A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle · first published 1887
The first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, and the least filmed of his cases for a reason.
7 versions · 1914–2010
Screen versions have arrived since 1914, but this is the Holmes novel adaptations tend to avoid, because a third of it leaves London altogether for a long flashback in the Utah desert that has nothing to do with detection.
What it does contain is the meeting: Watson invalided home, a laboratory, and a man who deduces Afghanistan from a suntan. Everything the character became begins on that page.
London, 1887 — a doctor with no patients
Conan Doyle was twenty-seven, running a practice in Southsea that had almost no patients, and wrote to fill the time. He sold the story outright for twenty-five pounds and kept no rights in it.
The method he gave his detective was not invented either: he had studied under Joseph Bell in Edinburgh, a surgeon who diagnosed patients’ trades and travels from their hands and their gait before they had spoken. Forensic science barely existed — fingerprinting was not yet used by police — and the idea that a crime could be reasoned out from physical traces was, in 1887, close to science fiction.
On screen
7Film and television, earliest first.
- 1914 A Study in Scarlet Francis Ford
- 1914 A Study in Scarlet George William Pearson
- 1916 Sherlock Holmes Arthur Berthelet
- 1933 A Study in Scarlet Edwin L. Marin
- 1983 Sherlock Holmes and a Study in Scarlet
- 2010 A Study in Pink Paul McGuigan
- — Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson Igor Maslennikov
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.