A Study in Scarlet

Although Sherlock Holmes is not the first investigator to appear in fiction—predecessors include Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket—he has become the most famous and iconic detective character, spawning the detective and mystery genres. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, originally based the character on a doctor he had trained under in medical school; the man’s ability to diagnose complex ailments by making detailed and seemingly irrelevant observations about each patient was inspiring. The popularity of the stories featuring Holmes, while not initially successful, reached such a fever pitch in the early 20th century that Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back from the dead after trying to kill the character off.

As the first of Doyle’s works to feature Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet establishes a lot of the characteristics that will come to define the character throughout the series: eccentric in his interests and knowledge, arrogant and self-confident, not sociable, cold toward others, and excitable when facing an interesting case. Holmes pretends he does not care what others think about him, but at the same time yearns for recognition and has a flair for the dramatic when investigating. He goes through episodes of working tirelessly, but then spends days barely moving—a cycle that foreshadows the cocaine use future short stories describe. Finally, this novel explains the erstwhile origin of the stories, which have ostensibly been written by Watson: After Holmes laments that Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade take credit for his work, Watson decides to chronicle his cases; the increased notoriety these case reports bring eventually cause Holmes to be employed by some of the most powerful and wealthy people in Europe, such as the UK Prime Minister and the King of Bohemia.

Most of the series’ recurring characters are foils to Holmes. Watson, Holmes’s roommate and partner, is often an audience stand-in. As a physician, Watson cares about healing injuries, and as a soldier, he is helpful with fisticuffs. However, Watson has none of Holmes’s skill of minute observation or deduction, so his amazed responses whenever Holmes solves a thorny case echo those of the equally confounded reader. Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade are two of a host of Scotland Yard detectives that appear throughout the series, whose main function is to demonstrate Holmes’s superiority to conventionally trained lawmen. Lastly, Wiggins is part of the Baker Street irregulars, a group of street boys that Holmes regularly employs to gather intelligence because criminals are less guarded around them, and they have the ability to be all over London.