A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

Published 1887 · 159 pages · 43,491 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime

How hard is A Study in Scarlet to read?

A Study in Scarlet scores 28 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
Victorian medical and scientific vocabulary. Watson's narration is clear for its era.
Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
Victorian prose, accessible for the period. Watson writes with military directness.
Abstraction: 28 out of 100
Logic, observation, and the science of deduction. Method rather than philosophy.
Information density: 38 out of 100
Two contrasting halves: Baker Street investigation and Utah flashback. Dense with period detail.
Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
Watson's limited perspective. Holmes explains only at the end. The Utah flashback is a structural surprise.
Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
Holmes as reason. Baker Street as the detective's temple. Conventional symbolism.
Ironic distance: 22 out of 100
Watson's admiration creates gentle irony. Holmes's vanity is presented with affection.
Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
Holmes explains everything. Complete detective-story resolution.
Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
Split structure: present-day investigation and extended Utah flashback. Unusual for detective fiction.

How A Study in Scarlet is regarded

A Study in Scarlet holds a literary regard score of 68 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where A Study in Scarlet sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (83 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Study in Scarlet scores 58 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
I suppose I am the only one in the world. I'm a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is.
Symbol: Formal
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.
Mythos: Tragedy iii (tragedy iii)
I die knowing that my work in this world is done, and well done.
Genre: Novel + Romance

Where the story of A Study in Scarlet takes place

  • London, Baker Street and Brixton, c. 1881 (1880 to 1881), the main setting
  • Utah desert and Salt Lake City, 1847-1860 (1847 to 1860)

6 things that are true of A Study in Scarlet, with the passage for each

  1. Holmes first appears in a chemical laboratory, shouting that he has found a reagent precipitated only by haemoglobin.

    I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else.

  2. Holmes is ignorant of the Copernican theory and explains that he deliberately forgets what is useless to his work.

    My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.

  3. The murder room contains one word, written in blood on the wall.

    Across this bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word — RACHE.

  4. Holmes proves the pill theory on a dying terrier: one pill is harmless and the other poisonous.

    Of the two pills in that box one was of the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless.

  5. In Utah, Ferrier receives a note giving him twenty-nine days before an unnamed reprisal.

    Twenty-nine days are given you for amendment, and then —

  6. The murderer never stands trial because his aneurism bursts the night after his capture.

    On the very night after his capture the aneurism burst

Scenes in A Study in Scarlet that Frye would name

36 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
let me introduce you to Mr. Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Enoch Drebber and of Joseph Stangerson. The detective's revelation pivots the whole story: the cabman is the murderer.
Pathos, untitled
The sturdy old man, whom he had left so short a time before, was gone, then, and this was all his epitaph. The discovery of Ferrier's grave is the sacrificial death scene of the Utah plot.
Pathos, untitled
poor Lucy never held up her head again, but pined away and died within a month. Lucy's death in the forced marriage is the second sacrificial death, and her wedding ring becomes the vengeance token.
Anagnorisis, untitled
then I saw a horror spring up in them, and convulse his whole features, which showed me that he knew me. Drebber recognises his twenty-year-old victim in the avenger just before the pills.
Agon, untitled
Choose and eat. There is death in one and life in the other. Hope stages a trial by chance, a ritualised duel with Drebber over the two pills.
Demonic imagery, untitled
To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one. The Danites form a secret organisation that reverses the sacred community into a demonic one.

Books that share these scenes with A Study in Scarlet

About the author

Arthur Conan Doyle