Thursday, October 28, 2010

A Study in Scarlet (1887)

The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I'd never read this novel before (except for The Hound of the Baskervilles I've only read the stories) but because I was writing my review of the new Sherlock series I thought I should check it out. It's a great first book, especially the strange central part, the long narrative set in Utah, 1847, in which the future murderer escapes from the grip of the Mormons. It's pretty sensationalist, the Mormons shown as an extremist cult, but this is adventure escapism and I can imagine that a settlement of Mormons in Western United States was as exotic to a Londoner in 1887 as the Kali cults of India.

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