Study Guide

One of my dearest friends is a long time enthusiast of Sherlock Holmes. To my friend's credit, he has never tried to hard sell me on reading Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories. Still, he's had his thumb on the scale for years, and that combined with the recent added weight of the stellar second batch of episodes of the BBC's Sherlock finally sold me -- I decided to pick up the complete stories of Holmes and start working my way through them in order.

Though the vast majority of Doyle's writing of Holmes was in short story form, he created the character in the full length novel, A Study in Scarlet. It chronicles the first meeting of Holmes and Watson, the procurement of their flat at 221B Baker Street, and the tackling of their first case together -- a bloodless murder with an apparent revenge motive.

I've been told that Doyle is not altogether consistent in his writing of his characters. Combine that with many authors' natural pattern of "finding a voice" slowly over time, and I found that A Study in Scarlet bears only some resemblance to the Sherlock Holmes that became world famous.

Holmes is famously played as a dispassionate, calculating analyst. The Holmes of this first novel is actually quite emotional. He has no small amount of pride, and displays warmth and humor in excess of what he's commonly shown to possess. Most significantly different is his attitude toward people less mentally gifted than himself. I think of Holmes as irritated by such people, barely tolerating their intrusion into his life; in this novel, Holmes is actually seems amused by others' shortcomings.

Watson, on the other hand, seems to be truer to form. Though some adaptations of Doyle's writing have done better than others in providing an essential role for Watson in the action, Doyle absolutely knew what he was doing in creating a character to be a first-person narrator of his detective stories. The problem of writing a mystery is to find a way to casually drop in clues that the reader could pick up on as "playing fair with the audience," without hanging a bell on them and making them too obvious. Watson solves this problem by becoming a veil behind which to hide some information when necessary; he can tell us that Holmes has clearly perceived something, while himself lacking the objectivity to tell us exactly what.

But more than the not-yet-evolved treatment of Holmes, there is a bigger problem with the novel. Five of its 14 chapters are devoted to a sub-narrative explaining the motivation of the killer in a prolonged flashback. This section is written in the third person, conveying information Watson has no knowledge of, and revolves mostly around two characters that never appear again in Doyle's writing. It's a lot of time and words devoted to establishing secondary characters; who is Doyle planning to serialize here, Holmes and Watson, or Freeman and Lucy?

That said, though the flashback feels long and off-point, it is compellingly written. There is tension and danger in this section of the book that even outpaces that of the main narrative, and I rather paradoxically found it the fastest section of the book to read. (Although maybe that came from wanting to plow through it quickly; it's positioned just at the moment Holmes reveals that he's solved the case, but before he reveals any details of the solution.)

On the one hand, A Study in Scarlet -- when taken solely on its own -- does leave me wondering how Holmes managed to catch fire so massively despite some obvious shortcomings. On the other hand, I found it much more entertaining and easier to read the other novels more than a century old. I think I'd average it all out to just a B-, though I am looking forward to continuing my journey through the stories of Sherlock Holmes.