A Study in Scarlet

Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and the entire Sherlock Holmes mythology starts here. Watson narrates. He has just returned from the Second Afghan War, wounded and broke, and he needs cheap lodgings. A mutual acquaintance introduces him to a strange man named Sherlock Holmes, who is looking for someone to split rent on a place in Baker Street. They move in together. Holmes turns out to be an unofficial detective with bizarre habits and an uncanny knack for inference. Then a body turns up in an empty house in Brixton, with the word RACHE written on the wall in blood, and Holmes is on the case.

The novel famously splits in half. The first half is the Holmes murder investigation in London. The second half drops the reader without warning into a Western flashback set in Utah, complete with Mormon settlers and a long revenge plot that explains the murders. Modern readers often find the structural break jarring, and the Mormon section has not aged well in its specifics. But the first half is foundational. This is where Holmes and Watson meet. This is where 221B Baker Street first appears. Everything that follows in the canon depends on this book existing.