A Study in Scarlet

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life."

In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, an army doctor home on sick leave, for the first time. Through Watson we learn a little about the eccentric figure who is his new room-mate at 221B Baker Street, before they encounter their first case: an American visitor to the city has been killed in an empty house off the Brixton Road, and the only clue the police have is the mysterious word 'Rache', scrawled in blood-red letters on the wall. As Holmes sets to work with his unique forensic methods, behind the murder a tangled skein of love, religion, and revenge gradually unwinds, taking us from the streets of London to the Utah Territory, and back again.

As Nicholas Daly's Introduction describes, out of this gripping tale grew the Holmes and Watson stories that would make Conan Doyle the best-paid author of his time. His creations have become household words, inspiring not only countless adaptations and imitations, but a Sherlock Holmes museum, Sherlock Holmes-themed pubs, and a whole array of Holmesian merchandise, from cushions to jigsaw puzzles. Here, though, we meet Holmes and Watson before they became famous, and we can see how their extraordinary impact on our popular culture derives from the late-Victorian world from which they emerge.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, and Trinity College Dublin. His publications include the books Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015). He has edited Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel and Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda for Oxford World's Classics. His Ruritania: A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess Diaries appeared from Oxford University Press in 2020.


Darryl Jones (General Editor) is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and popular fiction. He is the author or editor of ten books, including the Oxford World's Classics editions of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories (2011), Arthur Conan Doyle's Gothic Tales (2016), H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (2017), and The Island of Doctor Moreau (2017), as well as Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021).