A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
A Study in Scarlet
13 chapters
4.13from 509,603 ratingson Goodreads
An army doctor invalided home from Afghanistan needs cheap lodgings and is introduced to a man who wants someone to share rooms in Baker Street. Days later they are standing over a corpse in an empty house in Brixton with no wound on it and the word RACHE written on the wall in blood. The first Sherlock Holmes story.
About the book
Published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for twenty-five pounds, A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story. Dr John Watson, invalided home from the Second Afghan War on eleven shillings and sixpence a day, is introduced to a man who needs someone to share rooms at 221B Baker Street and who opens the acquaintance by deducing where he has been. Days later Inspector Gregson calls them to an empty house in Brixton where a man lies dead without a wound and the word RACHE is written on the wall in blood. The second half leaves London altogether for the Utah desert thirty years earlier, a change of scene that startles most first-time readers and supplies the motive. Doyle modelled Holmes on his Edinburgh teacher Joseph Bell, and the method — observation before theory, and never the reverse — is set out here in full.
Characters
Sherlock Holmes — Detective
A consulting detective with gaps in his knowledge that astonish Watson, and a method that does not.
Dr John Watson — Narrator
An army surgeon invalided home, looking for cheap lodgings and finding a subject to write about.
Inspector Gregson — Scotland Yard
One of the smartest of the Yard’s men, which Holmes says is not saying a great deal.
Inspector Lestrade — Scotland Yard
Gregson’s rival, working the same case from the opposite end and arriving at the wrong man.
Enoch Drebber — The victim
An American found dead in an empty Brixton house with no wound on him and a woman’s ring beside him.
Jefferson Hope — The hunter
A man who has followed two others across a continent and has very little time left to finish.
John Ferrier — Settler
Rescued in the Utah desert with a small girl, on the condition that he live by the community’s rules.
About the author
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician who began writing Sherlock Holmes stories while waiting for patients who did not come. He modelled the detective on Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon who could name a stranger's trade and recent travels from the state of his hands and boots. Doyle thought his historical novels the serious work, killed Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, and was pushed into resurrecting him by public protest and a great deal of money. He spent his last decades campaigning for spiritualism, and twice for men he believed wrongly convicted.