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Holmes explains to Watson that when either the police or the many private detectives in London are stumped by a case, they come to him, and he puts them on the right track, without ever having to leave his armchair. In A Study in Scarlet more than in any of the subsequent Holmes stories, this is indeed his main role. Even before the start of ❯❯

Holmes observes Dr. Watson and forms a conclusion

Watson is a He holds his left

He has a dark His haggard face

medical type arm in a stiff

face, yet pale clearly shows that

with the air of a and unnatural

wrists, showing he has undergone

military man, manner, showing

that he is deeply hardship and

so he must be an that it has been

tanned. sickness.

army doctor. injured.

Watson has been discharged from the army after military service abroad.

42 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

the central case, Watson notes how a stream of visitors of both sexes, and all ages and classes (police inspectors, “a young girl,” “a Jew pedlar,” “a railway porter,” and an “old white-haired gentleman”), are redirected by private inquiry agencies to call upon Holmes at 221B for help.

When the main case in A Study in Scarlet does get underway, Holmes travels to the crime scene, where he investigates enthusiastically. “As I watched him,” says Watson, “I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent.” But for most of the story, the action occurs without direct involvement from Holmes, and the culprit is ultimately apprehended in his Baker Street sitting room.

Conan Doyle had to adjust this approach in later stories, allowing Holmes to go out and investigate crime, and be more of a man of action, or an “amateur bloodhound,” as Watson calls him in A Study in Scarlet. However, he never fully loses his propensity for solving crimes from the comfort of his armchair.

…he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.

Dr. Watson

Watson’s notes on Holmes

Watson’s vital role

Every genius needs someone more ordinary to illuminate their powers, and Conan Doyle uses Watson in this role, defining his character in the first few chapters. A man who is in the best of neither health nor spirits, Watson is friendless and has no real purpose in life at the beginning of the story. He says of himself “how objectless was my life, and how little there was to engage my attention.” He fills his time closely observing his fellow lodger, even to the extent of making a list called “Sherlock Holmes—his limits.” Many of its observations, such as that Holmes’s knowledge of literature is “nil,” prove in later stories to be inaccurate.

For a short while, Watson’s study of Holmes becomes a kind of hobby— “this man stimulated my curiosity,” he notes. But Watson very quickly assumes the role of Holmes’s full- fledged assistant in investigating the Brixton murder. Presumably it is for his own interest that Watson makes detailed notes during the investigation. However, these jottings come in very handy when he decides to write up the notes to showcase the genius of Holmes in bringing the murderer to justice. It is also this act that seals the burgeoning relationship between Holmes and Watson: transforming himself from Holmes’s companion to his biographer, Watson follows in the footsteps of the celebrated

A STUDY IN SCARLET 43

diarist James Boswell, who became the biographer of the famous writer Samuel Johnson a century earlier.

Holmes’s London

While Conan Doyle recreates the streets and gardens of London in A Study in Scarlet, he had not lived in the city by that point; at the time he wrote the story he was residing in Southsea near Portsmouth, Hampshire. Instead, he must have acquired all his knowledge of the English capital from maps and gazetteers. The story takes us from Baker Street via hansom cabs to just a few well-known London areas, such as Brixton, Camberwell, Kennington Park, and Euston. Like Robert Louis Stevenson in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

(1886), Conan Doyle used his own home city, Edinburgh, as a model for London. The fictional Lauriston Gardens in Brixton, where the first corpse is discovered, was actually based on Lauriston Place in the

Victorian London was the backdrop for many of the Holmes tales, even before Conan Doyle moved to the city. The London settings included fictional places and real landmarks.

Scottish capital. But interspersed with these fictional locations are real-life London landmarks, some of which still survive. For example, in the first pages of the book, Watson waits for Stamford standing at the Criterion Bar in Piccadilly, which exists to this day.

Forgivable faults

It is easy to find fault with A Study in Scarlet. The structure is clumsy and the mystery itself somewhat contrived, and the central villain Jefferson Hope is a fairly featureless character too. Hope lacks any of the distinguishing qualities of the charismatic villains who were to cross Holmes’s path in later stories; Conan Doyle merely uses him as a pawn to further his plot.

