A Study in Scarlet

"There's a scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it." From the moment Dr. John Watson takes lodgings in Baker Street with the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, he becomes intimately acquainted with the bloody violence and frightening ingenuity of the criminal mind. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes and Watson's first mystery, the pair are summoned to a south London house where they find a dead man whose face is a twisted mask of horror. The body is unmarked by violence, but on the wall a mysterious word has been written in blood. The police are baffled by the crime and its circumstances. But when Sherlock Holmes applies his brilliantly logical mind to the problem, he uncovers a tragic tale of love and deadly revenge.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a writer and physician most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Before becoming a writer, he attended the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician, and it was from his teacher, Joseph Bell, that he learned much of what would inspire Holmes's skills of deduction. He also wrote science fiction stories, historical novels, plays, romances, poetry, and nonfiction. After his son Kingsley died in the first World War, he became a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.