A study in scarlet
A Study in Scarlet (Engl. A Study in Scarlet ) is a crime novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the first appearance of his detective Sherlock Holmes .
History of origin
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the study in scarlet at the age of 27. He was still a doctor in Southsea , near Plymouth , at the time, but had already sold a few stories to magazines. The study was rejected several times before he found a publisher in Ward, Lock & Co. in 1886. His publishers pointed out to him, however, that the market was flooded with cheap prose and that publication was not to be expected anytime soon. Doyle sold the rights for £ 25, a comparatively small sum. The originally intended title was A Tangled Skein (Eng. A tangled thread ). The novel first appeared in November 1887 as the cover story in Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine . The magazine cost a shilling and contained two articles by other authors. It was sold out by Christmas. Only 28 confirmed copies of this edition of the Beeton's Christmas Annual exist today, which are of high value among collectors. A complete but slightly damaged edition fetched $ 153,600 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in 2004. The specialist publication Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide therefore classified this issue as the most expensive magazine in the world, while the FAZ described it as a "profitable asset" at an auction at Sotheby's.
The study was first published as a book in 1888 by the same publisher, the illustrations were by Charles Altamont Doyle , Arthur Conan Doyle's father. A second edition came out just a year later, this time with illustrations by George Hutchinson .
The first German-language edition was published by the Lutz publishing house from Stuttgart in 1894 under the title Late Revenge in a translation by Margarete Jacobi.
content
The novel consists of two parts: The first is Watson's notes. Watson tells how he met Sherlock Holmes and accompanies and supports him in solving a murder case.
The second part tells the story of the murder. It is set in a Mormon community in Utah .
At the end, Watson speaks again and brings both parts together with his concluding remarks.
part One
The first part is entitled “From the memories of Dr. John H. Watson MD, Former Army Medical Officer ”.
Watson and Holmes met in 1881 and moved into an apartment on Baker Street . This is the beginning of the famous friendship between them.
While they are still getting to know each other, a letter arrives from Tobias Gregson asking Holmes to help him in an unexplained death near Brixton Road in Lauriston Gardens. Drebber, the murdered man, is lying in an abandoned house. On the wall is the word "revenge" smeared with blood. This leads the Scotland Yard detectives to the assumption that it could either be the English first name "Rachel" or the German word "Rache", the latter from the Goethe expert Holmes, who otherwise speaks German as well is considered more likely. Holmes finds a woman's wedding ring on the dead man. There is blood in the rooms, but not Drebbers, as Drebbers seems completely unharmed.
In order to set a trap for the perpetrator, Holmes places an advertisement in the newspaper stating that he has found a wedding ring to be picked up from Dr. Watson. An old woman, Mrs. Sawyer, comes to Baker Street to pick up the ring that her daughter allegedly lost. Holmes follows her by jumping on her cab , certain that she will lead him to the killer. When the cab stops, the woman is no longer in it, and the addresses she gave turn out to be wrong. "Mrs. Sawyer “must have jumped off while driving. Holmes deduces from this that the old lady is a young man who has dressed up in order to deceive him.
While Sherlock Holmes was still pondering this defeat, Scotland Yard's Inspector Gregson appeared the next day to announce that he had arrested Arthur Charpentier, the son of the boarding house owner who lived with Drebber, as a suspect. Shortly afterwards, Inspector Lestrade, also from Scotland Yard, arrives and tells of the murder of Stangerson, Drebber's private secretary and traveling companion, at the guesthouse. Lestrade found two pills in Stangerson's hotel room, on which Holmes demonstrates how Drebber was murdered with poison in such pills. However, Stangerson's body shows signs of violence, he was killed by a deep stab on the left side.
When there is a knock at the door, the street kid Wiggins, part of the "Baker Street Special Forces", comes in with a coachman. Holmes handcuffs the driver and arrests him as Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Drebber and Stangerson.
Part II
The title of the second part is "The Land of the Saints".
