Review: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle

[Russ Allbery]

A Study in Scarlet
by Arthur Conan Doyle

Series:    Sherlock Holmes #1
Publisher: AmazonClassics
Copyright: 1887
Printing:  February 2018
ISBN:      1-5039-5525-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     159

A Study in Scarlet is the short mystery novel (probably a novella,
although I didn't count words) that introduced the world to Sherlock
Holmes.

I'm going to invoke the 100-year-rule and discuss the plot of this book
rather freely on the grounds that even someone who (like me prior to a
few days ago) has not yet read it is probably not that invested in
avoiding all spoilers. If you do want to remain entirely unspoiled,
exercise caution before reading on.

I had somehow managed to avoid ever reading anything by Arthur Conan
Doyle, not even a short story. I therefore couldn't be sure that some
of the assertions I was making in my review of A Study in Honor were
correct. Since A Study in Scarlet would be quick to read, I decided on
a whim to do a bit of research and grab a free copy of the first Holmes
novel. Holmes is such a part of English-speaking culture that I thought
I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

This was largely true, but cultural osmosis had somehow not prepared me
for the surprise Mormons.

A Study in Scarlet establishes the basic parameters of a Holmes story:
Dr. James Watson as narrator, the apartment he shares with Holmes at
221B Baker Street, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's competition
with police detectives, and his penchant for making leaps of logical
deduction from subtle clues. The story opens with Watson meeting
Holmes, agreeing to split the rent of a flat, and being baffled by the
apparent randomness of Holmes's fields of study before Holmes reveals
he's a consulting detective. The first case is a murder: a man is found
dead in an abandoned house, without a mark on him although there are
blood splatters on the walls and the word "RACHE" written in blood.

Since my only prior exposure to Holmes was from cultural references and
a few TV adaptations, there were a few things that surprised me. One is
that Holmes is voluble and animated rather than aloof. Doyle is clearly
going for passionate eccentric rather than calculating mastermind.
Another is that he is intentionally and unabashedly ignorant on any
topic not related to solving mysteries.

  My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally
  that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition
  of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this
  nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled
  round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I
  could hardly realize it.

  "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of
  surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

  "To forget it!"

  "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally
  is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such
  furniture as you chose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort
  that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to
  him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other
  things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now
  the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into
  his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help
  him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and
  all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that
  little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend
  upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you
  forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest
  importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the
  useful ones."

This is directly contrary to my expectation that the best way to make
leaps of deduction is to know something about a huge range of topics so
that one can draw unexpected connections, particularly given the
puzzle-box construction and odd details so beloved in classic
mysteries. I'm now curious if Doyle stuck with this conception, and if
there were any later mysteries that involved astronomy.

Speaking of classic mysteries, A Study in Scarlet isn't quite one,
although one can see the shape of the genre to come. Doyle does not
"play fair" by the rules that have not yet been invented. Holmes at
most points knows considerably more than the reader, including bits of
evidence that are not described until Holmes describes them and
research that Holmes does off-camera and only reveals when he wants to
be dramatic. This is not the sort of story where the reader is
encouraged to try to figure out the mystery before the detective.

Rather, what Doyle seems to be aiming for, and what Watson attempts
(unsuccessfully) as the reader surrogate, is slightly different: once
Holmes makes one of his grand assertions, the reader is encouraged to
guess what Holmes might have done to arrive at that conclusion. Doyle
seems to want the reader to guess technique rather than outcome, while
providing only vague clues in general descriptions of Holmes's behavior
at a crime scene.

The structure of this story is quite odd. The first part is roughly
what you would expect: first-person narration from Watson, supposedly
taken from his journals but not at all in the style of a journal and
explicitly written for an audience. Part one concludes with Holmes
capturing and dramatically announcing the name of the killer, who the
reader has never heard of before. Part two then opens with... a
western?

  In the central portion of the great North American Continent there
  lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served
  as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra
  Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to
  the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence.
  Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout the grim district. It
  comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy
  valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged
  cañons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white
  with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They
  all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness,
  inhospitality, and misery.

First, I have issues with the geography. That region contains some of
the most beautiful areas on earth, and while a lot of that region is
arid, describing it primarily as a repulsive desert is a bit much.
Doyle's boundaries and distances are also confusing: the Yellowstone is
a northeast-flowing river with its source in Wyoming, so the area
between it and the Colorado does not extend to the Sierra Nevadas (or
even to Utah), and it's not entirely clear to me that he realizes
Nevada exists.

This is probably what it's like for people who live anywhere else in
the world when US authors write about their country.

But second, there's no Holmes, no Watson, and not even the pretense of
a transition from the detective novel that we were just reading. Doyle
just launches into a random western with an omniscient narrator. It
features a lean, grizzled man and an adorable child that he adopts and
raises into a beautiful free spirit, who then falls in love with a wild
gold-rush adventurer. This was written about 15 years before the first
critically recognized western novel, so I can't blame Doyle for all the
cliches here, but to a modern reader all of these characters are
straight from central casting.

Well, except for the villains, who are the Mormons. By that, I don't
mean that the villains are Mormon. I mean Brigham Young is the on-page
villain, plotting against the hero to force his adopted daughter into a
Mormon harem (to use the word that Doyle uses repeatedly) and ruling
Salt Lake City with an iron hand, border guards with passwords (?!),
and secret police. This part of the book was wild. I was laughing
out-loud at the sheer malevolent absurdity of the thirty-day countdown
to marriage, which I doubt was the intended effect.

We do eventually learn that this is the backstory of the murder, but we
don't return to Watson and Holmes for multiple chapters. Which leads me
to the other thing that surprised me: Doyle lays out this backstory,
but then never has his characters comment directly on the morality of
it, only the spectacle. Holmes cares only for the intellectual
challenge (and for who gets credit), and Doyle sets things up so that
the reader need not concern themselves with aftermath, punishment, or
anything of that sort. I probably shouldn't have been surprised — this
does fit with the Holmes stereotype — but I'm used to modern fiction
where there is usually at least some effort to pass judgment on the
events of the story. Doyle draws very clear villains, but is utterly
silent on whether the murder is justified.

Given its status in the history of literature, I'm not sorry to have
read this book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It is very much of
its time: everyone's moral character is linked directly to their
physical appearance, and Doyle uses the occasional racial stereotype
without a second thought. Prevailing writing styles have changed, so
the prose feels long-winded and breathless. The rivalry between Holmes
and the police detectives is tedious and annoying. I also find it hard
to read novels from before the general absorption of techniques of
emotional realism and interiority into all genres. The characters in A
Study in Scarlet felt more like cartoon characters than fully-realized
human beings.

I have no strong opinion about the objective merits of this book in the
context of its time other than to note that the sudden inserted western
felt very weird. My understanding is that this is not considered one of
the better Holmes stories, and Holmes gets some deeper characterization
later on. Maybe I'll try another of Doyle's works someday, but for now
my curiosity has been sated.

Followed by The Sign of the Four.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed: 2023-12-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-5039-5525-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>