A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

"There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."

One of the elements in the Back to the Classics Reading Challenge this year is to read a classic detective novel.  When choosing which book to tackle for this one, my mind went immediately to the most famous of all literary detectives, Sherlock Holmes.  Aside from being a fan of the Robert Downey Jr. movies and reading "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" with my sixth graders years ago, my knowledge of Sherlock Holmes is woefully inadequate.  So, I decided it was high time I got to know this character.  Naturally, I started at the beginning of his adventures with the very first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet.

*Warning - Spoilers follow!*

The plot of A Study in Scarlet is framed as a recollection in the journal of one Dr. John Watson, who becomes Holmes' roommate in the beginning of the novel.  Dr. Watson is immediately intrigued by the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, who reveals himself to be an expert in the science of deduction, which he uses to help the police solve crimes.  Before long, Watson is able to tag along after Holmes when his help is requested in the investigation of a mysterious murder.  A dead man has been discovered in a vacant house in Brixton.  The body is unmarked, making the cause of death difficult to determine, and the only clues of note are a lady's wedding ring and a word scrawled in blood on the wall. As Holmes uses his superior thinking skills to deduce the identity of the murderer, Watson records the events as they unfold. In this way, the readers get to experience watching Holmes do his impressive detective work.

This is a fun little adventure, but I admit, I was surprised by some of the content.  I'm not going to be the arrogant blogger who criticizes Arthur Conan Doyle's work with her nose up in the air here (because I obviously could not do better were I to try and write a mystery novel), but I had a few hangups that I want to explore.  To be clear, I liked the story, but I expected to be a little bit more impressed than I was.  I'm disappointed that I wasn't exactly blown away with this novel.

I thought Sherlock Holmes was a delightfully weird character.  His expertise in fields as diverse as boxing, chemistry and the violin were intriguing, and his quick wit and intelligence were very fun to read.  I love smart, quirky characters, so the way Doyle characterized Holmes was right up my alley.  I also really liked some of his comments regarding how other, lesser, people try to take credit for the work of more capable people.  Although I am not a detective, I know the type of people he was commenting on very well, so his thoughts rang true to me, especially this remark:

"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence...The question is, what can you make people believe you have done?"     

So while I really enjoyed Holmes as a character, some of his "deductions" during the plot of the novel struck me as absolutely impossible.  For a character who claims to do all of his detective work through pure logic, a lot of what Holmes said seemed to me to be nothing more than amazingly accurate guesses.  For example, towards the end of the novel, when Holmes is describing how he put all the pieces of the crime together, he says this of the wedding ring that was found near the murder victim:

 "Clearly, the murderer had used [the wedding ring] to remind his victim of some dead or absent woman."

Well, obviously, right?  Who wouldn't guess that?

These type of deductions happen again and again throughout the novel.  While I understand that the reader is supposed to just go along for the ride and chalk these deductions up to the brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, they rang false to me.  I would have preferred the story to be a bit more intricate, and contain revelations that actually made sense when all is said and done at the end.

On the other hand, I do acknowledge that A Study in Scarlet is an early detective novel, and also Doyle's first story with Sherlock Holmes.  Perhaps the mysteries and deductions become better as the stories go on.  In any case, while I was rolling my eyes a bit at what Holmes was able to "deduce," I still enjoyed him as a character very much.

Another bit of weirdness I experienced with the story was how it switches narration completely in the middle of the novel and starts telling the backstory of the murderer. The first part of the book is clearly labeled as coming from the notes of Dr. Watson, and tells the story of the murder and Holmes' investigation of it.  Holmes gets to the point of arresting the murderer, you turn the page, and all of a sudden you're reading about a man walking through the desert in the American Southwest.  The change is so abrupt and unexpected that I honestly thought that I had touched something wrong on my Kindle and had somehow switched books. 

Eventually, you figure out what you're reading once you get to learn some of the characters' names, but the shift seemed bizarre.  About half of the novel deals with this flashback, and I hate to say it, but it's rather boring.  While it gives you information to clarify why the murder that the novel is centered around occurs, no character in this section is as interesting as Sherlock Holmes.  I wanted to get back to him to see how he solved the crime, not read about how evil the Mormons that settled Salt Lake City were.

Speaking of that, the fact that the crime is rooted in the practices of the Mormon faith was bizarre. When you pick up a Sherlock Holmes novel, the last thing you would suspect is that a band of murderous Mormons, including Brigham Young himself, are a significant part of the story.  Expect the unexpected when you read Sherlock Holmes, I guess.

Eventually, the narration shifts back to Watson's notes, and the last few chapters of the novel consist of Holmes explaining how he figured the whole thing out. I found this structure to be disruptive to the reading process.  The inclusion of the backstory didn't seem to flow naturally into Watson's journal and it broke my ability to get lost in the story.

The last little piece of the story that troubled me was some of the language that Doyle uses in describing different characters.  A lot of his wording has not aged well.  He refers to a band of street boys that Holmes employs as "street Arabs," some stereotypical references to Native Americans are used, and his depiction of the Mormon faith is more than a bit troubling.  Doyle refers to their practice of marrying multiple wives as having "harems" and depicts their religion as one steeped in kidnapping and murder. 

I did a bit of research to see if Doyle's depiction of Mormonism was in any way based on fact, and it turns out that it really wasn't. While there is some historical precedent for violence within the Mormon community, it does not appear that anything like what Doyle wrote about was true.  Doyle himself admitted that his description of Mormons was stated "more luridly" than a historical piece of writing would have been.  Years later, his daughter said that, "You know, father would be the first to admit that his first Sherlock Holmes novel was full of errors about the Mormons."  So basically, Doyle's writing was offensive, and it was recognized as being offensive during his lifetime.  Not exactly cool.  However, his depiction, incorrect as it is, was based on the misinformation about Mormons that was rife during his time period.  We can't judge Doyle too harshly by contemporary standards, it's just a bit jarring to read such an antiquated and prejudiced account of a religion.  

So essentially, while I did like reading A Study in Scarlet and being introduced to one of the most famous literary characters of all time, the experience was not quite as impressive as I was expecting.  Some pretty unrealistic "deductions," and a bizarre and troubling backstory impeded my enjoyment of the mystery plot.  I am definitely interested in reading more of Sherlock Holmes' adventures though, because I suspect that they must become better as they go on.  I get the feeling that this first story must be like the first couple episodes of some TV series - a bit awkward until they really find their footing.  This one is okay, but I have a feeling that my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories are still in front of me.