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A Study in Scarlet recounts Jefferson Hope's murder of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson. Although it occurs in London, the homicide is precipi- tated by events in Utah Territory, which introduced a British audience to a vast frontier both untamed and beautiful. The land, which functions in the text as the quintessence of American alterity, is inextricably related to John Ferrier, Jefferson Hope, and Lucy Ferrier, Arthur Conan Doyle's independent and beautiful young woman whose capture by Brigham Young's band mirrors the settlement and colonization of the landscape. In this essay, I argue that Conan Doyle's exotic depiction of the land and its inhabitants complicates the precarious relationship between the Mormon adherents and Conan Doyle's idealized American West. Like seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers, Brigham Young and his devotees strike off on their own with the stated goal of religious freedom, but in doing so they impose a colonial order on what Conan Doyle describes as an uncultivated environment. Furthermore, this particular representation of colonization and the American West occupies an anomalous place in the Holmes canon. What has become known as the "Mormon segment" in Conan Doyle criti- cism is never actually reported to Holmes or Watson in A Study in Scarlet; they solve the case with none of the backstory that was provided to the reader. I argue that the seemingly disparate Mormon episode functions as a formal frontier of Sherlock Holmes's system of logical deduction. The exoticized Utah desert and project of colonization circumvents Holmes's usual methods of analysis, which attests to the complexities of colonialism and displacement in the nineteenth-century American West.
A Critical History of A Study in Scarlet
Any analysis of Conan Doyle's first Holmes novel must consider two issues that have preoccupied critical responses to A Study in Scarlet since it first appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887: Conan Doyle's portray- al of Mormonism and the American West and Study's so-called "divided" narrative. In telling one story, A Study in Scarlet relates two narratives, one detailing the celebrated meeting of Holmes and Watson and the resolution of their first case together and the other a suspenseful and expeditious recounting of religious despotism, murder, and polygamy in the deserts of Utah. The two sections operate almost autonomously as evidenced...