“Poor devil!” he said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my misfortunes. “What are you up to now?”
“Looking for lodgings,” I answered. “Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.”
“That’s a strange thing,” remarked my companion; “you are the second man to-day that has used that expression to me.”
“And who was the first?” I asked.
“A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital….”
Back in 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle was a struggling physician in the London suburb of Southsea (I’ve always understood that he was an ophthalmologist, but his Wikipedia bio says he didn’t turn to eye medicine until a few years later). Lacking patients, he devoted some of his abundant leisure time to writing, with some success. He sold a detective story called “A Study in Scarlet” to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a publication remembered today almost solely for that story. It was a one-off; Doyle took the modest fee and went on to other things.
But the story came to the attention of the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine in the US, and he commissioned a sequel. This would be “The Sign of the Four.” Doyle’s fictional detective, based to a large degree on the analytical methods of his medical teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, was off like a galloping horse – one that would eventually (in Doyle’s view) run away with its owner.
Having, as I mentioned before, started re-watching the excellent BBC Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett, I decided it would be pleasant to re-read the stories – something I haven’t done, I think, since the 1970s. I was right. I enjoyed “A Study in Scarlet,” which I read in this inexpensive Kindle collection (they’re all out of copyright now) immensely.
If you’re not familiar with the story (it’s never been properly dramatized, for reasons I can understand), it’s narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, an army surgeon recently returned from Afghanistan, where he was wounded in action. He’s living on his medical pension while recovering, and starts looking for a roommate. (See the extract above.) He soon finds himself living at 221B Baker Street with the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, whose profession is a mystery to him for a while. Finally, Holmes reveals that his frequent visitors, Lestrade and Gregson, are Scotland Yard detectives. He himself is the world’s first “Consulting Detective.” When the policemen ask Holmes to come view a body found in an empty suburban house, Holmes asks Watson to come along.
I’ll leave it at that. The story is to get hold of, and easy to read. Doyle’s prose is certainly Victorian, but not stuffily so. His characters are vivid; his dialogue is sharp, even after all these years.
I’ve always rated “A Study in Scarlet” as one of the weaker stories, mainly because of the “back story” chapters, where the murderer – arrested (he uses the delightful Americanism “snackled” for it) after being lured in by Holmes, explains how and why he came to commit the terrible murders he is confessing. The story takes us back to the American Wild West and the Mormon state of Utah. This back story works better than I remember, though (although I have no time for Mormon theology) I still think the Mormons are portrayed pretty harshly.
But taken all together, I found “A Study in Scarlet” more entertaining than I expected. And I have even better stories to look forward to, as I move into Doyle’s stronger work.
One caveat about this edition – it appears that, in scanning, the OCR software incorporated the page numbers into the text. So you’ve got to ignore those when they show up.
Sherlock Holmes has held up remarkably well. Even in this age of Harry Potter, iPads, etc. my kids love the original stories and novellas.
Good to hear.
My memory is that taken individually, Sherlock Holmes stories are entertaining. But I made the mistake of reading them en masse some years back when a single volume complete collection showed up on my bookshelf. Read one after the other they became rather formulaic.
One interesting characteristic I noted was that none of the rich people made their fortune in England. All of the wealthy characters living in stately rural mansions had made their fortunes in the remote corners of the world; Africa, Asia, America. They then moved back to England to live out their lives in leisure and luxury.
Doyle famously got bored with Holmes as time went on. He was pretty much phoning it in toward the end, knowing the public would buy anything he wrote about the character, and the pay was good. Some of the later stories are pretty poor.
I’ve long wondered how accurate – or otherwise – an impression of the Mormons this gives – and have never yet done enough ‘homework’ to my mind, though I thoroughly enjoyed running into Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943).
Having delighted in D. Martin Dakin’s Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1971) and William Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1975), I still have too fuzzy a sense of the textual history – something recently brought home to me by Simon Stanhope’s excellent Bitesized Audio Classic version of “The Cardboard Box” on YouTube (with fine introductory note)!
The Mormons certainly committed some atrocities, most famously the Mountain Valley Massacre. Not that surprising, considering the persecution they’d suffered and their sense of alienation. But (I haven’t read up on it either), I wonder if, for the Mormons themselves, the culture was as oppressive as Doyle portrays it. (Many people consider Victorian England pretty darn oppressive too.) Doyle seemed to enjoy using loud colors to paint his foreign excursions in the stories (sorry about the mixed metaphors), and he wasn’t overly concerned about fairness to other cultures.
I must say I was astonished when I caught up with his (non-Holmes) “Mystery of Cloomber” recently.