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work by Edward VII in 1902—the king himself numbered among Holmes’s fans and was as eager as anybody to hear more of his exploits.

An emotional reunion

The events in The Hound of the Baskervilles predate Holmes’s apparent death in “The Final Problem,” and so did not resurrect the detective as fans had hoped. Holmes’s return from the dead in October 1903, in the short story “The Empty House,” provoked an emotional response from fans. Watson, too, was overjoyed at the news, swiftly selling his practice to move back into 221B Baker Street. Watson later discovers that the practice was bought by a relative of Holmes, revealing—with wonderful understatement on Conan Doyle’s part—that the feeling was mutual.

Perhaps the use of a waxwork decoy model of Holmes in “The Empty House” was Conan Doyle’s wry comment on the fame that his detective had garnered by this point. Yet he did not shy away from satisfying his readers, making sure that The Return of Sherlock Holmes ran the gamut of his hero’s talents. “The Dancing Men” features the most fiendish coded message in the canon, while the use of fingerprinting in “The Norwood Builder” was radical for its time. And Holmes’s skill for disguise underpins both “Charles Augustus Milverton” and “The Empty House.”

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These stories also often see Holmes hobnobbing with a high-society crowd. In “The Golden Pince-Nez,” there is a tantalizing reference to his having been admitted into the French “Legion of Honour” after he had apprehended “the Boulevard Assassin.” Likewise, two of Conan Doyle’s own favorite tales, “The Priory School” and “The Second Stain,” see Holmes dealing with some highly illustrious personae. Yet Conan Doyle’s aristocrats are not necessarily painted with affection. Lord Holdernesse is deeply implicated in the drama of “The Priory School,” and Sir Eustace Bracknell in “The Abbey Grange” is notable for his violence and alcoholism. The well-to-do “Norwood Builder” Jonas Oldacre, meanwhile, is an out-and-out fiend. As in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the tales in this collection often play out in controlled, out-of-town environments, away from the chaos of London. ■

THERE IS NOTHING MORE

STIMULATING

THAN A CASE WHERE

EVERYTHING

GOES AGAINST YOU

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1902)

154 A LEGEND RETURNS

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Novel

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: The Strand Magazine, August 1901

NOVEL PUBLICATION

George Newnes, March 1902

CHARACTERS

Sir Charles Baskerville

Squire of Baskerville Hall, recently deceased.

Sir Henry Baskerville

Inheritor of the Baskerville estate, arrived from Canada.

Sir Hugo Baskerville

Ancestor of Sir Henry.

Dr. James Mortimer Family friend of the Baskervilles and executor of Sir Charles’s will.

Jack Stapleton Neighbor of the Baskervilles; a naturalist.

Beryl Stapleton

Costa Rican beauty.

John Barrymore

Butler at Baskerville Hall.

Eliza Barrymore

John’s wife, and housekeeper at Baskerville Hall.

Selden Eliza’s brother, an escaped convict.

Inspector Lestrade

Scotland Yard detective.

Chapter 6

Chapters 1 & 2 At Baskerville Hall,

Dr. Mortimer comes Chapter 4 Watson meets the

to 221B Baker Street Sir Henry receives suspicious servants,

and relates the legend a warning note and the Barrymores, and

of Sir Hugo Baskerville has a boot stolen learns that an escaped

and the hound. from his hotel. convict is on the loose.

Chapter 3

Sir Henry Baskerville arrives in London; a huge, glowing hound is seen on the moor.

O

n a fall day in 1889, a Dr. Mortimer of Dartmoor calls at 221B Baker Street. He produces a manuscript, dated 1742, from which he recounts the story of how a curse was placed on the Baskerville family of Devonshire. The dastardly Sir Hugo Baskerville made a pact with “the Powers of Evil” and was subsequently chased down and torn to shreds by a “hell-hound” on the moor. The document warns his descendants to avoid the moor at night on pain of a similar fate. Now, Mortimer’s friend and the latest squire of Baskerville Hall,

Chapter 5

Holmes sends Watson to Dartmoor with Sir Henry, who has inherited Baskerville Hall.

Sir Charles, has died of heart failure after fleeing from what paw prints suggest was a “gigantic hound,” and his next of kin, Sir Henry, is arriving to from Canada inherit the estate.

