Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Brilliance!

I've just finished reading A Study In Scarlet. Wow. What a great little read! I know Holmes is a little more affable and pleasant in this book than he is in some of the other stories, and Conan Doyle was still very much finding his feet with the character, but that didn't bother me in the slightest and Watson is there from the start, bang on. Everything you need to know about both men, and how Holmes operates and deduces is here in this first novel or long story, and there's a real feeling of literary history in its pages.

When I was doing my undergraduate degree back in the mid-nineties Conan Doyle turned up on the reading list for the Nineteenth Century Culture module, probably under sensation literature, and The Sign of The Four was the chosen text because (as we were told at the time) A Study In Scarlet was generally considered an unsuccessful first attempt and not a true Holmes novel. Well I saw pshaw to that!

From a stylistic perspective I found the whole Utah section very interesting, and a pleasant contrast to Watson's narration. Conan Doyle is clearly guiding the reader to sympathise with, and actually support Hope's murders - hence the choice of tablets - and there's the whole 'natural law' versus the 'law of the land' question going on.

I've finished the book wanting to reach for The Sign of The Four - which is very much to Conan Doyle's credit in creating or capturing a world that so ably immerses us with surprisingly little actual detail. A Study In Scarlet is very economically written - we pick up a lot of detail without long descriptive passages. That said, there's a kind of standard 'Holmesian London' setting in most people's minds anyway, courtesy of the characters being so very much in the public psyche.

I've read the Oxford World's Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Owen Dudley Edwards. I adore the Oxford Holmes editions, and they are excellent value. For a short book like A Study In Scarlet you get almost half the novel's length again in explanatory notes, plus an introductory essay of about a third the length of the novel again. These additional critical apparatus offer us different ways to read the book, and potentially repeated readings are rewarded. I only read the text this time, but last time I also read the introduction as well for background information and on both reads so far I've occasionally dipped into the notes for clarity, but I know there's a whole lot more contextual and biographical information in those notes that I haven't yet picked up which may enhance future reads.
The introductions taken together essentially make up a critical volume in their own right. As Owen Dudley Edwards observes in his Genrral Editor's Preface, their purpose is not so much to introduce each volume, but to give an overall critical, contextual and bibliographical appraisal and they assume greater knowledge of the Conan Doyle / Holmes canon. New readers should avoid them on the first read. After all we already have Doctor Watson to ably guide us through these stories without any input from a modern editor. After I've read or re-read the rest of the Holmes novels and short story collections I'll probably return and read all the introductory essays without risk of accidental spoilers.

I've also got the single volume Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes but it's an unwieldy tome and sits on the bottom shelf. It may be more value as holiday reading...