A Study in Scarlet.

A wounded army doctor comes home from Afghanistan, takes rooms with a strange, brilliant lodger, and watches the science of deduction turn a locked London death into an unravelling thread. So begins one of literature's great partnerships.

What it's about

Dr John Watson, invalided out of the army, needs cheap lodgings and finds himself sharing Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective unlike anyone he has met. When a man is discovered dead in an empty house with no wound and a single word scrawled in blood on the wall, Scotland Yard is baffled and Holmes is delighted. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 debut for the character then swerves into an unexpected second half, carrying the story across the ocean to trace a long grudge back to its source before returning to Baker Street for the reckoning.

Themes

Reason against chaos runs through every page, along with the pleasure of watching a mind read a room the rest of us merely occupy. Doyle is also fascinated by justice and its limits, by how a wrong done years ago and far away can still demand its due, and by the friendship between two very different men that the whole Holmes canon would go on to build upon.

Why it still matters

This is where the modern detective story takes its recognisable shape: the eccentric genius, the loyal narrator, the clue that everyone else overlooked. Nearly every sleuth since owes something to these pages. Reading it now is like hearing the first bars of a tune the whole world would come to know by heart.

Who it's for

Perfect for anyone meeting Holmes for the first time, and rewarding for longtime readers who want to return to the beginning. If you love mystery, Victorian atmosphere, or simply a tightly wound puzzle told with wit, start here.

Sources and references

Verified references for this edition: Open Library, WorldCat.