At his London hotel, Sir Henry receives a note that reads: “as you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.” Holmes sends Watson to Dartmoor with Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer, claiming that he is too busy to go himself. Watson finds Baskerville Hall “a place of shadow and gloom.” On the “forbidding” moor, he meets a local naturalist, Jack Stapleton,

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 155

Chapter 9 Chapter 12

Watson discovers that Holmes and Watson the escaped convict is discover that the Mrs. Barrymore’s brother, convict has died after hiding on the moor. fleeing the hound.

Chapters 7 & 8 Chapters 10 & 11

Watson meets Stapleton, Watson further hears the howl of a hound, investigates the local and sees Barrymore people, then discovers signaling with a candle Holmes in a hideout to somebody on the moor. on the moor.

Chapter 14

Stapleton releases the hound on Sir Henry; it is shot by Holmes and Watson. Stapleton flees into the mire and is sucked to his death.

Holmes points Back in 221B Baker

out the likeness Street, Holmes of Stapleton sums up the case to Sir Hugo. for Watson.

and the two see a pony sucked into the bog. As Jack departs, his sister arrives, and warns Watson to leave.

Sir Henry and Watson catch Barrymore, the butler, signaling at night to someone on the moor, and discover that he and his wife are taking food, and Sir Henry’s old clothes, to Mrs. Barrymore’s brother Selden, an escaped convict. While looking for the criminal, Watson and Sir Henry spot someone hiding out on the moor—who turns out to be none other than Sherlock Holmes. The detective has been spying on Stapleton, who he suspects has a shady past. As night falls, baying and screams signal the convict’s death. Seeing a portrait of Sir Hugo on the wall of the hall, Holmes notices a striking similarity to Stapleton.

When Sir Henry begins walking home from the Stapleton residence across the moor, a fog descends and the hound appears—a fearsome beast with fire bursting from its mouth and eyes. Just as it is about to tear Sir Henry’s throat out, Holmes and Watson shoot it dead. The dog has been coated with phosphorus to look fiery. Stapleton, the man who is behind the hound’s murderous attempts on the life of both Sir Charles and Sir Henry, is sucked to his death trying to escape across the mire. Lestrade finds Stapleton’s sister Beryl gagged and bound, and it becomes clear that she is actually his wife. She was the author of the warning note sent to Sir Henry in London, and has been tied up in the house as she refused to take part in Sir Henry’s murder. It is revealed that Jack Stapleton was an unknown nephew of Sir Charles who planned to inherit the Baskerville fortune by murdering his relatives. ■

156 A LEGEND RETURNS

W

hen Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” (pp.142-47) in 1893, he was taken aback by the strength of feeling it incurred: fans reacted as if he had killed a real person. The author was also aware of how lucrative the Holmes franchise had been—and could be again. And so he eventually relented and incorporated Holmes into a supernatural horror story that he

It’s an ugly business, Watson, an ugly, dangerous business and the more I see of it the less I like it.

Sherlock Holmes

was already working on: The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is something of a cliché that every major crime writer since has had to think twice about killing off a hero they’ve grown tired of. As comebacks go, The Hound of the Baskervilles (actually a prequel), is a mightily impressive and memorable one. Not only did it see the dramatic reintroduction of Conan Doyle’s most famous literary creation, but it was also to become the most famous of all Holmes’s adventures.

Imagining the hound

The first appearance of The Hound of the Baskervilles was in August 1901, when it was published in nine monthly installments in the great detective’s spiritual home, The Strand Magazine. Once again the installments were graced with illustrations by Sidney Paget, who used a more detailed wash style than he had previously. However, like many subsequent film-makers,

The eponymous 1939 movie is the best-known and perhaps most successful cinematic adaptation of the novel. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played Holmes and Watson in 13 more films.

he discovered that no image of the hound could do justice to the hellish creature conjured by Conan Doyle in the mind of the reader: “…there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.”

Unsurprisingly, Holmes’s reappearance was a phenomenal success in both Britain and the US. Newnes initially produced 25,000 copies of the collected installments as a novel, but the print run was soon extended for readers in the colonies, and the US edition was published with a print run of 70,000. Noting the remarkable interest in the book, the US magazine Collier’s Weekly made a favorable offer to Conan Doyle for further stories featuring the great detective. As a result, it was in Collier’s, not the Strand, that subsequent Holmes stories were first published. Meanwhile, The Hound of the Baskervilles has become one of the truly great supernatural myths in literature. The book has been translated into almost every major language; adapted—with varying degrees of success—more than 20 times for cinema and television; and the story still remains fully embedded in the public imagination.

