Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – A Study in Scarlet (1887)
Novel – read via the Classicly app for the iPhone, May 2011
- 3 nods out of 5 -
Some people never go out of fashion: Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, Richard Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes. From his beginning in the Victorian era, Holmes has continued to thrill audiences in an array of creations in continuing dramas, radio plays and movies (currently there are both a BBC series and an ongoing film franchise). There is no other more popular fictional detective than the magnifying glass welding Holmes.
Although the short stories have proved the more popular (56 short stories and only four full length novels), A Study in Scarlet is noted as the very first appearance of the detective, of the meeting of Holmes and Watson, in what was the start of a beautiful friendship. Holmes investigative skills are apparent in a smug, confident and appealing manner; the title of the book revealed in one of his statements: ‘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.’
As was the custom with the vast majority of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, Watson is the chief narrator; but the novel is rather intriguing in its switch from Watson to an over viewing third-person narrative. Holmes apprehends the story’s murderer at this juncture, with the novel removed from the streets of London to the plains of Utah, as the murderer’s own story is revealed in a complex mix of revenge and Mormonism.
The novel attracted little attention when originally published; but yet the Holmes legend would grow via an array of short stories. Here the character was created, and up and up it would grow until it became embedded in our popular culture, decade after decade.
