A Study in Scarlet
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Summary
Invalided army doctor John Watson, freshly home from Afghanistan and short on money, takes rooms at 221B Baker Street with an odd, brilliant stranger named Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective who deduces Watson's entire military history from his tan and his bearing within minutes of meeting him. Scotland Yard's Lestrade and Gregson bring Holmes in on a baffling case, a well dressed American named Enoch Drebber found dead in an empty house with no visible wound and the word RACHE written in blood on the wall, and Holmes works out from a handful of physical clues, a cigar ash, a wedding ring, footprints in the dust, that the killer is taller than the police assume and driven by something more personal than robbery. A second man, Joseph Stangerson, turns up stabbed soon after, and Holmes traces both murders to Jefferson Hope, a cab driver he has quietly known for days is the culprit before finally having him arrested in a set piece that shows off the deductive method for the first time. Doyle then swings the story back decades to the American West to explain why, following John and Lucy Ferrier, a father and daughter rescued and taken in by Mormon settlers in Utah, and showing how the church later forced Lucy into marriage with Drebber against her love for Hope, a betrayal that broke Lucy's health and killed her, and set Hope on a decades long hunt across two continents for the men responsible. Back in the present, Hope calmly confesses everything to Holmes and Watson, satisfied at having finally settled the account, and dies of a preexisting aortic aneurysm the night before he can be tried.
Doyle introduces Holmes's whole method here in miniature, the magnifying glass, the chemistry experiments, the barely concealed contempt for the official police's plodding, and lets Watson's own bewildered admiration do the work of selling the reader on a character neither of them has met before. The book moves briskly through its London half and then asks real patience for its long American flashback, a structure later Holmes stories mostly abandoned, but the payoff, watching how a wronged man's grief hardens into a decades long act of private justice, gives the killer more weight than a typical villain gets.
Doyle wrote the whole short novel in under three weeks at the age of twenty seven and sold it outright for twenty five pounds with no royalties attached.
Historical Context & Significance
A Study in Scarlet first appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for December 1887 and drew little notice at the time, so few copies of that annual survive that the eleven known today are now valuable collector's items. Ward, Lock and Co. issued it as its own book in July 1888, and an American edition followed from J. B. Lippincott in 1890.
Holmes's later short stories in the Strand Magazine turned this quiet debut retroactively into one of the most consequential first appearances in popular fiction, and the novel is generally credited as the first detective story to put a magnifying glass in its investigator's hand as a working tool rather than a prop. Adaptations have followed steadily since a 1914 silent film through the 2010 BBC series Sherlock, and the book's depiction of Mormon settlers led a Virginia school district to remove it from a sixth grade reading list in 2011.