Conan Doyle Begins Writing A Study in Scarlet
According to biographer Andrew Lycett, Arthur Conan Doyle began writing A Study in Scarlet—-originally titled A Tangled Skein—on this late winter day in 1886. After cutting his novelist's teeth of The Firm of Girdlestone, he was ready, he remembered, to try "something fresher and crisper and more workmanlike." He had always enjoyed detective stories, particularly those of Edgar Allan Poe and Émile Gaboriau, and lit upon the idea of trying one of his own.
He decided to create a detective with the formidable observational skills of his former medical school professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, reasoning that if "it was surely possible in real life, ...why should I not make it so in fiction?" He also decided to give him a narrator—-an assistant bright and bold enough to keep up, but not perhaps as flamboyant as his friend. What to call them? Conan Doyle writes in his memoirs that he disliked the notion that a character's name should give away his or her personality, and so he experimented a great deal before he found the perfect fits. A surviving notebook page reveals that, in an alternate universe, we might be celebrating the exploits of Sherrinford Holmes, a philosopher and collector of rare violins in the person of a "reserved, sleepy-eyed young man" who plays an Amati, and Ormond Sacker, a veteran of the Soudan—no, make that Afghanistan. There are snatches of dialogue: "I am a consulting detective," and "What rot is this?" Lecoq is still a bungler. Some things never change.
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