Another problem with A Study in Scarlet is that Holmes is such a brilliant detective that he very quickly sees to the heart of any case. Because he succeeds in solving the murder mystery and apprehending the culprit halfway through the narrative, there is little left for Holmes to do. Conan Doyle then takes the reader on a long flashback to the wilds of Utah, detailing the history of the links between Hope, Drebber, and Stangerson, and their connection to the Mormon church. As a result, Holmes necessarily disappears from the scene, and only returns in the last two short chapters.

The almost-too-quick genius of Holmes was a structural problem that Conan Doyle did not fully resolve in his later Sherlock Holmes novels either. He resorted to the flashback device once again in The Sign of Four (pp.46–55) and The Valley of Fear (pp.212–21). And Holmes is also absent for much of The Hound of the Baskervilles (pp.152–61), although Watson is on hand for the entire story. ❯❯

An inspirational teacher

In his 1924 autobiography, Conan Doyle explained the inspiration behind Holmes’s amazing powers of deduction. “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell…” At Edinburgh University’s medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell (1837–1911) had made Conan Doyle his outpatient clerk, who recalled that Bell “…often learned more of the patient by a few quick glances than I had done by my questions.”

On one occasion, Bell amazed the students gathered around him by pronouncing that the patient standing before them had served in the army, and had been recently discharged from serving as a noncommissioned officer in a Highland regiment on Barbados. Bell explained, “You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

44 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.

Sherlock Holmes

It may seem strange to the modern reader that Conan Doyle inserted such a long flashback into the middle of a detective story. At the time the author believed it would add an exotic appeal to the story, especially since the Mormons were very much in the news when Conan Doyle sat down to write this tale. The previous year he had attended a meeting of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, where the subject of Mormon polygamy had been addressed. By the time he was writing A Study in Scarlet, he had clearly carried out some extensive reading on the church—so much so that he felt he could even include the real-life figure of Brigham Young in his cast of characters. Conan Doyle researched various volumes for his descriptions of Utah, as he did for London in the English section of the book. But he was not sufficiently careful in his placing of the Rio Grande, which appears to have wandered from its usual setting; “These little things happen,” Conan Doyle is said to have admitted when this was pointed out to him.

Seldom bettered

While it is possible to pinpoint numerous holes in the plot of this tale if you look hard enough, in the end none of these faults are what really matters. What remains in the reader’s mind is the well-defined central character of Holmes.

This brilliant characterization is most sharply demonstrated in the first part of A Study in Scarlet, in which the detective makes a succession of brilliant deductions about the corpse in the house in Brixton—a sequence that has rarely been bettered in crime fiction. On his arrival at the scene, Holmes

Brigham Young

The only real-life historical figure Conan Doyle used as a character in a Holmes story was Brigham Young (1801–77). Born in Vermont, Young became a Methodist in 1823. He joined Joseph Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after reading The Book of Mormon, and rose to become its leader. He was called the “American Moses” after leading his followers through the desert to the “promised land” of Utah, where the Mormons founded their headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Holmes carefully examines the word “Rache” written in blood on a wall at the murder scene. The way the letters have been written gives him vital clues as to the identity of the killer.

immediately chastises Gregson for allowing everyone to trample over the pathway, destroying potentially vital footprint evidence. “If a herd of buffaloes had passed along there could not be a greater mess,” he says. Inside the house, Holmes

Conan Doyle’s depiction of both Young and Mormonism may be harsh, but he was never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, and at the time it was not regarded as particularly controversial. However, Conan Doyle was later criticized for defaming the faith, and years after his death, Brigham Young’s descendant Levi Edgar Young claimed that Conan Doyle had privately apologized, saying that “he had been misled by writings of the time about the Church,” and admitted that he had written “a scurrilous book.”

A STUDY IN SCARLET 45

flings himself to the ground with his magnifying glass before rattling off a list of facts to the dumbfounded Watson, Gregson, and Lestrade.

