I suspect that most of the readers who visit my blog will have no difficulty remembering the mystery book that introduced you to - and hooked you on - reading mysteries. In my case, it was Sherlock Holmes, and the very first of Conan Doyle's books about Holmes, the novel A Study in Scarlet. I had just turned ten years old when a friend of the family gave me a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes - all four novels and fifty-six short stories. My parents were just beginning what was going to be a birthday trip for me, on which I was driven all around the United States (on what was then the existing system of mostly rural roads before the Interstate highway system was established). Sherlock accompanied me. I returned home several weeks later, back from "seeing America" - having, in fact, seen remarkably little of America, because I had spent most of my supposed sightseeing time in the back seat of the car with those Holmes stories. I've never lost my fondness for Holmes in the original format - and, as I'm very much overdue for another reading of the Holmes books, I offer you from the vault my audio review of A Study in Scarlet, which I ran the better part of a decade ago on the Classic Mysteries podcast. As always, it has been slightly edited. But come, the game's afoot:
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A medical man – a combat veteran – is seeking a roommate in Victorian London. A mutual friend introduces him to a most unusual man, whose trade is (for the moment) something of a mystery. He is…well, in his own words now…"I am a consulting detective. Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me and I manage to put them on the right scent.”
Does any of that sound familiar? It should. The British medical man is Dr. John Watson. And his new friend and soon-to-be roommate is named Sherlock Holmes. They meet in the early chapters of what would become one of the most influential mysteries of all time – the novel called, A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
I think it is fair to say that no more influential fictional detective than Sherlock Homes has ever existed. 132 years after A Study in Scarlet first appeared in a magazine – Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887 – Holmes as a character and as an influence on the whole realm of detective fiction continues to astound us. He is the subject of new movies, new television adaptations, new literary pastiches and parodies – some authorized by the Conan Doyle estate, some less so.
All that influence really comes from an incredibly small literary output – Doyle wrote only four novels and 56 short stories about Holmes. And it all began with the first novel, A Study in Scarlet.
The story begins in London with that first meeting between Holmes and the man who would narrate most of his stories, Dr. John Watson, M.D. Watson, recently invalided out of the British army after receiving war wounds in Afghanistan, is looking for someone to share rooms, as a way of cutting costs. He is introduced to Holmes, a man of mystery to his few friends. In fact, it is not until they are already rooming together that Watson will have a chance to find out what it is, exactly, that Holmes does – and how he uses logic and reasoning to solve seeming inexplicable puzzles.
It is that ability to use logic rather than intuition or guesswork, to observe things that others do not observe, such as splashes of mud or cigar ashes, that gives Holmes his strengths.
And those powers are put to the test when two London police detectives, Lestrade and Gregson, come to Holmes seeking help in solving a lurid and seemingly impossible murder case. It involves the discovery of a man’s body – without wounds – in an empty house. Someone has scrawled the letters r-a-c-h-e in blood upon the wall of the room. What is the significance of that writing? The London detectives have their own ideas – ideas which Holmes finds amusing at best – but it will be Holmes who uses logic to solve both that murder and a second, clearly related killing.
The killer is caught and arrested little more than halfway through the book. At that point, the reader is taken back to events in the American west many years earlier. This kind of split narrative was used in many novels of the period, giving the author the freedom to tell some of what we now call the “backstory” of the novel and explain the motivation behind the events we have witnessed.
Eventually, as the characters move through time, we are brought up to date and Dr. Watson’s narrative resumes – providing another perspective on the events which have taken place. It also gives Holmes a chance to explain to Watson the logical steps by which the murderer was uncovered and the crime explained.
A Study in Scarlet was followed by another novel, The Sign of Four, and then by the first 23 short stories. At the end of that, you may recall, Doyle attempted to kill off his now fantastically successful creation – Doyle thought that Holmes was getting in way of the author’s efforts to write “serious” fiction. Very little of Doyle’s “serious” fiction holds up very well today – nor is it much read. Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back – and Holmes continues to be immensely and intensely popular.
As I said earlier, Holmes was and is absolutely central to detective fiction (even among authors who sneer at him). Whether you come to Holmes through the original books, such as A Study in Scarlet, or through the newest television or movie versions, Les Klinger's brilliantly annotated edition of the complete Holmes books, or through brilliant pastiches such as Laurie R. King’s justifiably popular series about Holmes and Mary Russell, you cannot get away from Holmes. Nor, come to think of it, should you get away.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here. I should also note that there are (on Amazon alone) more than a thousand versions of this book listed, with prices generally quite reasonable (including a couple that are at least nominally free). Your favorite book dealer should have no trouble accommodating your Sherlockian tastes.
Next: Dead Witness, A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories, edited by Michael Sims.
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