New Book - A Study in Scarlet - Sherlock Holmes 1 - by Arthur Conan Doyle (Pages 1 - 33)

 

First Published: December 27, 1887

This is the first Sherlock Holmes novel written by Arthur Conan Doyle. The narrator is Dr Watson, and he explains that in 1878  after serving the Northumberland Fusiliers, he was wounded in Afghanistan in the war, so he was sent back to England.

Dr Watson has no relatives in London, and he first stays at a hotel, but he wants to find lodgings. Then he runs into a colleague, Young Stamford, and he tells him about ssomeone in the hospital wanting to find someone to share his lodgings. That is how Dr Watson meets Sherlock Holmes.

At first Dr Watson is confused about what Holmes does. He has knowledge about a great variety of subjects, but his occupation is something Watson can't guess. There are a lot of people who come to visit him. 

Then one morning Watson reads an article about the power of deduction, and he laughs at the absurdity of the claims of the author. When he explains it to Holmes, Sherlock says that he wrote the article himself, and he can prove that his power of deduction is reliable, and he says that he is a consulting detective, who often helps the police.

That morning Holmes gets a letter in which another Scotland Yard detective, Tobias Gregson, tells himt that a dead man has been found in an empty house off Brixton Road. Holmes asks Watson to come with him, and in the house Gregson and Lestrade tell the newcomers that even though there is blood, the man has no wound, and what they found on him was some letters from Cleveland, Ohio, between Enoch J Drebbes and Joseph Stargerson, and there is also a woman's wedding ring and a passage for the Guian Steamship Company. The detectives do not know how he died, and then Lestrade finds that someone carved the wword "RACHE" in the wall, and he thinks that it must refer to Rachel. 

Holmes then says that Rache is the German word for vengeance, and from studying the house, he can say that two men arrive in a carriage, one of whom is the murderer, and he describes the man. The way the dead man died was poison. Watson and the other two detectives are flabbergasted to hear the information that Sherlock has provided from just examining the house.