In the great salt desert, the Mormons on their way to Utah find two survivors of a group of 21 settlers, John Ferrier and the girl Lucy. Both people and residents of the new city of Salt Lake City are taken away on condition that they accept the Mormon faith . John officially takes Lucy, who is not his birth daughter, as his daughter. As respected members of the ward, they quickly became a wealthy family, and Lucy grew up a Mormon. Still, there are doubts about the leadership regarding Ferrier's faith, as he cannot warm to polygamy and has not yet approved Lucy for marriage. However, when she falls in love with a young trapper and silver seeker who does not belong to the community, the situation escalates.
When the religious and secular leaders notice this, the love between Jefferson Hope, the young trapper, and Lucy Ferrier threatens to fail because of the religious power structures of their community. Drebber and Stangerson both want Lucy to be their wives; they have the influence and power to push their advertising against that of Hope, who is also absent for two months but has Lucy and her father's yes-word for a wedding after his return.
When Ferrier is threatened more and more and he is even given an ultimatum, he tries by letter to call Hope from the silver fields for help, which does not arrive until the night before the ultimatum expires. Hope tries to escape with Lucy and her father. They hide in the mountains. When he leaves the camp, Lucy and her father are overtaken by the pursuers. Her father is murdered and Lucy is forced to marry Drebber. Hope tries everything to prevent this wedding, but comes too late. She dies shortly afterwards while Hope swears revenge. Drebber and Stangerson, themselves expelled from the community, flee to England, where Hope finally follows them.
Work history context and meaning
When Doyle decided in 1886 to write a detective story, he was well read and knew and particularly appreciated the works of Edgar Allan Poe , Wilkie Collins and Émile Gaboriau . Although his fictional character of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet expresses disparagingly about Poe's famous detective character of C. Auguste Dupin ( "a very inferior fellow" ) and Gaboriaus Inspector Lecoq ( "a miserable bungler" ), Doyle knew very well as an author how much he owed the literary models Poes and Garboriaus.
Doyle's intention was to create an outstanding detective figure who would upgrade detection to a precise science and illustrate its concrete application in practice. An exciting plot and narrative style should make this applied “science of deduction” palatable to the readers . Already in this first detective story Doyle, a longer short story, which is extended through the middle section to the length of a novel, the character of Sherlock Holmes with all his characteristic and well-known features is introduced. At the same time, in the second chapter, the doctrine of the "science of deduction" is presented; the protagonist Dr. Watson is placed at the side as an admiring friend and companion who not only reports on what is happening as a narrator, but also offers his friend a wide range of opportunities for lecturing and demonstrating.
In “A Study in Scarlet” Holmes is hardly depicted as a character, but rather as a literary type described only by a few suggestive features. Attention is drawn to his various pipes and the tobacco he keeps in a Persian slipper. His dressing gown and the Inverness cape as well as the deerstalker cap are also mentioned. These few details are enough to give the reader the image of the great detective who, as a variation of Poesch's Dupin, solves most of his cases without leaving his apartment. He's an eccentric, smokes opium and plays the violin. Like his predecessor Dupin, he represents a mixture of thinker and artist, like him has a "bi-part soul" that suggests profundity. Of course, like Dupin and many of his literary successors, Holmes is also a bachelor; the thought of a married detective would have seemed grotesque to contemporary reading audiences.
The suggestive external features not only show the closeness of Holmes to Poe's Dupin, but also show similarities to Collins' Sergeant Cuff and Gaboriaus Inspector Lecoq. Doyle adds further typical features in the appearance, in the way of speaking and the behavior of Holmes as well as in the peculiarities of deduction, which he reproduces mainly from the memories of his own academic teacher Professor Joseph Bell . In “A Study in Scarlet Red”, Doyles already shaped the essential characteristics and characteristic traits of his detective hero, which are further typified and schematized in the subsequent series stories by overdrawing and finally providing a literary template for the detective literature in Doyle's successor.
Doyle typifies not only the figure of the great detective, but also the “science” of detective art. In Holmes' “chain of thought” method, which is reminiscent of Dupin's “analytic mind” , the only correct one can be crystallized from a multitude of possible solutions through logical deduction, however improbable it may be. Holmes' approach is characterized by careful observation and measurement, through deduction and combination. In doing so, however, he falls back on the highly popularized ideas of scientific methods and the acquisition of knowledge from the 18th century: Holmes was the first detective in literature to use a microscope and work with a tape measure and magnifying glass. Strangely, he has an immense specialist knowledge in absolutely absurd areas, while on the other hand he hardly seems to be interested in the generally known scientific knowledge of his time. For the solution of his cases he also needs the intuition of an artist; his “bi-part soul” can also be felt here.
