A Study in Scarlet

What It's About

A struggling young doctor, invalided home from military service, needs someone to share lodgings with. He's introduced to an odd, brilliant stranger with an uncanny habit of deducing a person's history from small details — and so begins one of literature's most famous partnerships. Before long, the pair are drawn into a police investigation: a man found dead in an empty house, with no visible wound and a single word scrawled in blood on the wall. The case takes the detective's powers of observation and reasoning to their limit, and the story eventually shifts entirely, tracing back decades to events far from London that explain how the victim came to meet his end.

Key Concepts

The novel introduces the method that would define the character for the next century: reasoning backward from small, overlooked details to a complete picture of events, rather than working forward from a theory. It's also notable for its unusual structure, breaking away partway through from the London narrative into a self-contained account of earlier events on the American frontier before returning to tie the two strands together.

About the Author

Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish-born writer and physician, trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh before turning to fiction full-time. Beyond his literary career, he held wide-ranging interests, including an outspoken later commitment to spiritualism, and he was knighted in 1902.