Recommendations
Books Like A Study in Scarlet
Best books to read after A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel (1887) — Watson's meeting with Holmes at Baker Street, the 'RACHE' murder in Brixton, and the first demonstration of the deductive method that would make Holmes the most imitated fictional detective in history. These recommendations extend the experience through the Holmes canon, through Victorian detective fiction, and through the broader tradition of rational detection that Holmes established.
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The first and best short story collection (1892) — where A Study in Scarlet introduced Holmes in a novel-length narrative that suffers from the Utah flashback, the Adventures stories (A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, The Speckled Band) show Holmes at his most perfectly calibrated; the step up from the first novel that made Doyle one of the most popular writers in Britain.
- 2Buy
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The most celebrated Holmes novel and the one that most successfully combines Gothic atmosphere with rational detection — Dartmoor's moor, the Baskerville family curse, and Stapleton's scheme give Holmes's deductions an atmospheric context A Study in Scarlet lacks; the pinnacle of the Holmes novel-form.
- 3Buy
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
Collins's founding detective novel (1868) is the most important literary predecessor to A Study in Scarlet — Sergeant Cuff is the direct prototype from which Doyle derived Holmes's eccentric exterior and methodological precision; reading The Moonstone after A Study in Scarlet shows what Doyle inherited and what he added to the tradition.
- 4Buy
And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie
Christie's most structurally perfect novel represents the Golden Age detective fiction tradition that Holmes's method helped create — where Holmes is the infallible genius who solves an apparently impossible crime, Christie's novel uses the same logical closure but makes the detective and the murderer the same person; the tradition's ultimate formal achievement.
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The Adventures of Arsène Lupin
by Maurice Leblanc
Leblanc's French gentleman-thief stories began as a deliberate response to Holmes — Lupin is the French criminal counterpart to the English detective, and Leblanc even stages a direct confrontation between the two in 'Herlock Sholmes' (the subject of an injunction from Conan Doyle); reading Lupin alongside Holmes illuminates both the international reach of the Holmes phenomenon and the detective-vs.-criminal formula it generated.
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The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's medieval mystery novel is explicitly modeled on the Holmes tradition — William of Baskerville is named for both William of Ockham and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and his investigation of murders in a monastery follows the Holmes structural formula; the most intellectually ambitious tribute in the post-Holmes detective tradition.
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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
by Nicholas Meyer
Meyer's 1974 pastiche is the most celebrated Holmes continuation outside Doyle — the story of Holmes's treatment by Sigmund Freud for cocaine addiction illuminates what Doyle's stories leave implicit about Holmes's psychology; an intelligent exploration of what the Holmes canon assumes but doesn't examine.
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Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Collection
by Arthur Conan Doyle
After A Study in Scarlet, the best next step is simply reading the rest of the canon — the four novels and five story collections, ideally in a complete collection. The complete Holmes runs to about 1,800 pages and is uniformly readable; no other detective body of work of comparable size has aged as well.
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