A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four

The two novels in which Sherlock Holmes was made. A Study in Scarlet (1887): Watson, back wounded from Afghanistan, takes rooms at 221B Baker Street and watches his new friend read a corpse. The Sign of the Four (1890): a treasure from the Indian Mutiny, a one-legged man, a steam-launch chase down the Thames, and the meeting of Watson and Mary Morstan. Everything the later stories assume is here first. Ninety-eight plates, among them Venice courtyard views and a Highland portrait, extend the book's own mix of city chase and country landscape.