The very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet was also the first of Conan Doyle's books to be published.

His two creations, Holmes, the master of the science of detection and Watson, the great detective's faithful companion, are immediately in fine form. The mystery itself, its solution plucked unerringly by Holmes from the heart of Victorian London, proves to be the inevitable consequence of a tragedy of the American West.

The story is harrowingin its alternating hope and despair, although Holmes himself was later to complain that the book `produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid'.

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