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A Study in Scarlet

Arthur Conan Doyle · 1887 · 43,291 words
1:54:24
at 420 wpm · the whole book
The audiobook runs about four and a half hours.

Sherlock Holmes first appears in a hospital laboratory, waving a test tube and shouting about a blood reagent, and is introduced to Watson, invalided home from Afghanistan with a shattered shoulder, as a man looking to split the rent on Baker Street. Some weeks later there is a body in an empty house off the Brixton Road: no wound on it, blood that is not the dead man's, the German word for revenge daubed on the wall. Know the shape before you start. Holmes handcuffs his man halfway through, and the book then leaves London for five chapters of Utah revenge, built from the era's anti-Mormon exposés rather than from history. The London chapters go quickly; the Utah ones are where readers stall.

14 chapters · begin at the beginning
1Mr. Sherlock Holmes7:24begin ▸
·2The Science of Deduction9:22sealed
·3The Lauriston Gardens Mystery10:18sealed
·4What John Rance Had to Tell6:45sealed
·5Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor6:43sealed
·6Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do8:40sealed
·7Light in the Darkness8:47sealed
·8On the Great Alkali Plain9:38sealed
·9The Flower of Utah6:44sealed
·10John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet4:50sealed
·11A Flight for Life8:53sealed
·12The Avenging Angels9:11sealed
·13A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.11:37sealed
·14The Conclusion5:32sealed

How long does it take to read A Study in Scarlet?

A Study in Scarlet is 43,291 words. At an average adult reading pace of 300 words a minute that is about 2 hr 24 min, or roughly 1 hr 48 min if you read quickly and 3 hr 36 min at a more deliberate 200 words a minute.

That count is measured from the complete public-domain text rather than estimated from a page count, so you can compare all the books side by side.

Text: A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle (1887), public domain, via Project Gutenberg. · You read at the book's authored pace; nothing here is stored anywhere but this browser. · About Midsentence