A Study in Scarlet: A Sherlock Holmes Novel

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

Holmes has great powers of deduction. He tells how he identified a person has coming from Afghanistan by seeing characteristics of his appearance. Holmes also talks about how he can identify characteristics of blood. (thus the study in Scarlet). Then the book goes down to the murder mystery they are looking at. They identify an American, Jefferson Hope,  that poisoned two others in England. It is a long running revenge tale where Jefferson Hope had wanted mary the girl that one of the men had married. The girl died shortly after. It tied into the Danites and the Mormons. (The girl and her adoptive father were the only survivors of an immigrant group. They then ran into Mormons who took them and offered them a place in Salt Lake if they joined the faith. The man did outwardly, but not inwardly. Things came to a head when as the girl became a marriageable woman. She wanted to marry Hope who was outside the faith. They fled rather than give in.

The depiction of Mormons does portray some of the more extreme, surly characters. The guys that were murdered actively practiced polygamy and wanted to force people into it. They later left the main church in a schism. It talks about a central leadership but seems to get things wrong. It does however respect it as a general movement and the people are not cruel, but they are tight-knit group. Once in power, the oppressed tend to be like those they fled.

Holmes tends to quickly make deductions. How many of these are really accurate?

The book also includes Speckled Band

In this story, a snake is used to attempt to kill somebody. This ends up backfiring and killing the perpetrator instead.

The Diary of a Nobody

The Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith

This is the diary of a clerk that thinks a lot of himself. He goes to various activities and expects to be treated as nobility, but is just treated as the average person he is. He has colleagues and family that have some adventures. There is an attempt to do a seance that was identified as a fraud due to answering nothing like what the question was. It feels very episodic with sections capable of being read on their own.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Book I

This includes four Sherlock Holmes stories. They all follow a similar pattern, generally involving some people and Watson, and then Holmes discovering the real crime that occurred.

The stories include the following:

The Speckled Band

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

The Red-Headed League

The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk