Last time I read Agatha Christie's debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
That's where I met Poirot, and one question followed me through the whole book.
What was Agatha looking at when she built him?
There's only one answer: Sherlock Holmes.
If we're talking about the most famous detective in the world, it's him and nobody else. That was true in Christie's day too.
So this time I went upstream, to Arthur Conan Doyle's debut, A Study in Scarlet.
The Sherlock in my head
For me, Sherlock means Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series.
A masterpiece, moved into the present day.
That Sherlock looks down on everyone. Wounding people with words costs him nothing (though he does soften, slowly, across the seasons).
So what's the original like?
Still sharp with the sarcasm, no argument there. What surprised me was how considerate he can be.
That gap was fun on its own.
And A Study in Scarlet came out in 1888. Nearly 140 years ago.
I worried a book that old wouldn't land. I needn't have.
It's just good. This is the source, and you can feel it.
Doyle wrote 60 Holmes stories, by the way.
Only four are novels: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear.
The other 56 are all short stories.
Did you know the short stories outnumber the novels that heavily? Hold onto that. It matters later.
What was Doyle doing before he was a writer?
"What kind of life does a person live before they write detective fiction?"
According to his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859.
His uncle John Doyle was a satirical cartoonist. His father Charles worked as a civil servant in an Edinburgh government office.
The family was Irish by descent, which makes being born in the Scottish capital worth explaining.
His mother Mary wanted him to become a doctor.
His father never advanced in the service and supplemented his income by painting. He was also, as later came out, an alcoholic. Money was always tight.
So Arthur went along with it, to take some weight off his mother.
Hm. That's heavier than I expected.
Holmes had a real model
Then came the five-year medical program at the University of Edinburgh.
That's where Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell.
Bell is the man Holmes is built from.
Thin, dark-haired.
A high nose and grey eyes that went straight through you.
A sharp face, and a strange walk with his shoulders up.
That's basically Holmes already.
Bell was an excellent surgeon. But the surgery isn't the interesting part.
His diagnoses didn't stop at symptoms.
The patient's occupation.
The patient's character.
He'd read those too.
The moment where Holmes tells Watson he's just back from Afghanistan?
That wasn't invention. Doyle watched it happen, over and over, at school.
There's something here for anyone who writes.
Build a genius from scratch and they usually come out fake.
Doyle didn't. He watched a man he genuinely found extraordinary, and put him on the page.
The day he decided to quit medicine
Doyle kept a literary ambition alive the whole time he studied medicine.
A friend told him something worth having a friend for.
"Your letters have such life in them, you could surely write something that would sell."
So he wrote an adventure story, sent it out, and a magazine bought it.
He'd already sailed the Arctic as a ship's doctor while still a student, and after his degree he spent a long stretch at sea off the west coast of Africa.
Then he opened a practice in Southsea, just outside Portsmouth.
He was still publishing a considerable number of short stories.
His life kept tilting away from medicine and toward literature.
He wrote in the hours the practice left empty.
Then in 1891 he caught a severe influenza and spent about a week close to death. When he recovered and looked back over his life, he made the call.
Quit medicine. Write full time. It took nearly dying to decide.
I think I understand that.
Maybe nothing smaller is enough to make a person change their life.
Part two suddenly becomes an American novel
Now, the book itself.
The most interesting thing about A Study in Scarlet is that part two abruptly becomes a story set in America.
Holmes and Watson don't appear at all.
What you get instead is Utah.
The entire past that set the crime in motion, dropped in whole.
My first reaction was: wait, what is this?
But I enjoyed it, honestly.
That historical-novel flavor seems to come from Sir Walter Scott, a writer Doyle admired.
Were the Mormons really like that?
In the book, Mormonism is rendered as deeply alien.
Polygamy.
No marriage permitted outside the faith.
By modern standards it's startling.
So was any of that true at the time?
The polygamy, yes. In late nineteenth-century Utah Territory, plural marriage was openly practiced.
And the strong aversion to marrying outside the faith is in the record too.
