Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet)

It was good to read the first Holmes novel, with the setting up of the Holmes and Watson pairing. Plus the magnifying glass and Holmes in disguise.

A Study in Scarlet is an 1887 detective novel by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become the most famous detective duo in literature. The book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, a consulting detective, to his friend and chronicler Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."^[1]

The story, and its main characters, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Only eleven complete copies of the magazine in which the story first appeared, Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, are known to exist now, which have considerable value.^[2] Although Conan Doyle wrote 56 short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon. The novel was followed by The Sign of the Four, published in 1890. A Study in Scarlet was the first work of detective fiction to incorporate the magnifying glass as an investigative tool.^[3]

H G Wells - The Invisible Man

 H G Wells - The Invisible Man

A fairly straightforward story about an invisible man trying to become visible again, but going mad and murderous.

It was OK. Worth the quick read

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.

While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in The Invisible Man. The novel is considered influential, and helped establish Wells as the "father of science fiction".^[1]