A Study in Scarlet

This is where it all begins: an invalided army doctor back from Afghanistan needs cheap lodgings, and a friend knows an odd fellow with rooms at 221B Baker Street. Watson's new flatmate deduces strangers' lives at a glance, keeps chemical experiments and tobacco in equal disorder, and is consulted (by the police themselves) when a corpse turns up in an empty Brixton house with a word scrawled in blood on the wall and no wound on the body.

Conan Doyle then does something bold with the novel's second half, leaping continents and decades to uncover the long fuse of vengeance behind the crime before returning Holmes to explain everything with infuriating ease. As the first Sherlock Holmes story ever written, it is both a brisk, satisfying mystery and the birth record of the most famous friendship in detective fiction.

At roughly 44,800 words, A Study in Scarlet runs about 5 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “A Study in Scarlet” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.