Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton." The Strand Magazine, vol. 27, no. 160, Apr. 1904, p. 377.
Later, in 1973, he himself was denounced and sentenced to the guillotine. When he was sentenced, hecklers asked him if his blood was too pure for execution throwing his quotation back at him.
This statement was published in a major magazine of the time. It referred to a notorious lynching in the South where the victim had been brutally tortured and burned to death. In this case the victim had apparently committed a horrible crime. The Bishop condemned the horrific nature or the lynching but took the view that it was an act of insanity and that the relatives of the child killed by the lynching victim may well have been driven to insanity by the act However, this lynching, like most all in the South was not just an act of vengeance—insane or not—by relatives of a victim, it was participated on by a large mob, many of whom had no relationship to any of the parties. Whites who committed horrible crimes were rarely lynched, but many accused Blacks were lynched even though they turned out to have been innocent.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.
