He enlists in the army and joins his regiment in India just in time to take part in the Second Afghan War (1878-80) and sees action in the Battle of Maiwand where he is shot in the shoulder and, upon recovering, invalided out of the service a pension. Watson took a medical degree from University of London in 1878. Watson’s career and characterįor someone interested in late Victorian history, Watson’s biography as as interesting as Holmes’s. I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them.’ To the duality of story and plot (see below), and the duality of the various disguises characters adopt in the story, is added a fundamental duality between what actually happens in the detection of the crime, and a) what is reported in the Press and b) what is published in Watson’s accounts/stories. Watson comforts Holmes that he will publish the truth: ‘Never mind. Later Watson reads out newspaper accounts of the murder, includes his transcript of the killer’s confession taken down shorthand, and the text includes notes, adverts, even the message scrawled in blood on the wall.Īt the end of the book, Holmes laughs at the way the incompetent Scotland Yard detectives get the glory of solving the crime in the Press.

This is very much of the period which revelled in intertextuality, enjoying texts made of other texts, from letters, journals, diaries, newspaper accounts etc. Watson MD, late of the Army Medical Department’. The novella (130 pages) is described as being a ‘Reprint from the reminiscences of John H. It was the stories which became popular and led to a further 13 being commissioned (collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894). These stories are collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892). Conan Doyle went on to write a sequel, The Sign of Four for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (1890), and then persuaded Strand magazine to take 13 short stories to appear monthly in 1890-91. It was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887 and attracted very little attention. A Study in Scarlet is the first of the four canonical Sherlock Holmes novels.

Sherlock holmes a study in scarlet book