In A Study in Scarlet and the subsequent Holmes stories , Doyle takes on the quasi- ritual pattern of retrospective denouement from Poe on the one hand, but also leaves his memories of the demonstrations of his former teacher Dr. Bell: In a way, the “science of deduction” is similar to the art of diagnosing illnesses that Dr. Bell presented his medical students with surprising results, sarcastically combining humorous lectures with sententious teachings. In this direction, Holmes' work shows parallels to the work of a qualified specialist who alone can restore an ideal world.
In his first detective story, Doyle also developed another structural feature of the detective story, which is also characteristic of the following series stories. The almost superhuman skills of the great detective require a complementary figure to mediate between the ingenious investigator and the average reader. With the introduction of the Watson figure, the basic pattern of which had already been prototypically shaped by the anonymous narrator of the Dupin stories, Doyle worked out a template that was taken up in a variety of classic detective stories, for example by Captain Hastings next to Hercule Poirot or Archie Goodwin next to Nero Wolfe .
The figure of Dr. Watson fulfills different functions. As a scientist and doctor who also served as a soldier for a long time, Dr. Watson is a confidante for the contemporary reader: his report, which also claims to describe what he has experienced himself, creates the impression of a verifiable image of reality in the world of fiction and thus gives the story a high degree of realism or truthfulness.
Watson's limited narrative perspective can equally be used for skillful guidance of the reader, such as a distraction or misleading, to generate tension. Watson also forms a dramatic audience and anticipates the intended reactions of the readers when he listens in admiration to his friend.
As a acting character, Watson corresponds more to the reading audience than the eccentric detective. By trying to understand the working methods and thought processes of his friend, Watson opens up opportunities for the average reader to identify with the detective. Since Watson only slowly or hesitantly understands the connections or conclusions of his friend, the self-esteem of the reader can be strengthened, since it is suggested to him that he can draw the right conclusions faster than Watson.
Dr. Watson is similar to the reading public in his intellectual structure; therefore, especially when the case is being resolved, he forms a perfect listener for the lecturing of the great detective, who gradually explains and makes understandable his previously hidden thoughts and trains of thought.
The function of the audience anticipating the reaction, which is reinforced in places by melodramatic elements, offers an additional possibility to manipulate the reader, who is thus deprived of the opportunity to express his own opinion. Although inactive, the reader can still indulge in the illusion that they are actively involved in solving the case and even compete with Watson or Holmes.
reception
A study in scarlet is one of only four novels about Sherlock Holmes. Doyle described the other cases of his hero in 56 short stories .
The novel shows some small deviations from later Sherlock Holmes stories, for example Watson reports here about a shoulder wound he received in the Second Anglo-Afghan War at the Battle of Maiwand , in later stories it is a leg wound.
English author Neil Gaiman published an authorized pastiche entitled A Study in Emerald Green in the Doyle collection of short stories Shadows over Baker Street . This is where the heroes of Doyle meet the world of HP Lovecraft .
Illustrations
From the beginning, the publishers had the editions of Sherlock Holmes' works illustrated, with a few exceptions. In addition to the content canon, a canon of images has therefore also been established that has had a lasting impact on the image of Sherlock Holmes. The study in scarlet red has been reinterpreted by several generations of draftsmen over the course of 120 years, sometimes with great stylistic and qualitative differences.
For the edition of the Beeton's Christmas Annual the illustrator DH Friston contributed a total of four drawings, including the very first pictorial representation of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is already holding his typical prop, the magnifying glass, in his hands.
For the first book edition, the publisher engaged Arthur Conan Doyle's father, Charles Altamont Doyle . He also illustrated the story with four drawings, which, however, do not come close to either Friston or his successors in terms of quality. The publisher replaced him in the second edition by George Hutchinson.
While Friston and Doyle managed to get by with four drawings, Hutchinson illustrated the plot with 40 drawings. James Greig illustrated the story in 1895 for Windsor Magazine , where it was published as a serialized novel, and summarized it in 7 pictures.
