A Study in Scarlet (3)

Sherlockian Way of Thinking

Following Holmes into the Fog

It is a raw London morning. The rain has stopped only hours before, leaving the cobblestones slick and the air heavy with the smell of damp brick and horse sweat. In front of a quiet house, two deep wheel ruts press into the softened earth by the curb. Detective Gregson might have glanced at them once and moved on. But Sherlock Holmes lingers.

In front of a quiet house, two deep wheel ruts press into the softened earth by the curb.

He crouches, fingertips brushing the indentations, eyes narrowing ever so slightly. “Fresh,” he murmurs, half to himself. The marks were made when the ground was still wet from last night’s downpour. A cab, he decides. And not one that merely passed—its tracks are too close to the sidewalk, too still in their imprint. No, this cab waited here. Two passengers climbed down and walked into the house. One never came out alive.

It is the first step in a chain of reasoning that will, in the days to come, unravel the killing of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson. Holmes’s method is never about sudden flashes of inspiration. It is about starting with the smallest, most ordinary things—the slant of a wheel track, the spacing of a footprint, the faintest whiff of tobacco—and testing each observation until it yields a fact.

From Mud to Murder

Inside the house, the scene is still and grim. A man lies on the floor, his fists clenched, his face frozen in a grimace of terror. There are no wounds, no blood, no signs of a struggle. Holmes moves about the room in measured silence. Watson watches him reject, one by one, the obvious explanations: no, not natural causes—the man’s expression is too contorted. Not suicide—there are no weapons, no vials, no self-inflicted injury.

A man lies on the floor, his fists clenched, his face frozen in a grimace of terror.

When all else is stripped away, only one possibility remains: murder. And if murder, then—how? Holmes leans closer to the body, catching the faint sour tang rising from the victim’s lips. A possibility takes shape: poison. It is only a hypothesis, but he files it away, waiting for proof.

That proof comes later, with the discovery of Stangerson’s body in a hotel room. A small medicine bottle is found at the scene. Inside: two pills. Holmes tests them on a sickly dog—one harmless, the other instantly lethal. The hypothesis is confirmed. The killer’s weapon was a pair of pills, one innocuous, the other deadly, leaving the victim to choose his own fate without knowing which was which.

Reading the Walls

Back in the first crime scene, a single word—RACHE—is scrawled in blood on the wall, nearly six feet from the floor. Holmes studies the height, considers the instinctive habit of writing at one’s eye level, and calculates: the killer is over six feet tall. Examining the letters more closely through his lens, he spots tiny scratches in the plaster. Not made by the blood itself, but by the writer’s fingernail—long, especially on the right hand.

Back in the first crime scene, a single word—RACHE—is scrawled in blood on the wall.

And then there is the ash, a fine scatter on the floor. Holmes has catalogued more than a hundred types of tobacco ash, each as distinctive to him as a fingerprint. This one is unmistakable: an Indian Trichinopoly cigar. In these three small details—the height of the writing, the fingernail marks, the cigar ash—Holmes has conjured a silhouette of the killer.

The Shape of a Motive

Holmes approaches motive as he approaches all else: by elimination. Robbery? Impossible—both victims’ valuables were untouched. Political assassination? Unlikely—there was no haste in the killer’s departure; he lingered, left traces. What remains is revenge, a conclusion reinforced by the bloody word on the wall.

This was a killing born of an old wound, not of greed or politics.

Digging into the victims’ histories, Holmes finds the shared past: both were Americans, both tied to the same insular religious community, both bound by a story of betrayal. And at the heart of it all, a woman’s wedding ring, small and plain, found at the scene. It is enough to complete the picture—this was a killing born of an old wound, not of greed or politics.

The Man Behind the Reins

The final act of deduction concerns the killer’s disguise. Holmes remembers the cab waiting outside, the driver absent for far too long. What better way to move through London unnoticed than as one of its own cabmen? The hypothesis forms quickly: the murderer drove himself to both scenes, his carriage serving as both transport and concealment.

Confirmation comes from the street—Holmes’s network of ragged but resourceful Baker Street Irregulars spots a cabman matching the description near the second crime scene. Soon after, Jefferson Hope is in custody, the disguise discarded, the chain of reasoning complete.

Holmes’s triumph in A Study in Scarlet lies not in the glamour of sudden insight, but in the precision of method: observe, hypothesize, predict, and verify. Each clue, no matter how small, is tested against reality. Each theory is built brick by brick until the structure of truth stands complete.

And so, what begins with the quiet imprint of a wheel in the mud ends with a confession in a London cell—a journey through which Holmes reminds us that in the hands of a true detective, even the rain-slick streets can speak.