Title: “A Study in Scarlet”
Year first published: 1887
Type: Novel
Chronology: First Sherlock Holmes story; one of four full-length novels and 56 short stories
Location(s): (Very briefly) Maiwand, Afghanistan; Peshiwar; University of London; Portsmouth; The Strand Hotel; The Criterion Bar; The Holborn; Baker Street; Audley Court; Duncan Street, Houndsditch; Charpentiers Boarding House, Torquay Terrace; The Sierra Blanco (USA); Salt Lake City, Utah; St. Petersburg; Paris; Copenhagen; Camberwell; Waterloo Bridge; York University
Date: March 4 1881 (?)
The crime or the mystery: Murder
Particulars of the crime or mystery: Method of murder unknown until the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, then found to be poison administered. No forced entry, no evidence of robbery, no marks on body, no blood. (Drebber) Found stabbed to death in his hotel room (Stangerson)
Scene(s) of the crime or mystery: 3 Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road, a deserted empty house (Drebber); Halliday’s Private Hotel (Stangerson)
Date(s) of the crime(s) or mystery: March 4, March 5
The time (if given): 2 AM (discovery); 6 AM
The Players
The Client: None
The victim(s): Enoch J. Drebber, an American and later Joseph Stangerson, also American
The accused or suspected: Arthur Charpentier
The arrested: Arthur Charpentier
The investigating officer(s): Inspector Tobias Gregson, Inspector Lestrade (Peripherally) PC John Rance, who unfortunately had the culprit that night but had let him go, believing him to be a mere drunkard.
The advocate(s):None
The real culprit(s): Jefferson Hope, Lucy Ferrier’s sweetheart
Others: Mrs. Sawyer, an old woman (really a man in disguise) who answers Holmes’ advertisement about the lost ring and collects it from Watson; Wiggins, leader of the “Baker Street Irregulars”; Madame Charpentier, owner of the boarding house where Drebber stayed; Alice Charpentier, her daughter, Arthur’s sister; John Ferrier, an American survivor of a pioneer wagon; Lucy Ferrier, the only other survivor, his adopted daughter, forced into marriage with Drebber after John’s death; Brigham Young, leader of the Mormons
The clues: Hansom cab wheel tracks outside the house, a woman’s wedding ring, a box of pills, a telegram saying “J.H. is in Europe” (unsigned)
The red herring(s)*: The word RACHE scrawled in blood on the wall. Lestrade thinks it’s part of a name - Rachel - at which Holmes grins and tells him it is the German word for revenge. But it’s all a blind anyway and has nothing to do with the murder.
The argument between Drebber and Arthur Charpentier, and the pursuit of the former by the latter, cudgel in hand.
The breakthrough: Holmes lays his hand on the murderer when he realises he is a cabman and sends for him
The result: The murderer confesses but dies of a heart condition before he can be brought to trial. See the synopsis below for the full story behind his crimes.
* Unlike in other journals, the term “red herrings” does not refer to the text/story, as in, elements that seem to have no bearing on the plot. Rather, they are things upon which the police fasten as being important, as being clues, when they either have nothing to do with the crime/mystery or are missteps which set them on the wrong path and line of thinking. This may lead to false arrests, accusations or just leads that go nowhere.
How the case is solved
Having determined that two men were in the empty house, that one is now absent and that Drebber was poisoned, and that both arrived in a cab, and further, having telegraphed to Cleveland and found that Drebber had taken out a protective order against Jefferson Hope, Holmes has all the pieces, and has only to fit them together. When he comes into possession of the tablets left in Stangerson’s room, he has the final link in his chain. He realises Hope must have driven Drebber to the murder scene, and therefore must be working as a cab driver.
Deductions made by Holmes which have nothing to do with the case:
That Watson has recently been in Afghanistan; That the caller who brings the news from Gregson about the crime is a retired marine sergeant.
Before the case
A short note as to what Holmes and Watson were doing before the case was brought to them, or before Holmes brought the case to Watson. What were they talking about? Where were they (almost always Baker Street of course)? What were they doing? Did what they were doing or talking about have any bearing on the case?
This being the first meeting of the two, there is no “before the case” as such, but before the telegram from Lestrade arrives Watson has been reading Holmes’ article on the science of deduction through observation (unaware that he is the author) and arguing with him over it. This leads of course to the first examples of Holmes’ incisive deductions, which take his friend by surprise and have him grudgingly admit that he may have been wrong in his assessment of the man.
Synopsis:
Having spent time in Afghanistan as an army doctor during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, John Watson returns to England, carrying an injured left arm. With most of his comrades dead or still in Afghanistan, he has nobody to come back to and having been away for some years has no house, so he goes looking for lodgings. A friend of his puts him in touch with a Sherlock Holmes, who is in the same situation as him and is looking for someone to share apartments he has found but cannot afford on his own. And so a legendary partnership is born. Intrigued by Holmes’ (he will never, despite what will become as deep a friendship as any between two people, call him by his first name, nor will anyone except one person) assertion that he can divine details of people from pure observation of their dress, their walk, their face, he puts this claim to the test and is astounded as Holmes proceeds to show how it is done. It all seems very simple, but then so is anything once you’ve been shown* how.
