The story
A Study in Scarlet is a short novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in London in late 1887. It introduces Dr. John Watson, an army doctor invalided home from Afghanistan, who becomes the flatmate of Sherlock Holmes, a self-employed consulting detective, at 221B Baker Street. They investigate a murder in an empty house, with the word RACHE scrawled in blood on the wall. The second half of the book leaves London for Utah and the Mormon settlements to explain the motive.
Doyle (1859 to 1930) was a Scottish doctor with a struggling practice who wrote in his spare time. He based Holmes partly on Joseph Bell, a surgeon at Edinburgh whose habit of deducing a patient's life from small details had impressed him. He was also well aware of Poe's Dupin and of the French writer Emile Gaboriau. He sold the rights for about 25 pounds, and the book had modest success. The character took off only when Doyle began writing short stories for the new Strand Magazine from 1891, and their serial format and Sidney Paget's illustrations made Holmes a celebrity.
Doyle grew tired of the character and killed him in 1893 in 'The Final Problem', but public outcry forced him to bring Holmes back, in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901 to 1902) and in later stories. Holmes appears in four novels and 56 short stories, and he has been played by more actors than almost any other character in film.
Why it mattered
- Holmes made the detective a lasting cultural hero and defined the genre's puzzle form for the golden age of detective fiction.
- The Strand Magazine model, with a recurring hero in self-contained stories, shaped popular fiction and later television.
- The method of reasoning from small clues influenced the public image of forensic science.
Sources
- Arthur Conan Doyle Britannica
- The Creator of Sherlock Holmes Was, Like Many Victorians, Fascinated by Mormons Smithsonian Magazine
Community notes
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