The first German illustrations came from Richard Gutschmidt . He drew 24 pictures for the 1902 edition of the Lutz publishing house in Stuttgart. He later illustrated 6 more Holmes stories.
A modern interpretation comes from the Danish artist Nis Jessen , whose edition of A Study in Scarlet is completely illustrated for the first time with over 600 drawings.
DH Friston
Charles Altamont Doyle
Richard Gutschmidt
Film adaptations
A study in scarlet red has been filmed several times, but seldom completely, mostly the emphasis was on the first part, which describes the first meeting of Holmes and Watson.
The first film adaptations are from the silent film era. A Study in Scarlet was the very first British Sherlock Holmes film adaptation in 1914. The main actor, James Bragington, who played Sherlock Holmes, was not an actor but an accountant. He got the role because he's drawings Alfred Gilbert from the beach Magazine looked similar. It was his only appearance in front of a film camera. There are no more copies of this film today.
In the same year, the story was filmed in the USA by Francis Ford , who acted as a director and Holmes actor. The role of Dr. Watson played his brother John Ford , who would later become one of Hollywood's most successful directors. Although filmed while he was still alive, the two films didn’t bring any money for Doyle, as he had ceded all rights to the publisher for £ 25.
The best known film adaptation is A Study in Scarlet from 1933, but the film mainly took over the title, while the plot bears little resemblance to the novel.
Sherlock Holmes and a Study in Scarlet from 1983, which is not a real film, but an animated film, is closest to the original . Peter O'Toole lent his voice to Sherlock Holmes.
Another successful film adaptation of the novel was made in 1968 with Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock as Holmes and Watson. It was made as part of a TV series with Cushing and was produced and broadcast by the BBC.
Even a case of pink , the first episode of the BBC series Sherlock from 2010, based on the novel.
expenditure
German-language first edition
- Late revenge . Translated by Margarete Jacobi. Lutz, Stuttgart 1894.
- Sherlock Holmes - A Study in Scarlet - Complete & Illustrated Version . This e-book contains the revised original translation by Margarete Jacobi, supplemented by illustrations by Richard Gutschmidt. Null Papier Verlag, Neuss, 2012 4th edition, ISBN 978-1517104351 (paperback), ISBN 978-3-95418-148-3 (Kindle), ISBN 978-3-95418-149-0 (Epub), ISBN 978- 3-95418-150-6 (PDF)
Further editions
- A study in scarlet . Translated by Gisbert Haefs . Haffmans Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-251-20100X
- A study in scarlet . Translated by Gisbert Haefs . No & But, 2005. ISBN 3-0369-5143-1
- A study in scarlet . Translated by Gisbert Haefs. Insel Verlag 2007. ISBN 978-3-458-35013-2
- A study in scarlet . Crime story (s) 4. With foreword. First translation by Margarete Jacobi completely revised by Sebastian Frenzel. homunculus Verlag 2016. ISBN 978-3-946120-24-7
- Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes - The Novels - A Study in Scarlet Red - The Sign of Four - The Dog of the Baskervilles - The Valley of Horror (translation by Margarete Jacobi, HO Herzog), Anaconda-Verlag 2013, ISBN 978-3730600306
- A study in scarlet . Translated by Henning Ahrens . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-596-03563-2
Audio books
- A study in scarlet , Naxos. ISBN 3-89816-151-X
literature
- Samuel Rosenberg: Naked Is the Best Disguise: Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes , Arlington Books Publishers Ltd, 1975. ISBN 0-85140-237-2
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Russell, Richard and Elaine Gross Russell, Antique Trader Vintage Magazines Price Guide, Iola, Wisconsin, kp books, 2005
- ↑ Peter Rawert: Sherlock Holmes. Income property . In the FAZ of July 9, 2010 ; Retrieved July 16, 2010
- ↑ a b Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel . 2nd revised edition. 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , pp. 60 .
- ↑ a b Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel . 2nd revised edition. 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , pp. 61 .
- ↑ a b c Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel . 2nd revised edition. 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , pp. 62 .
- ^ Paul G. Buchloh, Jens P. Becker: The detective novel . 2nd revised edition. 1978, ISBN 3-534-05379-6 , pp. 64 ff .
- ↑ imdb.com