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A common device within the canon is established in A Study in Scarlet when American Jefferson Hope scrawls out the word “Rache” (“revenge”) in his own blood, having come to England seeking vengeance: stories that begin in foreign lands must be unraveled and concluded by Holmes in London. Watson too sees himself washed up into the “great cesspool” of the British Empire, when he arrives in London after his wounding at the Battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan.

A quickening pace

Conan Doyle moved to London in March 1891; he had abandoned his struggling medical practice on England’s south coast, and was planning to set up shop as an ophthalmic surgeon. The first four Holmes short stories were written during the following month, and began appearing in the newly founded The Strand Magazine soon afterward. This time, the sleuth was an instant success, and nothing could have prepared Conan Doyle for the readers’ enthusiasm. Holmes’s popularity also ensured the success

INTRODUCTION 35

Watson marries Mary Morstan, and sets up a new medical practice

(see “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” pp.114–15).

Holmes and Moriarty

disappear into the Reichenbach Falls. The “Great Hiatus” begins (see “The Final Problem,” pp.142–47).

JAN 1889 FEB 1890 APR–MAY 1891 JUL 1891 FEB 1889 MAR 1891 MAY 1891 OCT 1892

The Sign of Four appears in Lippincott’s Magazine. It is published as a novel in October.

The Strand Magazine begins publishing Holmes

short stories as serializations.

Conan Doyle Conan Doyle arrives Conan Doyle gives Conan Doyle

publishes Micah in London, by way of up his medical publishes The

Clarke (p.344)—a Venice, Milan, and practice and Adventures

historical novel. Paris. He lodges at decides to make his of Sherlock

23 Montague Place. living from writing. Holmes.

of the Strand itself, since all of the detective’s subsequent outings appeared there, before being published in book form. Conan Doyle was paid £300 for the last six stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—dwarfing the £25 for which he had sold A Study in Scarlet. And when the Adventures was published as a book in October 1892, the author dedicated it to Joseph Bell—the Edinburgh medical professor on whom Holmes had been partly based.

A complex character

Watson’s famous list of Holmes’s intellectual faculties is featured in A Study in Scarlet; indeed, at this point, it seems that the detective is a pure reasoning machine. However, in The Sign of Four, his cocaine use and violin-playing reveal other elements of his character, perhaps influenced by the cult of “aestheticism.” Holmes displays a type of world-weariness so affected that it is known not as “boredom,” but rather by the French term ennui. Yet, conversely, the second novel brims with the kind of physical action that is absent from the first. In fact, Holmes perpetually defies Watson’s preconceptions: a result of Conan Doyle’s occasional inconsistencies, perhaps, or even the detective’s own evasiveness.

Yet for all the variations in his character traits, Holmes’s physical appearance was set in these early years as Sidney Paget’s drawings first appeared alongside the stories in the Strand. Holmes’ image was based on the artist’s brother Walter, and completed with the addition of the famous deerstalker hat.

Bringing it all back home

A thread of the exotic runs through the early stories, from the Indian backstory in The Sign of Four and Grimesby Roylott’s Indian “Swamp Adder” in “The Speckled Band,” to the penal transportation of British criminals to Australia in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and Elias Openshaw’s exploits in the US Civil War in “The Five Orange Pips.” There is also a marked sense of playfulness in these early stories. “The Red-Headed League,” with its gullible pawnbroker Jabez Wilson, is a case in point, as is the duo’s brush with European royalty in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In this story, Holmes’s admiration for the “adventuress” Irene Adler also sets the tone for the frequent shift of sympathies between high-society clients and supposed criminals. ■

THERE’S THE SCARLET

THREAD OF

MURDER

RUNNING THROUGH THE

COLOURLESS SKEIN OF LIFE

A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887)

38 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Novel

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: Beeton’s Christmas Annual, December 1887

NOVEL PUBLICATION

Ward, Lock & Co. July 1888

CHARACTERS Stamford Former medical colleague of Watson’s.

Inspectors Lestrade and Tobias Gregson

Scotland Yard policemen.

Enoch J. Drebber

Elder of the Mormon church.

Joseph Stangerson Mormon elder, and Drebber’s secretary.

