A Study in Scarlet (2)

Sherlockian Way of Thinking

Case Overview

A Mysterious Death

London, 1881.
The city is heavy with fog, and on Brixton Road an abandoned house waits in silence. Inside, the body of an American, Enoch J. Drebber, lies sprawled on the floor. His face is twisted into a mask of terror, eyes wide as though they had stared into death itself. And yet—there are no wounds, no trace of blood, no sign of struggle.

Holmes enters, his gaze sweeping the room. On the wall, daubed in crimson letters, is a single word: RACHE.
“Rachel?” the police murmur, convinced it must be the name of a woman. Holmes bends closer, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
“Not Rachel,” he corrects them quietly. “Rache—German for revenge.”

Near the corpse lies a woman’s wedding ring, strangely out of place in that desolate room. It is the first of many threads Holmes will seize upon. Later inquiries reveal that Drebber had been lodging at a hotel with a companion, Joseph Stangerson. The game, as Holmes would say, is afoot.

The body of an American, Enoch J. Drebber, lies sprawled on the floor in an abondoned house.

Another Victim

The police quickly fix upon Stangerson as the likely suspect. But before long, the tables turn—Stangerson is found dead in his hotel room, a knife driven into his chest. On the bedside table lies a small medicine bottle. Poison, the police suggest. Holmes, however, is already thinking further, tracing a deeper pattern that links the two murders together.

A Tragedy in the Past

To uncover the truth, the narrative carries us across the Atlantic, back thirty years to the stark deserts of Utah. Here we meet John Ferrier and his adopted daughter, Lucy, struggling against the iron rule of a Mormon settlement. The leaders demand Lucy’s hand in marriage to one of their elders; her own will counts for nothing. Forced into an unwanted union, Lucy wastes away, her life consumed by grief.

But there is one who loved her—Jefferson Hope. Her death hardens his heart into iron. He swears an oath of vengeance upon the men who destroyed her: Drebber and Stangerson. For decades he follows their trail across continents, his resolve unbroken, until at last he finds them in London.

The Completion of Revenge

Hope dons the simple, anonymous livery of a cabman, the perfect disguise in the crowded streets of London. He follows Drebber patiently, waiting for the right moment. When it comes, he confronts him not with a weapon but with a choice: two pills, identical in appearance. One harmless. One laced with deadly poison.
“Choose,” he commands.

Drebber, sweating and panicked, swallows his fate—and collapses in death. Later, Hope finds Stangerson and finishes the grim work with a knife. His vengeance is complete.

Yet fate plays its own hand. Afflicted by a mortal illness, Hope’s body begins to fail him. When Holmes and the police close in, he makes no attempt to flee. Instead, he recounts his tale calmly, almost with pride, and dies in his cell of natural causes, his vengeance achieved but his life consumed in the pursuit.

Holmes triumphs not by flashes of intuition, but by method.

Why It Matters

This case, Holmes’s first in the canon, demonstrates why A Study in Scarlet stands apart. Holmes triumphs not by flashes of intuition, but by method: observing, hypothesizing, testing, and proving. A word scrawled in blood, a wedding ring dropped carelessly on the floor, the faintest sour odor on a dead man’s lips—each small trace is gathered and weighed, until the full truth emerges.

As Holmes himself declares:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

And so, in the fog-bound streets of London, Sherlock Holmes teaches us that even the faintest clue can become the key to unlocking the darkest mystery.