A Study in Scarlet

Title: A Study in Scarlet
Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Published: 1886 originally.
Genre: Detective stories!
Pages: 395 little mobile phone pages.


The first Sherlock Holmes story, and one of the very few novel-length ones! This baby introduces both Holmes and Watson, how they met and came to live together, and, of course, the big mystery.

An American man is found dead, apparently from suicide, in an empty room in an empty house in Brixton, but when the coppers call in Ghostbusters Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Smarty-pants starts to find many things to prove that it was, indeed, murder.

(I've seen the modern-day Sherlock BBC series episode made of this a couple of times: I hope I'm not confusing/remembering things from that instead of the novel. It was quite faithful in execution, but also took many liberties.)

I was reading along happily, trying to figure out all the details, when suddenly the story jumped to Utah, USA, and a group of Mormons traveling towards what would be Salt Lake City. I was sitting in a bus, far from the internets when this happened, and since I couldn't check if this was supposed to happen, wondered if someone had -by accident or intention to utterly confuse- replaced the book with Something Completely Different. But it all tied in together in the end. Hope I didn't spoil anything for anyone. Sorry, hypothetical readers.