A Study in Scarlet

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Sherlock Holmes novels

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the novel A Study In Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, in 1886 at the age of 27. He had already published short stories in several magazines of the day, such as the periodical London Society. He was working as a general practice doctor in Southsea, England.

He originally titled it A Tangled Skein. After many rejections, he eventually saw it published by Ward, Lock & Co. in Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887 for which he received £25 in return for the full rights (although Conan Doyle had pressed for a royalty instead).

The story, and fictional character, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Only ten copies of Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887 are known to exist now and they have considerable value.

The novel was produced in book form in July 1888, published by Ward, Lock & Co. This book was illustrated by Arthur Conan Doyle's father, Charles Doyle. A second edition appeared the following year and contained illustrations by George Hutchinson, and J. B. Lippincott Co. published the first American edition in 1890. Numerous further editions, translations and dramatisations have appeared since. Although Doyle wrote dozens of short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The novel is split into two quite separate halves. The first is titled Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department. This part is told in first person by Holmes' friend Doctor John H. Watson and describes his introduction in 1881 to Sherlock Holmes through a mutual friend and the first mystery in which he followed Holmes' investigations. The mystery revolves around a corpse found at a derelict house in Brixton, England with the word "RACHE" scrawled in blood on the wall beside the body.

The second half of the story is called The Country of the Saints and jumps to the United States of America and the Mormon community, and incorporating a highly-fictionalized depiction of the Danites, including an appearance by Brigham Young in a somewhat villainous context. It is told in a third person narrative style, with an omniscient narrator, before returning in the last chapter to Watson's account of Holmes' investigation and his solution of the crime. In this chapter the relationship between the two halves of the novel becomes apparent. The motive for the crime is essentially one of lost love and revenge.

1 Plot holes
2 Inconsistencies
3 Adaptations
4 Samuel Rosenberg
5 External links

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Plot holes

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

It is strange that the police apparently never questioned the owner of the Brixton house, where the first murder happened. The door was intact, so whoever murdered Drebber had to have a key, for which the owner would have been the obvious candidate. This would have led the police (or Holmes, who chose to ignore the clue as well) quickly on to the right track.

It also does not follow that Jefferson Hope shows no suspicion upon having his cab summoned to 221B Baker Street, after his earlier ploy of having sent a friend disguised as an old woman to the same address. It seems unlikely that he would have forgotten the address so quickly after having seen the advertisement about the gold ring in the paper on the previous day.

The book violates what would later become one of the cardinal rules of detective fiction and which provides much of the fun of reading such books - namely, that the author must provide enough prior clues to let an intelligent and perceptive reader solve the mystery for him/herslef. There is no way whatsoever for a reader to do that here. The very first time that the reader hears the name "Jefferson Hope" is when Holmes produces him as the murderer. (The most the reader could know before is that somebody with the intials J.H. is somehow involved). Nor is there is the smallest prior hint that Mormons are in any way involved. Certainly, nothing found in possesion of the two murdered men gives any hint of their Mormon background - in fact, Doyle positively misleads the reader, since "Decameron" is anything but receommended reading material for Latter Day Saints. In extenuation, it should be noted that these rules of the detective genre did not yet exist, and Doyle's book was among the pioneering works laying the very foundations of that genre.

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Inconsistencies

There are several minor inconsistencies in the story which are incompatible with later Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr Watson provides a short autobiography of himself at the start. In this he is invalided out of the army after being wounded in the shoulder in the Second Afghan War. In later stories, his wound has moved to his leg. Watson also says "I keep a bull pup," which, if a dog, is never mentioned again - leading to a number of theories about the animal, including that there was no dog but it was slang for "I have a short temper," [1] (first suggested by J. Barzun), a short-barrelled firearm, or a psycholinguistic distortion for "I keep a full cup" (Arthur M. Axelrad).

In this book, Holmes is presented as a single-minded person who has no interests whatsoever except for what directly serves his work as a detective, and who indeed actively tries to forget any irrelevant piece of knowlege which came inadvertantly to his attention. While this works in the first book, it would have made Holmes an inutterably boring charcter had Doyle persisted in it for the rest of the series (which would than hardly have had the same amount of popularity).

In later books and stories Holmes is depicted, to the complete contrary, as a multifaceted intellectual with an intensive interest in and deep knowlege of numerous subjects having nothing to do with his detective work, such as music, philosophy and bee-keeping, and he keeps writing articles and monographs in numerous fields.

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Adaptations

The novel was followed by The Sign of Four, published in 1890.

It has been adapted many times, although frequently only the sections of the book in which Holmes and Watsons's relationship is established are used. The Ronald Howard/H. Marion Crawford television series used that section of the book as the basis for the episode The Case of the Cunningham Inheritance, as did the John Gielgud/Ralph Richardson radio series, which combined it with Charles Augustus Milverton to make the episode Sherlock Holmes meets Doctor Watson. The book was adapted in full fewer times, notable ones being in the Peter Cushing/Nigel Stock television series, as an episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theatre and by Bert Coules for the first project starring Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson.

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Samuel Rosenberg

In his Naked is the Best Disguise, Rosenberg notes the similarity between Jefferson Hope's tracking of Enoch Drebber and a sequence in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Several other associations between Doyle and Joyce are also listed in Rosenberg's book.

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