Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes confronts a problem in which observation, disguise and social performance matter more than force. A masked royal visitor asks him to recover a compromising photograph from Irene Adler, an American singer whose intelligence has already frustrated every conventional attempt.

The story established several of the Holmes canon's most enduring images: the rooms at Baker Street, the brilliant deduction drawn from ordinary traces, the detective's transforming disguises, and above all Irene Adler—remembered not as a romantic conquest, but as "the woman" who anticipated his method.

This edition places illustrated progression maps at stable moments in the text. Each one gathers only the people, locations, objects and questions already encountered, allowing the reader to reconstruct the trail without revealing what lies ahead.