Holmes the masterful

The novel begins in a pleasingly familiar fashion. At 221B Baker Street, Holmes demonstrates to Watson his genius for scientific observation and deduction by analyzing Mortimer’s walking stick in his typically masterful style. But it is not long before the fantastical legend of the Baskerville hound intrudes into their ordered, rational, modern world. It sets Holmes and Watson off on a quest to track down a fabulous beast— reminiscent of those in medieval literature—a genre in which Conan Doyle was well versed.

Supernatural or natural

In later life, Conan Doyle displayed a personal—and, to many, a gullible— belief in the supernatural. Just after World War I, as he was mourning the deaths of both his son Kingsley and his brother Innes, Conan Doyle was famously duped by doctored photographs created by two Yorkshire schoolgirls, purporting to show fairies in their backyard (p.20). In 1901, however, through the cool, calm reasoning of Holmes, he gives the supernatural pretty short shrift. From the start, Holmes grasps the essential fact

The cover of the first edition of the novel was adorned with a woodcut by British artist and illustrator Alfred Garth Jones (1872–1955).

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 157

Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.

Sherlock Holmes

about the hound. The paw prints found at the scene of Sir Charles’s death were real: therefore the hound must be a flesh-and-blood animal, and not a specter. This is confirmed to Holmes when one of Sir Henry’s new boots is stolen from his London hotel room, only to be returned and another, older, boot taken. Crucially, Holmes does not reveal the meaning until the end of the story: the boot was stolen so that the hound would have a scent to follow, but the new boot, being as yet unworn, did not carry Sir Henry’s scent, so the thief put it back and stole an old one instead.

Another key clue that Holmes discovers early on in the story, but keeps to himself until its very end, is the faint scent of white jasmine on the warning note sent to Sir Henry. Holmes knows that only one of the handful of neighbors living within a few miles of Baskerville Hall could have sent the message. When he detects the scent, he realizes the source must be a woman and his suspicions fall on Stapleton, whose “sister” might have written the note.

Down in Dartmoor

The details of the case established, the reader accompanies Watson, Mortimer, and Sir Henry to ❯❯

An inspirational acquaintance

In 1901, Conan Doyle played golf in Cromer, Norfolk, with a journalist acquaintance named Bertram Fletcher Robinson (1870–1907)— “Bobbles” to his friends— and subsequently stayed at Robinson’s home in South Devon, where the journalist had a coachman called Baskerville. Bundled up against the cold, the pair would stroll across the lonely moors, Robinson regaling Conan Doyle all the while with myriad local legends. Together they came up with the basic idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles, and in a footnote at the beginning of the first installment of the book in The Strand Magazine, Conan Doyle wrote: “This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr. Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details.” Robinson himself, while he did accrue a share of the royalties, was always modest about the extent of his contribution. Whatever that was, it is clear that the finished Hound of the Baskervilles is overwhelmingly the handiwork of Sherlock Holmes’s creator.

158 A LEGEND RETURNS

Foulmire

House

High Tor

House

Cleft

Tor

Black

Tor

Vixen

Tor

Bellever Tor Old tin mine

Body of

Selden

found here

Coombe

Tracey

Grimpen

Hamlet

Hiding place of Sherlock Holmes

Bronze Age hut circles

Grimpen Mire

Lafter Hall Summer house

Body of

Sir Charles

found here

Yew Alley Baskerville Hall

Mernpit The

House Avenue

Ruined Lodge lodge

The setting for the story was carefully constructed by Conan Doyle, based on a combination of reality and invention. The elements are real—tors, hut circles, and dangerous peat bogs are all features of Dartmoor—but the arrangement and the names (except for Vixen Tor and Bellever Tor) are the author’s creation.

Dartmoor to face what is still an unknown enemy. Once there, the wonderfully sinister atmosphere of the moor and mire evoked by Conan Doyle, and the dramatic events that unfold, combine to deepen the sense of dread in the reader’s mind (never mind Mortimer’s) that the hound might really be supernatural—until Holmes’s reappearance sees reason triumph over superstition.

The detective is actually conspicuously absent for a large part of the narrative, but this is not a misstep on Conan Doyle’s part, for Holmes’s absence only builds a sense of anticipation in the reader, particularly since much time is now spent describing events, without the usual excitement of seeing the detective’s skills in action. When the reader discovers that Holmes has in fact been secretly on the scene all the time, the ploy is retrospectively all the more pleasing.