Jefferson Hope

Young American.

Constable John Rance

Policeman.

Wiggins Leader of a gang of London street urchins.

Madame Charpentier

Drebber’s landlady.

Chapter 3

Watson accompanies

Holmes to a house

in Brixton where Chapter 5

Chapter 1 an American named Holmes tries to draw out the

Stamford introduces Drebber lies dead. murderer with a newspaper

Watson to Holmes Holmes examines ad about a ring left at the

and the two men the scene with a scene, but is outwitted by

agree to take magnifying glass an accomplice disguised

rooms together. and tape measure. as an old woman.

PART 1

Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 6

Watson studies Holmes sends a Gregson arrests Holmes, who telegram to the Drebber’s landlady’s demonstrates US police, then son Arthur, but his remarkable interviews the then Lestrade powers of armchair constable who finds Stangerson observation and discovered stabbed to death, deduction. the body. exonerating Arthur.

Arthur Charpentier

Naval officer, and son of Madame Charpentier.

Alice Charpentier Madame Charpentier’s daughter.

John Ferrier Wanderer found by Mormons.

Lucy Ferrier John Ferrier’s daughter.

Brigham Young Real-life leader of the Mormon church.

T

he year is 1880 and military surgeon Dr. John H. Watson has been discharged from the army after being wounded in Afghanistan. Back in London and living on a meager army pension, he is looking for someone to share lodgings with. An old colleague of Watson, Stamford, introduces him to Sherlock Holmes (who calls himself the world’s only “consulting detective”), and the two men take up rooms at 221B Baker Street.

On receiving a request for help from the police, Holmes invites Watson to accompany him. The pair meet inspectors Gregson and Lestrade of Scotland Yard at a house in Brixton, where a body has been found. Holmes deduces from the sour smell on the man’s lips that he has been poisoned. Documents identify him as Enoch Drebber, a US citizen, who is traveling with his secretary, Stangerson, and lodging with a Madame Charpentier.

A woman’s wedding ring has been left at the scene, and after questioning Constable Rance, who found the body, Holmes suspects that a drunk seen hanging around the house was in fact the murderer

A STUDY IN SCARLET 39

Chapter 2

A few years later, Chapter 4 Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Ferrier is now a Lucy, her father, Back at Baker Street,

Holmes astounds successful farmer and Hope leave the arrested Hope

Gregson and in the Mormon under cover of shows no remorse

Lestrade by luring stronghold of Salt Lake darkness, heading in avenging Lucy,

the murderer, City, and Lucy falls for Carson City, and recounts in

Jefferson Hope, to in love with a trying in vain to brief his adventures

Baker Street and non-Mormon, escape the grip in London tracking

arresting him. Jefferson Hope. of the Mormons. down his victims.

Many years earlier in the Utah When the Mormon Stangerson kills Ferrier, and Hope dies before

desert, Mormon pilgrims rescue leader, Brigham when Lucy is forced to his trial, Holmes

John Ferrier and his daughter Lucy, Young, says that marry Drebber she dies tells Watson how

on condition they convert Lucy must marry broken-hearted. Drebber he solved the

to the Mormon faith. either Drebber and Stangerson are exiled murder, and

or Stangerson, from the faith, and Hope Watson vows

polygamist church hunts them down in Europe. to make the

elders, Ferrier and case public.

his daughter

plan to flee.

returning to claim the ring. Other evidence suggests to Holmes that the murderer is a cabbie, although he does not reveal this to Watson.

Gregson arrests the landlady’s son, Arthur Charpentier, who had confronted Drebber over his coarse behavior toward his sister Alice. Lestrade suspects the secretary Stangerson, but finds him stabbed to death, killed while Arthur was in custody. A pillbox containing two pills is found with his body. Back at 221B, Holmes tests the pills on a sick terrier; the first is harmless, but the second kills the dog.

Learning from the police in the US that Drebber had sought protection from a man named Jefferson Hope, Holmes instructs a gang of street urchins, known as the “Baker Street Irregulars,” to trace a cabbie by that name and lure him to Baker Street. When Hope arrives, Holmes arrests him before an astonished Gregson and Lestrade.

