A former senior writer at The New York Times, Margalit Fox is considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written front-page send-offs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. (Conan Doyle for the Defense is in many ways a fond belated obituary for the long-overlooked Oscar Slater, an immigrant everyman treated inexcusably by history.) Fox’s previous book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.