So where did Doyle get all this?
Here's the good part. Doyle had never been to Utah.
There's a line from a much later trip, when he passed through by train.
"A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind."
Come on. So what did he actually read?
Researchers point to exposés written by former Mormons.
The result is a book that wounded the people of Utah deeply.
For anyone who writes, that stings.
The most exciting source is the most fun. Fun makes you want to believe it. But a fun source isn't a correct one.
A debut preserves whatever the writer was still careless about.
For Doyle, it was research.
The shape of the telling hasn't settled yet
Another thing only a debut gives you.
A Study in Scarlet nests a third-person past narrative inside Watson's first-person frame (the Utah section above).
Within the Holmes canon, that structure is the exception.
First book. The style hadn't set.
Everything after it runs on Watson's first person.
Which means Doyle found the right shape for Holmes while writing.
He didn't start out holding the finished form. Isn't that enormously encouraging?
A manuscript sold for 25 pounds
Here's something else, and it echoes Christie: Doyle made almost no money from his debut either.
He sold the manuscript for 25 pounds.
Roughly 600,000 yen in today's terms.
Copyright included.
Compare that to the Holmes stories he later serialized in The Strand Magazine.
The first six short stories paid an average of 30 pounds each, about 720,000 yen.
Buying a whole novel outright cost less than a single short story.
Doyle deeply regretted selling that manuscript so cheaply.
That's the first step of the most famous detective in the world.
The real reason Holmes took off
A Study in Scarlet appeared in the annual Beeton's Christmas Annual.
The result: it didn't sell much at all.
The break came afterward.
The Strand Magazine, monthly.
When A Scandal in Bohemia, the first Holmes short story, ran there, it exploded.
Doyle became a famous writer overnight.
A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, already in print, drew fresh attention.
From then on, the monthly serial in The Strand was the engine.
And here's the actual point.
The one format Doyle invented
Magazines then were grab bags. Unconnected stories, stacked up.
Looking at that, Doyle had an idea.
What about a series built around a single protagonist? If it caught readers, it would hold them to that magazine.
The ideal version works like this.
One character who keeps appearing.
Every installment complete in itself.
Then a reader can pick up any issue and get a whole story.
The central character should be Sherlock Holmes.
He'd already used Holmes in two novels, but a run of short stories would give him far more room.
The self-contained serial short story.
Nearly every writer uses this now. Television, comics, most of it runs on this shape.
Doyle devised it.
That's why 56 of his first 60 Holmes stories are short.
So Doyle invented a great detective, and he also invented how to sell a great detective.
A Study in Scarlet is rough. No getting around that.
But within a few years he changed how stories themselves get sold.
Writing practice
Now my own report.
First, I've built the habit of going to bed early.
Getting up early is still a work in progress. Some mornings it's 5am or 4am, some mornings it's 7am.
It'll settle, slowly.
What matters is the going-to-bed part. I'm convinced of that now.
I've also found that meditating at night helps. Above all, staying off social media and screens after dark.
I read two more books as preparation for the Edogawa Rampo Prize.
Kiwamu Sato's QJKJQ, and Zappa Momono's Rōko Zanmu.
Both were good, but QJKJQ hit hardest.
That book is something else.
What makes it work, I think, is that it's rooted in what people actually are.
Why do people kill?
It has the feel of reaching for something fundamental, almost philosophical.
It isn't only a mystery.
It isn't a murder, a solution, the end.
There is a puzzle, but the puzzle isn't the point.
Looking into it, QJKJQ is rated highly among Rampo Prize winners while being nothing like the standard winner.
An outlier, in a sense.
I want to be able to write novels like that.
I've bought three more Rampo winners too: The Karamazov Sister, Hachigatsu no Kiri no Naka de, and Thirteen Steps.
Reading all five should show me the range of the prize, and what actually wins it.
So far I'm enjoying every one of them, which suggests this prize and I may suit each other.
What's left is whether I can write.
Hm. I'll write.