A Study In Scarlet [SPOILERS]

By BinaryMeadow

A Study in Scarlet was kind of a big deal for me and for novels too. It was the first detective/mystery book I ever read, and apparently it was also the first time Sherlock Holmes showed up in a novel, so yeah, this is basically where it all starts, the whole Sherlock thing, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book. What stood out most to me was Holmes’s way of working. His deduction stuff felt pretty revolutionary, like the tiniest detail can matter. I’d also guess that by today’s standards he’d probably be seen as neurodiverse or something like that, since he seemed to know almost nothing outside his own narrow area, and Watson points out his limits pretty early on. Watson himself is the narrator, and I liked getting the story through him. He was a doctor in the British army, got sent to Afghanistan, got wounded, and had to come back. Because of that he couldn’t really manage living alone, and then he ends up hearing about Holmes through a friend who mentions the move to 221B Baker Street and that Holmes wanted a roommate. Holmes’s skills still seem wild even now. He can tell a cigar or tobacco from ash, figure out someone’s height, what shoes they wore, and just go through every possibility. That makes Lestrade and Gregson from Scotland Yard look pretty small-minded next to him. They even jump to a woman named “Rachel” because of a wedding ring and the word “RACHE” in blood, which is... yeah. The book is split into two parts, with the first part about the Brixton Road case and the second part explaining who actually did the murder and what happened. And it matches up really well with what Holmes had already worked out just by looking at the scene with a tape measure and magnifying glass and using his whole data approach, which he calls data, and I guess that word is old now. You also get a bit about Holmes loving the violin, both playing it himself and watching Norman Neruda, and Watson hints at him using drugs at one point. Honestly there’s a lot here, so I’d just say read it. It’s not even that long, and it’s a classic for a reason. Really worth it.