be there.

"I didn't re-read any of the Sherlock Holmes books, apart from The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I refer to at one point. But there is also a reference to The White Company, which I have never read, but I knew Doyle thought it was his best novel. He thought his historical stuff was better than Sherlock Holmes.

"It is often the case that writers resent the books that bring them success and he wished that Sherlock Holmes would just fade into the woodwork.

"But I also didn't want it to be the sort of novel where you are constantly bouncing off Conan Doyle's fiction and making lots of allusions to things that only committed Doylians or Sherlockians know about. I am more interested in the writer as a man of action than the writer as a study."

Arthur & George is based on the Great Wyrley Outrages, a series of vicious animal slashings, which occurred in rural Staffordshire in the late 19th-century. Half-Parsee lawyer George Edjali, the son of an Indian Anglican vicar and a Scottish mother, was wrongly convicted of the crimes and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. After Doyle championed his case, Edjali eventually received a begrudging pardon.

But unlike a similar miscarriage of justice in France, which involved Emile Zola, the Great Wyrley Outrages has since been almost completely forgotten, although it did help lead to the creation of the English Court of Appeal.

"I don't regard it as a historical novel, I regard it as a novel of now, which just happens to be set when it is set," says Barnes. "As I was reading the initial accounts of the case, I was thinking, gosh, that is just like today in the way the police put the case together. It wasn't necessarily malicious overall. All it needs is a touch here and a touch there and a bit of prejudice here and a bit of contaminated evidence there, and it's cleared up.

"I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Police is trying to make the force more representative of London and there's a lot of resistance from the predominantly white force."

Indeed, one of the most significant passages of the book occurs when Doyle tells a stunned Edalji that the thing the pair have most in common is that they are both "unofficial Englishmen".

"George can't believe it but it's true, that's what Doyle said to him," says Barnes. "But anyone looking at Doyle, even though he has Scottish and Irish in his blood, will see he is the most official Englishman you can imagine. So I allow George to be rather puzzled by this, but this is also part of George.

"If this case was happening now, someone like George would be able to refer to other examples from people of mixed race who have been badly treated and he would then be able to say: 'I'm not really British, I'm only half British but it doesn't bother me and from now on I'm going to be half British and half Jamaican or whatever I choose.'

Barnes' blending of fact and fiction has led some critics to question whether Arthur & George is strictly novel as it is based on real people and events that actually took place.

"I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces," says Barnes. "There are no traces of his character so as far as George goes, if you wrote it as non-fiction it would be very thin and you would be forced to say all those awful, conditional words all the time, like 'surely he would have thought this at the time'.

"But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because I've convinced them and they can't tell the bits I've made up from the bits I didn't make up."

* Jonathan Cape, $59.95.