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Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet
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Title Details
Running Time
4 Hrs. 30 Min.
Description
One of the four novels within the sixty episodes of the Sherlock Holmes canon, A Study in Scarlet(1877) marked the debut of Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson, along with their residence at 221 B Baker Street, Inspector Lestrade, and the ragtag band of street urchins Holmes referred to as "the Baker Street Irregulars." Doyle modeled Holmes in part upon the idiosyncrasies of one of his medical school instructors, Dr. Joseph Bell; the literary structure, however, he borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's stories of Auguste Dupin. The brilliant but eccentric detective, the admiring friend who narrates the story, the cases which are puzzling and fantastic as much as sensationally criminal, the dramatically revealed solution at the end; all these are elaborated from Poe's work.
Doyle then added distinctive touches of his own: a strong feeling for the atmosphere of late Victorian and Edwardian London; an interest in the methods of Victorian science; witty, comic dialogue between the leading figures; a subtle sense of the macabre; and a chivalric concern for justice and the unjustly oppressed. A Study in Scarlet takes these elements and revolves them around two American travelers, one murdered with poison, the other with a knife through the heart, with the clues at the scene being a woman's wedding ring and the German word for "vengeance" written in blood. As Holmes unravels the connection between the two corpses, he stumbles on a connection between Socialist societies blossoming both on the Continent and in America, and traces back the roots of the crime to the desert wastes of Utah and the Mormon settlement of Salt Lake City.
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