A Study in Scarlet

About this book

A Study in Scarlet is a short detective novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in 1887. It is the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, and it establishes almost everything later readers associate with them: the rooms at 221B Baker Street, Holmes’s method of deduction, the baffled Scotland Yard inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, and Watson’s role as narrator and friend.

The book is read today mainly because of what it began. Doyle was a young doctor with a slow practice when he wrote it, and he sold the copyright outright for a small sum. The story attracted modest attention on its own; it was the later short stories in The Strand Magazine that made Holmes famous. But as the origin of the most imitated character in crime fiction, it has stayed continuously in print.

The story

Watson, an army surgeon invalided home from the war in Afghanistan, is looking for cheap lodgings in London when a friend introduces him to a man who needs someone to share rooms. The man is Holmes, who is working in a hospital chemistry laboratory and whose profession Watson cannot work out. Watson’s early attempt to list what his new flatmate does and does not know is one of the book’s best-remembered passages.

A body is found in an empty house in Brixton, unmarked except for a word written in blood on the wall. Lestrade asks Holmes for help, and Watson goes along. The investigation occupies the first half of the novel. The second half breaks away entirely to Utah decades earlier, among the Mormon settlers, and explains how the case came to London.

Themes and historical context

Doyle acknowledged his debts. Holmes was modeled in part on Joseph Bell, a surgeon who had taught Doyle in Edinburgh and who was known for diagnosing patients’ occupations and habits at a glance. The literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin, whom Holmes himself mentions in the novel, not entirely kindly. Doyle’s contribution was to make the detective’s method the point of the story and to give him a companion whose ordinary intelligence lets the reader keep pace.

The two-part structure, with a long American flashback, follows a pattern Doyle used again in The Valley of Fear. The Utah section, with its portrait of the Mormon community under Brigham Young, is historically unreliable and was objected to at the time and since; readers should treat it as melodrama rather than history.

The novel’s London is the London of the 1880s: gas lamps, hansom cabs, telegraph boys and a new, professional police force that Holmes treats with amused contempt. That setting, and Holmes’s confidence that crime can be solved by observation and reasoning, made the stories a product of their scientific age and gave them the atmosphere that adaptations have been drawing on ever since.

Who should read it

This is an easy, quick read, shorter than most modern mysteries. The first half will please anyone who likes the Holmes of film and television; the Utah flashback is a different kind of story and some readers skim it. New readers who want the best of Holmes are often advised to go to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes next, but starting here gives the full introduction of the two characters and their partnership.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg transcription was prepared by Roger Squires and David Widger.