When Conan Doyle juxtaposes Holmes’s powers with Watson’s ordinariness, he makes those powers seem even more impressive; this effect is then amplified when Holmes is compared to the two bungling detectives. In their efforts to better one another, Lestrade and Gregson show just how far behind Holmes they are in terms of both acumen and perception. Neither of the two inspectors can explain the blood spattered around the murder scene, though Holmes privately surmises (correctly, it is later revealed) that the murderer must have had a nose bleed. Lestrade boasts to Gregson and Holmes that the murderer wrote “Rache” on the wall because he was disturbed before he could finish spelling the word “Rachel,” but Holmes bursts his bubble by pointing out that Rache is German for “revenge.”

Immortality beckons

In his 1947 essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” George Orwell wrote of Shakespeare that, like every other writer, sooner or later he will be forgotten. If the same applies to Conan Doyle, it is hard to envision his most famous creation suffering the same fate—Sherlock Holmes now has an identity beyond the pages of the novels and stories in which he first appeared.

Conan Doyle had great hopes for A Study in Scarlet, which it is believed took him only three weeks to write. But potential publishers were initially less enthusiastic: The Cornhill Magazine rejected it as reading like a cheap “shilling dreadful.” In the end, Conan Doyle accepted the derisory one-time fee of £25 for it to appear in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887, which indeed cost just a shilling—five pence in modern money. To add insult to injury, its magazine debut caused barely a ripple with the reading public. Having signed away the rights to it, Conan Doyle would never receive another penny for this, his first Holmes story, even when it was reprinted in book form just over a year later. However, A Study in Scarlet has remained in print ever since, just like every other Holmes story. ■

Beeton’s Christmas Annual was a paperback magazine produced from 1860 to 1898. Only 10 copies of the magazine containing the first Holmes adventure are known to have survived.

I NEVER MAKE EXCEPTIONS.

AN EXCEPTION DISPROVES

THE RULE

THE SIGN OF FOUR (1890)

48 THE EARLY ADVENTURES

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Novel

FIRST PUBLICATION

US: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, February 1890

NOVEL PUBLICATION

Spencer Blackett publishers, October 1890

CHARACTERS

Mary Morstan

Young governess.

Captain Morstan

Mary’s father.

Thaddeus Sholto

English gentleman.

Bartholomew Sholto

Thaddeus’s brother.

McMurdo Pondicherry Lodge porter and gatekeeper.

Lal Rao Butler at Pondicherry Lodge.

Mrs. Bernstone Housekeeper at Pondicherry Lodge.

Major Sholto Thaddeus’s and Bartholomew’s father.

Chapter Three

Mary shows Holmes

Chapter One a plan of a building on Chapter Five

Watson rails against which a note has been Holmes, Watson,

Holmes’s drug use, scribbled about the and Thaddeus find

The detective analyzes “sign of the four,” found Bartholomew murdered

the story behind among her father’s by a poisoned dart and

Watson’s watch. papers. the treasure gone.

Jonathan Small Englishman.

Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar

Jonathan Small’s associates.

Tonga

Native Andaman islander.

Athelney Jones

Scotland Yard detective. Mordecai Smith Boat owner. Mrs. Cecil Forrester

Mary Morstan’s employer.

Chapter Two

Mary Morstan asks for Holmes’s help in solving the twin mysteries of her missing father and an anonymous benefactor who now wants to meet her.

Chapter Four

Mary’s benefactor, Thaddeus Sholto, reveals that her father is dead and that his own late father hid “the Agra treasure,” which his brother Bartholomew has now found.

I

t is 1888 and Holmes, with no case to occupy him, resorts to cocaine, to Watson’s dismay. But a puzzle for Holmes to solve appears with the arrival of Mary Morstan, the daughter of a former Indian Army officer who vanished in London 10 years earlier. At the time, his friend Major Sholto told Mary that he had no idea the captain was in the country. Four years after Captain Morstan’s disappearance, Mary began to receive an annual, anonymous gift of a pearl, and now her mysterious benefactor wants to meet her.