In A Study in Scarlet, Doyle uses foreshadowing to clue the reader in to what may have happened to Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson—as well as to who their murderer may have been—early on in the novel. Although Holmes keeps quiet about his deductions until the end of Part 1 because, he says, he doesn’t want the murderer to know that he’s on his trail, Doyle’s detailed descriptions of crime scenes foreshadow the solution to the mystery by allowing readers to guess what happened based on the evidence available to them.
In Part 1, Chapter 7, Doyle describes the scene of Stangerson’s murder in great detail. Although it is still unclear how everything fits together, the details of the scene foreshadow the eventual solution to the mystery:
The door was locked on the inside, but we […] knocked it in. The window of the room was open, and beside the window […] lay the body of a man in his nightdress. He was quite dead […] The cause of death was a deep stab in the left side, which must have penetrated the heart […] There was a glass of water on the table, and on the window-sill a small chip ointment box containing a couple of pills.
Although what actually happened to Stangerson remains a mystery until much later in the novel, Doyle’s use of foreshadowing in this passage allows the reader to make their own guesses about Stangerson’s demise. Based on the details of the door being locked from the inside and the corpse being beside the window in a nightdress, one can reasonably surmise that the murderer snuck in through the window at night, while Stangerson was getting ready for bed. However, what remains unclear is the cause of death: was it the stab wound or the pills? Although exact details like these aren’t revealed until later, the reader is still able to begin to make guesses about what might have happened due to Doyle’s use of foreshadowing.
Doyle also makes use of a specific kind of foreshadowing often found in mystery novels called a red herring. A red herring is a detail that looks like it might be a clue but actually misleads the detective (and the reader). In Part 1, Chapter 3 of A Study in Scarlet, Doyle uses a red herring when describing the scene of Enoch Drebber’s murder:
Across [the wall] there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word:
RACHE.
“What do you think of that?” cried [Lestrade], with the air of a showman exhibiting his show […] The murderer has written it with his or her own blood […] Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish.”
Here, the red herring works on two levels. First, both Lestrade and the reader are likely to assume that the word “RACHE” is the beginning of the name Rachel, which might lead them to believe that this woman Rachel had something to do with Drebber’s murder. Second, it is later revealed that the murderer intentionally put the word “RACHE” (the German word for “revenge”) at the scene of the crime as a red herring to throw the detectives off his trail by making them believe he is German and not American. This combination of red herrings and accurate foreshadowing places the reader in the position of an actual detective, forcing them to pay close attention to all available evidence and do their best to piece together the story of what happened for themselves.
In A Study in Scarlet, Doyle uses foreshadowing to clue the reader in to what may have happened to Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson—as well as to who their murderer may have been—early on in the novel. Although Holmes keeps quiet about his deductions until the end of Part 1 because, he says, he doesn’t want the murderer to know that he’s on his trail, Doyle’s detailed descriptions of crime scenes foreshadow the solution to the mystery by allowing readers to guess what happened based on the evidence available to them.
In Part 1, Chapter 7, Doyle describes the scene of Stangerson’s murder in great detail. Although it is still unclear how everything fits together, the details of the scene foreshadow the eventual solution to the mystery:
The door was locked on the inside, but we […] knocked it in. The window of the room was open, and beside the window […] lay the body of a man in his nightdress. He was quite dead […] The cause of death was a deep stab in the left side, which must have penetrated the heart […] There was a glass of water on the table, and on the window-sill a small chip ointment box containing a couple of pills.
Although what actually happened to Stangerson remains a mystery until much later in the novel, Doyle’s use of foreshadowing in this passage allows the reader to make their own guesses about Stangerson’s demise. Based on the details of the door being locked from the inside and the corpse being beside the window in a nightdress, one can reasonably surmise that the murderer snuck in through the window at night, while Stangerson was getting ready for bed. However, what remains unclear is the cause of death: was it the stab wound or the pills? Although exact details like these aren’t revealed until later, the reader is still able to begin to make guesses about what might have happened due to Doyle’s use of foreshadowing.
Doyle also makes use of a specific kind of foreshadowing often found in mystery novels called a red herring. A red herring is a detail that looks like it might be a clue but actually misleads the detective (and the reader). In Part 1, Chapter 3 of A Study in Scarlet, Doyle uses a red herring when describing the scene of Enoch Drebber’s murder:
Across [the wall] there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word:
RACHE.
“What do you think of that?” cried [Lestrade], with the air of a showman exhibiting his show […] The murderer has written it with his or her own blood […] Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish.”
Here, the red herring works on two levels. First, both Lestrade and the reader are likely to assume that the word “RACHE” is the beginning of the name Rachel, which might lead them to believe that this woman Rachel had something to do with Drebber’s murder. Second, it is later revealed that the murderer intentionally put the word “RACHE” (the German word for “revenge”) at the scene of the crime as a red herring to throw the detectives off his trail by making them believe he is German and not American. This combination of red herrings and accurate foreshadowing places the reader in the position of an actual detective, forcing them to pay close attention to all available evidence and do their best to piece together the story of what happened for themselves.
