A Study in Scarlet Summary: Sherlock Holmes's First Case Explained
What A Study in Scarlet is about
Published in 1887, A Study in Scarlet is the novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson to the world. It opens in 1881 with Watson back in London after service in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, short of money and looking for lodgings. A friend named Stamford mentions a man who wants someone to split the rent on rooms at 221B Baker Street, and warns Watson about his eccentricities. The two men size each other up, take the rooms, and the most famous partnership in detective fiction begins.
Holmes calls himself a consulting detective. Watson, puzzled by the stream of visitors, slowly works out what that means, and a demonstration of Holmes's deductive method turns his scepticism into astonishment. Then a telegram arrives. A man has been found dead in an abandoned house on Brixton Road, with no wound on his body, blood splashed about the room, and the word RACHE written on the wall. Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade are already there and already going wrong.
The dead man is Enoch Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio. His secretary, Joseph Stangerson, is missing. Holmes dismisses the bloody message as a deliberate distraction, concludes that Drebber was poisoned, and produces a description of the killer from the marks on the ground and in the room. A woman's gold wedding ring is found beneath the body. That ring becomes the thread Holmes follows.
The novel has an unusual shape. Part one is Watson's account of the investigation. Part two, titled The Country of the Saints, leaves London and Holmes entirely and goes back to Utah's Salt Lake Valley in 1847, telling the story that produced the murder more than thirty years before it happened. Readers either love this structure or find it jarring. Either way, it is the reason the book feels less like a puzzle and more like a tragedy with a detective attached.
The main characters
Sherlock Holmes arrives almost fully formed. Cold in manner, theatrical in method, contemptuous of the official police, and happy to use whatever tools work, including a magnifying glass. This was the first work of detective fiction to put that glass in the detective's hand.
Watson is the narrator and the reader's stand-in, a wounded army doctor with time on his hands and a growing fascination with his flatmate. Gregson and Lestrade of Scotland Yard supply the contrast, industrious and jealous of each other, reaching for the nearest suspect. Wiggins leads the Baker Street Irregulars, the gang of street children Holmes pays to go where he cannot.
The second half belongs to John Ferrier and the girl he adopts, Lucy, the only survivors of a pioneer party rescued in 1847 by a group of Latter-day Saints led by Brigham Young, on the condition that they live under the Mormon faith. Jefferson Hope is the man Lucy loves, and Drebber and Stangerson are the sons of Council members who want her instead.
Themes
The title comes from a speech Holmes makes to Watson about the nature of his work: "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it." Murder as a bright stain in an otherwise drab weave is the governing image of the book.
Underneath the detection sits a long argument about justice and revenge. The law in London is slow, clumsy and keen to arrest the convenient man. The crime it is investigating grew out of a different failure of justice on another continent, where power had no check on it. Doyle sets private vengeance against official procedure and refuses to make the contest simple. Identity runs alongside it: disguise, false names, a man working as a cabby in plain sight, a killer who is also a mourner.
Why it still matters
It attracted almost no public interest at the time. It appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, of which only eleven complete copies are now known to exist, which is why they are worth so much. Doyle went on to write fifty-six Holmes short stories and only four full-length novels, of which this is the first. The Sign of the Four followed in 1890. Everything the Holmes industry runs on, Baker Street, the doubting doctor, the exasperated Yard men, starts here.
How it ends (spoilers)
Holmes advertises the found ring, guessing the killer will come for it, and an old woman claims it. She slips away, and Holmes concludes she was a young man in disguise. Gregson meanwhile arrests Alice Charpentier's brother, who had chased the drunken Drebber with a cudgel after Drebber tried to grab his sister. Then Stangerson is found stabbed in a hotel room, RACHE written in blood again, with two pills in a small box among his things. Holmes tests them on an ailing terrier. One does nothing. The other kills it. He sends Wiggins for a cab, and when the cabby comes upstairs for the luggage, Holmes handcuffs him. The driver is Jefferson Hope.
Part two explains him. Forbidden to marry Lucy, Hope saw Ferrier killed by Stangerson and Lucy taken back and forced to marry Drebber. She died within a month. Hope took her wedding ring from her body and swore vengeance, then pursued the two men for over twenty years, through Cleveland and across Europe, carrying an aortic aneurysm with him the whole way.
More: Sherlock Holmes Books in Order · More Sir Arthur Conan Doyle posters