It begins with a wounded army doctor, home from Afghanistan, looking for cheap lodgings — and being warned that the man he is about to share rooms with is a little odd. So Dr Watson meets Sherlock Holmes, and literature’s greatest partnership begins. A Study in Scarlet (1887) is where it all starts.
What strikes you, returning to the first story, is how fully formed Holmes arrives. On their first afternoon he astonishes Watson — and us — by deducing his entire history from a glance, and lays out his ‘Science of Deduction’: the method of reasoning backward from small, overlooked details that Conan Doyle would ride to immortality. The detective who sees what everyone else merely looks at was born complete.
The novel is a curious hybrid — half a brilliant London mystery, half a strange, sprawling flashback to the American West and a Mormon revenge plot. Later Holmes stories would tighten into perfection, but there is a special pleasure in the origin: the first spark of the friendship, the first ‘Elementary’ logic, the first fog-bound hansom cab. Every detective who reasons from a cigar ash or a muddy boot is his heir.
Read it, then go on through the whole canon and the greatest of the adventures.
Read A Study in Scarlet — the Erato Press edition →
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