A Study in Scarlet was Arthur Conan Doyle’s first introduction of the brilliant consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his friend, Dr. John Watson. It begins with the account of how two very different men came to share rooms in Baker Street, and how, before long, Watson was drawn into the most extraordinary adventure of his life. The tale moves from the crowded foggy streets of Victorian London to the wide, arid landscapes of the American West, stitching together a story of crime, passion, vengeance, and brilliant deduction.
Dr. John Watson had been an army surgeon, serving with the British forces in Afghanistan. A bullet had torn through his shoulder, leaving him weak and unable to continue active service. Illness followed injury, and he was shipped back to England, frail and with no family to turn to. His military pension allowed him a modest living, but London was expensive. He wandered the capital somewhat aimlessly until a friend suggested that he might share lodgings with another man in need of a companion. The man’s name was Sherlock Holmes.
Watson first met Holmes in the chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Holmes was bending over a test tube, eyes glinting with excitement. “I’ve found it!” he exclaimed. “The reagent which will precipitate hemoglobin and only hemoglobin. It’s the most practical discovery in medical jurisprudence.” Watson was startled by his enthusiasm. Holmes, turning, greeted him with an energetic handshake, immediately making observations about Watson’s military background. “You’ve been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” he remarked coolly. Watson, astonished, asked how he could possibly know, but Holmes only smiled. Later, when they discussed living arrangements, Holmes seemed perfectly agreeable, warning Watson that he had strange habits—occasional bouts of silence, chemical experiments, violin playing at odd hours—but he believed they could suit each other. Watson, amused, agreed. Soon they had taken up residence at 221B Baker Street, beginning what would become one of the most famous friendships in literature.
Life with Holmes was fascinating, though Watson could not always make sense of his companion. Holmes seemed ignorant of basic facts—he did not know the Earth revolved around the sun—but he could tell the trade of a man by the condition of his hands, or identify dozens of different tobacco ashes. He practiced boxing, played the violin hauntingly, and sometimes lay on the sofa for hours in deep thought. Watson kept notes on his eccentricities, puzzled by the limits of Holmes’s knowledge. One day, he asked outright what Holmes did for a living. Holmes replied that he was a “consulting detective,” the only one of his kind. “When the police are out of their depth, they come to me,” he explained. Watson, skeptical, was soon to see proof.
One morning, a letter arrived from Inspector Tobias Gregson of Scotland Yard. A man had been found dead under mysterious circumstances in a house on Brixton Road. Gregson begged for Holmes’s assistance. Holmes invited Watson along. “This will be instructive,” he said with a gleam in his eye.
At the house, a grim scene awaited them. The dead man lay sprawled on the floor of an empty room. He was middle-aged, well dressed, his face twisted in horror. Yet there was no wound upon him. On the wall above the body, written in blood, was a single word: RACHE. Around the corpse, Holmes examined footprints—some small and delicate, others large and square-toed. A woman’s wedding ring gleamed under the dust. Lestrade, another inspector, announced, “It looks like a crime of passion. Rache… that’s German for ‘revenge.’ The killer must be a foreigner.” Holmes only smiled thinly. “Rache may mean revenge, yes. But this is a trick. The murderer wished you to believe it.”
Watson observed his friend moving like a hawk across the room. Holmes sniffed the corpse, studied the soil on the victim’s boots, peered at candle drippings, and crouched to measure footprints. While the police argued theories of robbery and jealousy, Holmes whispered to Watson, “The man was poisoned. There is no wound, but the contortion of his features is unmistakable. And see the tracks of a man’s boots leading in and out? The murderer was tall, square-toed. He brought his victim here in a cab.”
The victim was soon identified as Enoch Drebber, an American staying in London. With him had been a secretary, Joseph Stangerson. Gregson and Lestrade pursued separate leads, each eager for credit. Gregson arrested a young man who had quarreled with Drebber in the past, while Lestrade searched for Stangerson. Holmes, unimpressed with both, quietly conducted his own experiments. He placed an advertisement about the lost wedding ring, certain it would draw the killer’s associates.
Sure enough, an elderly woman appeared at Baker Street to claim it. Holmes gave it to her, then in disguise followed her cab. But the trail ended suspiciously, and Holmes realized she had been a decoy sent to mislead him. Soon after, news came that Stangerson himself had been found murdered at a hotel. This time there was a knife wound to the heart, and once again “RACHE” was scrawled nearby. The police were bewildered.
Holmes alone was not surprised. He conducted chemical tests with pills found in the dead man’s possession. Then he asked Watson to observe carefully. “When I ring, bring in the constable waiting below.” Holmes wrote notes, dispatched messages, and finally requested that a cab be summoned. When the cabman entered, Holmes said quietly, “Gentlemen, allow me to present to you the murderer of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson.” The man froze, then lunged, but officers overpowered him. His name was Jefferson Hope, a cab driver by trade.
Watson could hardly believe it. How had Holmes known? “It was elementary,” Holmes explained later. “The murderer must have used a cab to spirit away his victim. Who better to disguise himself than a cabman? By tracing the cab numbers from the night, I found him. The pills confirmed it. One was harmless, the other deadly. He gave his victim the choice, forcing fate upon them.”
In custody, Jefferson Hope confessed freely. His story unrolled like another novel entirely, set far from London. Decades earlier, in the deserts of Utah, a party of exhausted emigrants had been saved from death by a band of Mormons. Among them were John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy. They grew prosperous under Mormon protection, but conflict arose when Lucy fell in love with a Gentile, Jefferson Hope, a hardy hunter and frontiersman. The Mormon elders, powerful and absolute, demanded Lucy marry one of their own: either Enoch Drebber or Joseph Stangerson. John Ferrier resisted, declaring Lucy free to choose. But the elders threatened death. Soon Ferrier was murdered, and Lucy was forced into marriage with Drebber. Her heart broke, and within weeks she died, whispering Jefferson Hope’s name.
Hope, consumed by grief, swore vengeance. For years he pursued Drebber and Stangerson across continents. He tracked them through America, then Europe. By the time he reached London, his own health was failing—an aortic aneurysm gave him only a short span to live. Still, he longed only for justice. One night he lured Drebber into his cab, drove him to the empty house, and offered him two pills—one harmless, the other poisoned. “Choose,” he said. Drebber chose death. Later, Hope confronted Stangerson at his hotel. Stangerson fought, so Hope killed him with his knife.
The word “RACHE” scrawled on the walls was his attempt to misdirect the police, though Holmes had seen through it at once. “I had my revenge,” Hope said. “Now I can die content.” Soon after, his aneurysm burst in his cell, and he was found dead, his mission complete.
Watson, reflecting, was awestruck. He had seen Sherlock Holmes’s method at work, his razor-sharp deductions outpacing the entire police force. The case itself had been grim, full of sorrow and blood, yet at its core was a love story and a man’s relentless pursuit of justice. Watson resolved to write the account, naming it A Study in Scarlet. “The scarlet thread of murder runs through the colorless skein of life,” Holmes had once remarked, and Watson thought the phrase perfect. Thus, from this first adventure, their partnership was sealed.
The story ends not with triumph but with reflection. Holmes, slightly irritated that the newspapers credited Gregson and Lestrade, shrugged off the lack of recognition. Watson, however, saw clearly that this was no ordinary man. “He is the best and wisest I have ever known,” he would later write. Their adventures had only just begun, but this scarlet-stained case on Brixton Road marked the start of one of the greatest legacies in literature.