Beeton's Christmas Annual

[Instrumental music playing] I'm Hugh Bonneville, and welcome to A Study in Scarlet, Part 1.

Originally published in its entirety in Beeton's Christmas Annual eighteen eighty-seven, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story and his first novel of any description was written when he was just twenty-seven years old.

Little did he know that it would go on to define his career for the next four and a half decades, or that his central character, a consulting detective called Sherlock Holmes, would prove to be one of the most enduring figures in all of literature.

When Doyle wrote this story over the space of about three weeks at the tail end of eighteen eighty-six, he was still working as a doctor in Hampshire.

Over the next seven episodes, we'll be bringing you Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's debut novel, A Study in Scarlet.

When this story was first published in Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887, the 27-year-old writer could scarcely have guessed that it was the work that would define his entire career, let alone that his new character, a consulting detective called Sherlock Holmes, would prove so popular that we'd still be reading and dissecting his adventures more than a century later.

So join us as we go back to where it all began, with a mysterious double murder in London that has its roots thousands of miles away in the desert plains of Utah.

That's next time.