Sherry Thomas’ A Study in Scarlet Women is an unabashedly feminist pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. In this novel—the first one in a series—features Charlotte Holmes. Charlotte and Sherlock share the same sharp observational skills and keen mind. Unlike her male counterpart, however, Charlotte is hemmed in by society’s rules about female behavior. She is also rather fond of sweets and exuberant dresses. Where Sherlock could stick his long nose into any situation that interested him, Charlotte has to plan elaborate ruses for the comfort of her clients. Even with these barriers and restrictions, Charlotte makes a smashing debut as a private consultant.
We meet Charlotte shortly after she deliberately destroys her reputation. Her mother would not let up on trying to get her married and her father failed to follow through on his promise to fund her through school, then help her set up as a headmistress somewhere. The only thing for it, Charlotte reckons, is to take herself permanently off the marriage market and leave home. Her first plans for employment do not go well, so the arrival of Mrs. Watson (a retired actress and widow of a soldier who died in Afghanistan) is a godsend. Before long, she and Mrs. Watson have set up a business for “Sherlock Holmes,” a reclusive invalid who solves mysteries.
This brief summary does little justice to the sheer amount of plot Thomas stuffs into A Study in Scarlet Women. This book also contains a frustrated romance for Charlotte and a fiendishly complex series of suspicious deaths that Charlotte solves (due to her sex and gender) mostly through second had information gathered by Inspector Robert Treadles (a disarming anagram for Lestrade). Charlotte suspects that three seemingly unrelated deaths are really a series of murders. The stories don’t add up for her, but it isn’t until Treadles does a lot of digging and her friend, Lord Ingram, investigates society gossip that the pieces start to fall into place.
It’s clear that a substantial part of this book are set ups for future entries in the series, so we are introduced to a lot of characters who do a little here but will definitely play bigger roles in the future—and we know this mostly because of these characters’ similarities to characters from the Holmes canon. Part of the pleasure of reading A Study in Scarlet Women is spotting the differences and similarities between the characters in this book and their inspiration. A few of the references had me chuckling. Others had me marveling at the way Thomas repurposes and reassigns pieces of the Holmes canon in this pastiche. If the plotting weren’t so intricately constructed and the characters so interesting in themselves, A Study in Scarlet Women would’ve been just a highly detailed and clever in-joke. Since they are, I had a great time reading this book. I’d recommend it to women Holmes fans who want to see the old stories flipped on their heads and gender-swapped.