Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is first featured along with his friend Dr. Watson in the novel A Study in Scarlet. Watson is introduced to Holmes through a mutual friend named Stamford. Watson is looking for lodgings and Holmes is searching for someone to go halves with him on the rent in apartment at 221B Baker Street, London. Stamford describes Holmes to Watson and informs him about Holmes’s idiosyncrasies.
Holmes and Watson meet and agree to see the apartment together and after seeing it, they promptly decide to move in. Watson describes Holmes to the reader, “Holmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. He was quiet in his ways and his habits were regular. It was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning. Sometimes he spent his day at the chemical laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him to the lowest portions of the city. Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him, but now and again a reaction would seize him and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night”.
Holmes solved mysteries with his sharp observation skills and powers of analysis and through the science of deduction as is evident in the Lauriston Gardens Mystery explored in this first novel.
Reviewed by Hannah George