Researching for books is not easy, but it becomes even tougher in the case of non-fiction on historical figures. Archives
either don’t exist or are difficult to access.
Shrabani Basu specialises in historical non-fiction. She has written Victoria & Abdul: The Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant; Spy Princes: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan and For Kind and Another Country: Indian Soliders on the Western Front 1914-17.
Her latest, released last week, The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village, is an intriguing story of how the creator of Sherlock Holmes stepped in to help a young Parsi who was accused of a crime he said he did not commit.
In this podcast interview with Sidharth Bhatia, Basu talks about the challenge of researching, the racism of Victorian England and how some of those tendencies still remain in Britain today.
