Very brief review: A Study in Scarlet

[cazrolime]

A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Though it veered off on a tangent halfway through that made me wonder if the publisher had pasted in a Victorian-era Western for a practical joke, this book never lost my attention. Having read quite a few of Doyle's short Sherlock Holmes stories, I was interested to read the detective's first outing, and it was a huge amount of fun. I don't believe I shall ever get tired of finding out how Holmes comes to his conclusions, and the Western segment -- even though its characterisation is a bit shallow -- had me freaking out over the fates of the characters and trying to work out how they would fit into the overall mystery.

I've been told that Doyle wrote better short stories than he did novels, but this book stands up to a lot of his better shorts. And it also continues the trend of Sherlock Holmes stories making me want to type all Victorian. So there's that as well.

Since Doyle books are out of print, I picked up two or three of his non-Sherlock novels free from a site along the lines of Project Gutenberg! One of them, The Parasite, I really really want to start but I promised to read it with my boyfriend and we're reading Watership Down first so aaaa. I will have to practice patience.