Review: A Study In Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

A Study In Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

I suspect like many people who are currently working their way through The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, my recent interest in Sherlock Holmes has partially come about as a result of the two Guy Ritchie Holmes movies, but mainly due to the Stephen Moffat/Mark Gatiss modern interpretation, Sherlock. So good is the Moffat/Gatiss Sherlock, especially series two, that I was driven straight to The Complete Stories to find out the origin story, if you will.

And boy, what a challenge. OK, so I’m in no way comparing my mission of devouring the Conan Doyle back catalogue as in any shape, way or form as monumental (for there is no better word) as my BFaM Matt’s The King Long Read epic, but still, The Complete Stories clock in at 1408 pages of relatively small print. Well, it’s a mission for me, at least.

So I start at the very beginning, which many consider a pretty average place to start, all things considered. The Holmes canon consists of four novels and 56 short stories. Chronologically, there’s two novels to start, then the other two interspersed amongst all the short stories. The book I’m reading (both hardback and Kindle – who says men can’t multitask?) has the novels up front, then the short stories afterwards. This is disappointing, as the consensus (including The Complete Stories editors’ notes) seems to be that the novels (at least the first two) are a bit crappy, and Conan Doyle only hits his stride with the short stories, defining the Holmes we know of today.

A Study In Scarlet is first up, then. It’s the origin story of Watson meeting Holmes: the characters are introduced and developed, detective and logic skills are thrown in, and personality quirks and idiosyncrasies quickly become entrenched; all this set against the backdrop of a particularly puzzling crime. And so it passes that clues are discovered, reasoning and deduction occurs, false leads are pursued (though mostly by the Scotland Yard detective buffoons who Holmes so likes to mock), all of which leads to the miraculous apprehension of the perp at the end of part one. Miraculous is the right word, as Holmes’ arrest of said criminal occurs out of the blue, with no real prior reference to him. Fortunately, part two of the book takes us 35 years prior to the setting of the story, to the frontiers of the West in America, a setting in to which Mormon frontiersmen are introduced, along with non-believers, forbidden love, and revenge, and fleshes the back story out quite nicely.

The weaving of the two parts of the story into a coherent whole is quite neat – at first the disjoint between the two seemed jarring, but I got on board with it quite quickly, and grew to enjoy it. I think I suffer from being too forgiving when reading, as I really quite enjoyed this. As an introduction in to the Holmes canon, consider me hooked. If the short stories are, as alleged, much better than this, I await them eagerly.