A Study in Scarlet (1887)
Blurb:
My review:
Although of great historical importance as being the first story to introduce Sherlock Holmes and hence revolutionise the genre, A Study in Scarlet is one of the least interesting of the Holmes tales. The first half introduces the Master himself, and his miraculous powers of deduction from footprints, bloodstains and dustmarks, which are brought to bear upon a rather minimalist case of murder, with neither the complexity nor the atmosphere of the later tales. Once the rather surprising murderer has been caught, little more than halfway through the book, there follows an overly lengthy flashback to Utah. While it is necessary to understand why the murders were committed, the flashback does not convince, and the reader is impatient to return to Holmes and Watson.
Note that Ellery Queen reused parts of the solution in his brilliant Tragedy of X (1932).