After some time in their new apartments in 221B Baker Street, it becomes apparent that Holmes is using the place as an office of sorts; seeing people who appear to need his help, including a police inspector known as Lestrade. For these consultations, iniitally, Holmes requests the room so that he and his clients can have privacy, but when a letter arrives for him and he reads it in Watson’s presence, he takes the doctor into his confidence, as he will do from now on. The letter is from another police inspector, by the name of Gregson, who requests his assistance in an unexplained murder.
Asking Watson to accompany him, Holmes sets off for the place, which turns out to be a deserted, empty house. A man lies dead inside, no mark on him, no blood except the word RACHE written on the wall. Although Lestrade - who uncovers the word - gleefully pins all his hopes on this, believing it to be the uncompleted name Rachel, Holmes dismisses it, remarking that it is in fact the German word for revenge, but is unimportant, an attempt by the murderer to throw them off the scent. Murderer? Yes, Holmes confirms grimly, this man was indeed murdered. When the two* police officers ask how, he says it was poison.
The man has been identified as Enoch J. Drebber, an American from Cleveland, Ohio, and a wedding ring is discovered at the scene. Both inspectors believe this points to the involvement of a woman (Lestrade probably privately still thinks this may be this Rachel) but Holmes is silent on the matter. He does what Watson will come to recognise as his usual thorough job of examining everything, inside the house and out, but says little. Holmes asks to speak to the constable (uniformed police officer) who discovered the body, and when they go to see PC John Rance Holmes is frustrated to hear that the constable had the murderer, or someone highly connected with it, in his hands, but let him go as he thought he was just a drunk. The canny detective though realises the man was just feigning being the worse for drink, and is angry that he is now in the wind.
He puts an advertisement in the local papers, advising of the finding of the wedding ring and asking if someone lost it to please call to Baker Street, then returns home with Watson. The next day they have a visit from an old woman, who agrees the ring is hers, and it is duly handed over. Holmes follows her, but she vanishes, having taken a cab, and he realises in annoyance that the old woman was in fact a young man in disguise, no doubt a confederate of the killer.* He send his small army of “street arabs”, as they called them in the nineteenth century - basically urchins, small lads similar perhaps to ***in’s army of children in Oliver Twist, you know the kind of thing - on some errand. Annoyed when he is given the slip, Holmes is somewhat more amused when Inspector Gregson turns up, claiming to have solved the crime. He has someone in custody, and is convinced he is their man. Having obtained the address of the dead man’s hatter from his hat, which was beside his body, he went there and got from the man Drebber’s address. He then visited the boarding house where Drebber was staying, found out that the landlady there had a dispute with him over his unwanted attentions towards her daughter, and that her brother had gone after him. He has jumped to the conclusion that Arthur Charpentier therefore is the murderer. Holmes privately tuts and shakes his head: he knows that often the simplest and most obvious solution is rarely the right one, but it gives him some satisfaction to see the police blunder about on the wrong trail.
The wrong trail indeed. A short while later Lestrade rushes in, to bring them the news that Drebber’s secretary, Joseph Stangerson, has also been murdered. So it could not have been Charpentier after all, at least, the second murder could not have been carried out by him. Gregson is crestfallen as his neatly-tied-up case bursts apart, but Holmes brightens when he hears what Lestrade considers unimportant information about the other murder, that there was in the dead man’s room a box of pills. When he hears of an unsigned telegram found in Stangerson’s pocket which reads “J. H. is in Europe”, he snaps his fingers, says he has solved the case. Both men look at him as if he is mad. Watson, at this point, is not prepared to disagree; how can such a complicated murder - two now - with so few clues and no suspect, given that Charpentier must now be discounted - be solved so easily?
Holmes takes the tablets from Lestrade and feeds them to the landlady’s dog, which is near death and which she had wished put down. The first tablet has no effect on the animal, and Holmes is annoyed, baffled, and a little embarrassed as the two detectives look at each other, possibly making circular motions at their temples with their fingers. Then he has it. He feeds the dog another tablet from the box and it quietly expires. He has been vindicated: the box has two types of tablet, one poison, one not. A short moment later WIggins, the head of his street Arabs comes up to say they have him. Holmes asks the boy to show him up, and when a man appears and Holmes directs him to pick up his luggage, it’s only the work of seconds for him to clap handcuffs on the man. A furious struggle ensues, but between Lestrade, Holmes and Gregson they overpower the man, and when he sees fighting is useless he subsides.
“Gentlemen,” says Holmes grandly, “let me introduce you to Mr. Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Enoch J. Drebber, and of Joseph Stangerson!”
Hope admits his guilt, but requests a chance to tell his story, which takes us back to his youth in the USA, where he met the beautiful Lucy Ferrier, who, with her adopted father John, were the only survivors of a wagon train and who were saved from death in the desert by a travelling band of Mormons, heading for Salt Lake City. Under the terms of the Mormon religion, Lucy was to be married to one of the sons of the two leaders, but her father knew them both to be horrible men, and that Lucy was already in love with a young rancher called Jefferson Hope, so he played for time until Hope could be contacted, then they all stole away together.
