A Study In Scarlet A Sherlock Holmes Mystery - Unabridged characters

Appears from the start

A private detective living in London who calls himself a consulting detective and says he invented the trade: when the official police or a private client is out of their depth, the problem comes to him. Watson meets him in a hospital laboratory, where he has just perfected a chemical test for identifying old bloodstains. Tall, lean and sharp-featured, he alternates between bursts of tireless energy and days of listless quiet. His learning is deliberately uneven, exact in chemistry, anatomy, poisons and the history of sensational crime, and blank where he judges a subject useless to him. He plays the violin, keeps irregular hours, and enjoys showing that a stranger's history can be read from small details of dress, hands and bearing.

Also known as Dr. Watson

Appears from the start

An army surgeon invalided home after service in Afghanistan, where he was wounded at Maiwand and then nearly died of fever. Living in a private hotel on a small pension and running short of money, he is looking for cheaper lodgings when a former colleague introduces him to another man in the same position. Steady, conventional and easily made curious, he narrates the case, keeps the record of it, and serves as a check on his new companion's certainties.

Appears from the start

A young medical man who once worked as a dresser under Watson at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Meeting Watson by chance in a bar and hearing that he wants cheap rooms, he mentions an acquaintance in the same position and takes Watson to the hospital laboratory to introduce them, with an air of warning Watson about what he is getting into.

First appears in chapter 3

A Scotland Yard detective, tall, fair and self-assured, who writes to Holmes for help with a body found in an empty house off the Brixton Road. Holmes rates him among the abler men of the official force, but he is chiefly occupied with beating his colleague Lestrade to a solution, and is quick to announce a result before it is secure.

First appears in chapter 3

A Scotland Yard detective, small, wiry and dark, working the same case as Gregson and openly competing with him for the credit. He is energetic and persistent but fixes on a theory early: at the Brixton Road house he insists that the word written in blood on the wall is an unfinished woman's name.

First appears in chapter 3

An American from Cleveland, Ohio, found dead in an empty house at Lauriston Gardens off the Brixton Road. There is no wound on him and no sign of a struggle, though blood is spattered about the room. He had been travelling in Europe with a secretary and had lodged for some weeks in Camberwell, where those who dealt with him describe a heavy-featured man given to drink and to unwelcome attentions toward women.

First appears in chapter 3

Secretary and travelling companion to Enoch Drebber, in charge of his employer's money and arrangements on their tour of Europe. He cannot be found when the police begin their inquiries, and his whereabouts become one of the first questions of the case.

First appears in chapter 4

The constable whose beat covered Lauriston Gardens on the night of the death, and who found the body after noticing a light in the empty house. Questioned by Holmes, he gives a full account of the scene and mentions, without attaching any importance to it, a drunken man he helped along the road nearby.

First appears in chapter 6

A young naval sub-lieutenant, son of the widow who keeps the Camberwell boarding house where Drebber lodged. Drebber's behaviour toward his sister led to the lodger being turned out and to a violent quarrel in the street, and Gregson arrests him for the Brixton Road death on the strength of it.

First appears in chapter 7

The leader of a band of ragged street children whom Holmes pays to go where he cannot and to watch what a uniformed man could not watch unnoticed. He reports to Baker Street when the errand Holmes set them across London has been carried out.

First appears in chapter 7

A powerfully built, quiet-spoken cab driver who comes up to the Baker Street sitting room to carry down a trunk and is handcuffed there by Holmes. He fights so hard that it takes four men to hold him. Holmes presents him to the two Scotland Yard detectives as the man responsible for the deaths of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson.

First appears in chapter 8

A hard, weather-beaten American found half dead on the alkali plain in 1847, the only surviving adult of a lost party of emigrants. He is rescued, along with a small orphaned girl he has kept alive, by a great column of travellers crossing to Utah, on the condition that he accept their faith and their authority. He prospers as a farmer in the settlement they found, but quietly refuses to take the wives the community expects of him, which leaves him respected for his money and distrusted for his obstinacy.

First appears in chapter 8

The child John Ferrier carries out of the desert and raises as his daughter. Twelve years later she has grown up in the Utah settlement, spirited and admired, riding about her father's land on her own errands. Her marriage is a matter in which the elders of the community consider they have a decisive say.

First appears in chapter 8

The leader of the emigrant column that finds Ferrier and the child in the desert, and afterwards the head of the settlement it establishes beside the Salt Lake. He states the terms of the rescue plainly at the outset and returns years later to hold Ferrier to them.