If the fiction of Julian Barnes were divided into two categories – dishy romances and puzzling historical souffles – the latter would seem to be what has made him famous. Yet this fiction, the “Flaubert’s Parrot” kind, is often less convincing than humbler fare like “Talking It Over” or “Love, etc.”

“Arthur & George” (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95, 392 pages) falls neatly into the historical souffle category. Arthur is Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes was also resurrected last year, in Michael Chabon’s slight novella “The Final Solution.” Mr. Barnes sidelines Holmes in favor of George Edalji, an innocent secondgeneration Parsi, a solicitor, to whose aid Doyle quixotically rides after George is wrongly convicted of a series of cow mutilations.

Mr. Barnes’s Doyle begins as a smart but thwarted young man. Even in his youth he is interestingly meek – a failed oculist, shy in marriage, who takes his pulp fiction a little too seriously. Two factors make this man into a Victorian terror. The first – money – proceeds from Holmes.The second is a passionate love affair Doyle pursues as his consumptive wife ails. His affair with Jean Leckie is platonic – important for Doyle, who makes a great deal out of chivalry and other Arthurian ideals. He frequently compliments himself that he does not “palter,” or speak needlessly, although the word itself, and the pet peeve it represents, indicate a precious and complacent mind.

Many of Mr. Barnes’s best scenes for Doyle are common to all tellings of Doyle’s life; for example, Doyle once had an argument with his sonin-law over his affair with Leckie. His son-in-law asked why it mattered that the affair was platonic, and Doyle responded that it made the difference between “innocence and guilt.” In one account, this response is “roared,” in Mr. Barnes’s, it is “bellowed.” Doyle’s well-meaning presumptuousness makes for good stories, but little interiority, little room in which Mr. Barnes can work. His imagining of Edalji consequently steals the show. The “Arthur” half of the novel finally feels more like a biopic than a Julian Barnes novel.

Any Doyle biographer must account for his spiritualism, which in the conventional wisdom hijacks the life of the man who invented our greatest rationalist hero. Doyle was a great advocate of seances; his endorsements were all over the wall text at the Met’s “Photography and the Occult” exhibition. Mr. Barnes, however, sees this not as a midlife crisis but as an abiding romanticism, on which the Sherlock Holmes mythos was an incidental growth that bothered Doyle the more they flourished.

However Mr. Barnes weaves ghosts into Doyle’s developing chivalric mind-set, the seances in this book are dead on the page. Who wants to read about telekinesis – seen through the boring optimism of Victorian science – when there’s a good mystery going?

The Edalji mystery comprises two spates of hate mail and hoaxes culminating in a string of livestock “rippings” for which Edalji is framed. Mr. Barnes lays out events thoroughly in the first part of the book, dropping Doyle for almost 100 pages. Then the story of Arthur’s affair vaults through the middle part of the book, until, as his wife dies and Doyle finds himself mysteriously chilled at the prospect of finally marrying his mistress, the Edalji case comes along to invigorate him. For the first time, Doyle willingly plays Sherlock. But his authorial instincts get the better of him: He tries to rewrite Edalji’s case, but the judicial record resists his pen.

“Arthur & George” is finally a story of temperament, a Sherlock Holmes case turned literary, shaped more by psychology and currents of opinion than by deduction. Unlike Mr. Chabon’s “The Final Solution,” which at least captures the electric fact of resurrecting Holmes, “Arthur & George” is more a portrait of several mustached men who happen to have something to do with Holmes.

The problem with novels about historical characters, as opposed to historical fiction about made-up characters, is that you can never quite believe in the characters. Even if novels are more alive than factual biographies, the factual biographies wait in the wings of the reader’s mind, preventing his imagination from acting independently on the fictional text. “Arthur & George” makes this worse by letting us glimpse, through the well-wrought stained glass of Mr. Barnes’s Doyle, the shadow of the real Sherlock Holmes, who we know better than any author. “Arthur & George” is good reading for long winter nights, but it’s not Mr. Barnes at his best.

blytal@nysun.com