But the Mormons were not about to be cheated, and rode in pursuit. As Hope went off to hunt for some game so that they would not starve, John was shot and killed and Lucy taken back and forced to marry Enoch Drebber, the worst of the two. It later emerged that the pair played cards for her, and Drebber won her. She did not last long, pining away and dying soon afterwards, to the no great concern of her brutal new husband. Unable to take his revenge, Hope rode into the camp where Lucy’s funeral was taking place and removed the wedding ring from her finger and rode off. He watched for his chance, following the two of them when they left America, across Europe, until finally he tracked them down in London, where he killed Drebber by forcing him to take a poison pill, or at least to choose between the safe one and the deadly one, and then knifed Stangerson to death.
There will however be no trial, as Hope is close to death: he has a heart condition, and will not last long. In fact he dies in his cell a few days later.
After the case
The epilogue here is quite short, and speaks of the by now inevitable death of Jefferson Hope, who passes away before he can stand trial for the double murder. Holmes explains his train of reasoning to a marvelling Watson.
Comments
To state the obvious, for a first novel this is nothing short of stunning. And brave. It wasn’t his first writing of course - he had had some short stories published in magazines in the years prior, like any aspiring author of the time - but it was his first full-length novel. To take on a powerful religion like Mormonism was incredibly brave of him, though I read that later he made some apologies and detractions, claiming that he had been misled by various books he had read on the subject. Still, much of what he wrote was the truth: Mormons practised (still do) polygamy and they guard their secrets closely. Whether they are or were the murderous vengeful cult of which he writes here or not is something I don’t know, but even suggesting they were, in a work of fiction, must have earned him some hatred across the water.
I didn’t realise that Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormons in the book, who decrees Lucy’s marriage to one or other of the elders’ sons, was a real figure, the second president in fact of the Mormons. That might have been a step too far: if he had used a fictional name, maybe he would not have insulted the Mormons so deeply. At any rate, the novel is well-spaced, taking place across two continents and over a period of maybe forty or fifty years, given Hope Jefferson’s narrative. It’s the first I’ve seen where the mystery is conclusively solved, but then there’s still about two-thirds of the book to go. When I read it recently I assumed when Holmes laid hands on Jefferson that we were near the end, but it was in fact just beginning.
It also has very few characters, for a novel: really there are only seven (excluding Holmes and Watson), eight if you include Arthur Charpentier. There are others, of course, but they’re very minor and ancillary, and the only ones really involved deeply in the story are Lestrade and Gregson, Jefferson, Drebber, Stangerson, Lucy and John Ferrier. Everyone else is more or less incidental. It of course establishes quickly the character of Sherlock Holmes and some of that of Dr. Watson, though we learn more about him as the stories unfold over the next ten years or so. It’s possibly one of the few - though not the only - in which the murderer is* treated with a good degree of sympathy, and the victims with none. We feel both earned their fate, and deserved to die. Even so, Hope is not allowed to get away with his crime but is not punished by any agency on this Earth.
It’s also a novel peopled largely by ghosts. John Ferrier, Lucy, Drebber and Stangerson are all dead by the time the story begins, but the spirit of the first two hangs heavy over the plot, driving Jefferson Hope on to revenge. In one way, I suppose, it teaches a poor lesson, that revenge is a thing worth pursuing, but then at the same time it could be said that Hope’s lust for revenge does for him, as perhaps he pushes himself too hard in pursuit of his quarry, and puts too much strain on his heart. In the end, perhaps, the old adage rings true: if you seek revenge, dig two graves. One for your victim, and one for yourself. The surname is surely well chosen, as the man’s hope that he would live happily with Lucy is gone, and now his* only remaining hope is to avenge himself on her killers.
It can be said too that technically speaking neither Stangerson nor Drebber killed Lucy: she died of natural causes. But it was a death of the heart, a death of the soul, a death of hope that finished her. When she was forced to marry the brutish Drebber, she knew there was nothing left for her in life. One of them surely did kill her father though - it must have been Stangerson, as Drebber blubbed it was not him, though then again he would say that, wouldn’t he? So at least one is guilty of murder. Nevertheless, the murder being avenged by hope is really that of Lucy, for Drebber driving her to the despair he did. There’s not an ounce of sympathy afforded by Doyle to either of the men, nor I believe should there be: even when Lucy dies Drebber just shrugs; he has many other wives. There was no love there, just lust.
A Study in Scarlet was not the instant success it should have been, with hindsight. Doyle received many rejections before being paid the paltry sum of £25 (about £3,000 today) for the story and all rights to it, and it was published first in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 to universal disinterest before being published as an actual novel the next year. The novel also begins the practice of the recounting of Holmes’ adventures by Watson, who becomes his chronicler or his biographer, so that all the stories are told in the first person, narrated by the doctor with Holmes spoken of in the third person, I think a relatively unique situation in fiction, not only crime fiction.