The second section of the novel begins in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1847. Here, it is revealed that Hope had been in love with a young woman called Lucy, who had died of a broken heart after Stangerson killed her father and she was forced to marry Drebber. The action then returns to Baker Street, where Hope reveals how he forced Drebber to make a choice between two pills; Drebber would take one while he would take the other. Drebber chose the poisoned pill and died. Hope accidentally left a keepsake, Lucy’s wedding ring, at the scene.

Hope dies of a heart condition before he can be brought to trial. To Watson’s indignation, a newspaper report gives all the credit for solving the case to Gregson and Lestrade, and barely mentions Holmes. ■

40 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

T

his is where the legend of Sherlock Holmes begins. Within the first few pages of his 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle establishes not only the eccentric and brilliant nature of his hero Holmes, but also the great detective’s essential partnership with Watson and his atmospheric vision of Victorian London. The relationship between the two men and the setting of their adventures both played an essential role in the success of the many Holmes stories that would follow.

Before the two future partners meet, Watson’s friend Stamford warns him that his potential fellow lodger “appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge,” and may be a bit too scientific and cold-blooded for his tastes. He tells Watson that Holmes even beats corpses in the dissecting-rooms with a stick to see how a dead body bruises after death (in mentioning this, Conan Doyle is eager to show that his sleuth is at the forefront of current developments in criminal investigation). Holmes claims to have created a new and groundbreaking process for detecting bloodstains—“the Sherlock Holmes’s test”. The fact that we never hear of this test again in any subsequent Holmes tale is not that important; Conan Doyle is simply trying to establish Holmes as the world’s first forensic detective.

Holmes the magician

But Holmes’s genius does not end with forensics. On first meeting Watson, he famously says, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” revealing his remarkable powers of observation. Holmes is able to pick out minute details,

You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.

Dr. Watson

Watson was injured at the Battle of Maiwand, July 1880, in the Second Anglo-Afghan war. This painting shows the British Royal Horse Artillery saving their guns from the Afghans.

assemble them in a rational and inspired fashion, and reach a conclusion that makes him seem like a magician performing an amazing trick.

Later, in 221B, Watson picks up a magazine and reads an article on “the Science of Deduction and Analysis” which says, “By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs... a man’s calling is plainly revealed.” When Watson dismisses this extract out loud as “ineffable twaddle” and “the theory of some armchair lounger,” Holmes reveals that he was the author. He then explains how he knew Watson had recently been in Afghanistan.

Watson is a doctor, and this fact, combined with the details that Holmes observes about his person and clothing, enables Holmes to

A STUDY IN SCARLET 41

deduce that Watson has recently seen service in war-torn Afghanistan that ended in an injury (see below). “The whole train of thought did not occupy a second,” says Holmes, with typical immodesty.

Creating a legend

Conan Doyle famously based Holmes’s powers of observation on those of his mentor at Edinburgh University’s medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell (see p.43). In the preface to Sherlock Holmes—The Complete Long Stories (1929), he later wrote: “Having endured a severe course of training in medical diagnosis, I felt that if the same austere methods of observation and reasoning were applied to the problems of crime some more scientific system could be constructed.”

For Holmes to appeal to the reader, Conan Doyle knew that he had to be more than a scientific cypher: he had to be enthralling in his own right. To the hypocritical society of the time—which covered up the legs of a piano for the sake of decorum, yet allowed prostitution

The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn.

Sherlock Holmes

to flourish in London’s East End— there was nothing more fascinating than a flamboyant bohemian with a disregard for convention.

Conan Doyle imbued his sleuth with an array of idiosyncrasies. The reader learns quickly that Holmes plays the violin well, and is a boxer, a swordsman, and an expert in singlestick (a martial art that uses a wooden stick). He has written a monograph on cigarette ash, keeps a tape measure and a magnifying glass in his pocket, and chatters to himself as he looks for clues.

Holmes is particularly proud of his “brain-attic,” in which he stores only essential information. As he explains: “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose… It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.” When Holmes declares, to Watson’s amazement, that he did not know that the Earth orbits the sun, he tells Watson: “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

The armchair detective