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The doctor may not have the genius of the detective but he is, as Holmes puts it, “a man of action,”

They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral.

Dr. Mortimer

whose “instinct is always to do something energetic.” Certainly, in Dartmoor Watson is energetic, confronting Barrymore head on, bluntly interviewing local people, ambushing the stranger hiding out on the moor—who turns out to be Holmes—and charging recklessly after Selden, a convicted murderer.

Telling the story

Watson’s account of his adventures on Dartmoor comprises a mixture of recollection, written reports sent back to 221B (from where, unknown to the good doctor, they are then sent all the way back to Holmes in his Dartmoor hideout), and detailed diary entries. This gives The Hound of the Baskervilles an episodic feel that is unusual in the Holmes canon. Rather than

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 159

A group of prisoners and their guards pass through the main gate of Dartmoor Prison, Princetown, in 1906. Built for prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the jail later housed murderers like Selden.

being punctuated with climactic moments of suspense and horror, as in most other Holmes stories, the narrative builds, with an insistent and increasing tempo, in a series of disparate and provocative scenes. This endows the narrative with a persuasive authenticity, making it easier for the reader to suspend disbelief in the face of the rather unlikely happenings that occur. But above all, the tale gives the reader Dartmoor, the unseen but eerily baying hound, and a deliciously sinister villain.

A worthy setting

Conan Doyle draws so vivid a picture of Dartmoor, with its bleak moorland, Neolithic ruins, craggy tors, twisting paths and streams, lonely dwellings, and fog-shrouded, menacing mire, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Looming over it all is the very real Princetown Prison. As Holmes observes, it is a worthy setting for such a dark tale. Says Watson of his first glimpse of the moor from the train, “Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.” Later, he describes Dartmoor as “… this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor

The hound of Hell

Myths from many countries refer to black hounds that are the servants of the devil, and a group of these sinister creatures is said to inhabit Dartmoor. The Wisht Hounds (“wisht” is an old word for “eerie”) are creatures of Satan and able to fly after their quarry. They are led by a devil figure, Dewer, often identified with an evil 17th-century squire, Richard Cabell of Buckfastleigh. Cabell is variously said to have kidnapped maidens, been a vampire, and murdered his wife.

sink into one’s soul…”. Like the local “peasants,” Sir Charles believed the legend of the hound, and nothing could induce him to go out on the moor at night. Watson and Sir Henry are made of sterner stuff, but even they are shaken to the core when they are out on the moor at night looking for Selden and suddenly hear the hound baying. “It came with the wind through the silence of the night,” Watson reports, “a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and ❯❯

When he died in 1677, villagers buried him under a heavy stone inside a solid tomb. Some say the Wisht Hounds chased him to his death, and gather every night to howl around his tomb. Others say his headless ghost leads the Wisht Hounds on their rides over the moors.

In the story, Stapleton creates the Baskerville Hound by buying a bloodhound/mastiff cross from a London dealer—Ross and Mangles on Fulham Road—and keeps the huge animal half-starved and chained in the ruins of a miner’s cottage.

160 A LEGEND RETURNS

then the sad moan in which it died away.” Watson never once believes the hound is supernatural, but Sir Henry’s faith is not so unshakeable. As he tells the doctor, “…it was one thing to laugh about it in London, and it is another to stand out here in the darkness of the moor and to hear such a cry as that.”

The Baskerville line

Like his uncle Sir Charles, Sir Henry is of necessity a sympathetic character, for Conan Doyle wants the reader to be concerned for his safety. The two are a far cry from their ancestor Sir Hugo, who rode roughshod over the local peasants

Grimspound was one of the Dartmoor sites visited in 1901 by Conan Doyle and Bertram Fletcher Robinson, while researching the novel’s grim setting.

and had his wicked, drunken way with kidnapped maidens. Sir Charles originally made his fortune in South Africa, and he donated generously to both local and county charities, according to a report in the fictional Devon County Chronicle. Sir Henry’s years in Canada have evidently given him a similarly democratic outlook, for he is determined to build on the work his uncle did in the community.

Very different is the other Baskerville nephew, Jack Stapleton, the secret only child of Sir Charles’s youngest brother, Rodger. “The black sheep of the family” and the “very image” of Sir Hugo, according to Mortimer, Rodger’s deviant activity had made England “too hot to hold him” and he fled to South America. There, unknown to his English relatives, he had married and had a son, Jack. The younger Stapleton stole some money and left for England with Beryl, a Costa Rican beauty, under the name Vandeleur. They settled in Yorkshire, where they founded a private school, but it soon sank “from disrepute into infamy,” says Holmes, until they found it prudent to change their names once again and, disguising themselves this time as a naturalist and his dutiful sister, moved to Dartmoor. Here Stapleton learned of the legend of the hound and hatched his dastardly plot, forcing Beryl to be his reluctant accomplice.

Masterly creations

The human agency behind the real hound, Stapleton is one of the best villains in the canon. From the start, Holmes realizes he is dealing

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 161

with a criminal almost as brilliant as himself. Paraphrasing Sir Walter Scott, he tells Watson: “this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel.” In London, when a disguised Stapleton hires a cab to follow Sir Henry and Mortimer, he at once spots Holmes and Watson trailing the pair on foot, and gets away. Knowing that Holmes will trace and interview the cabbie, he cheekily tells the man, “It might interest you to know that you have been driving Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” When the cabbie then duly informs Holmes of this, the detective bursts out laughing. “I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own,” he says, quoting Laertes in Hamlet.

Holmes knows his only chance is to fool the “wary and cunning” naturalist into dropping his guard. He sends Watson on alone to Baskerville Hall, announcing, “I’ve been checkmated in London, I can only wish you better luck in Devonshire.” In order to allay his adversary’s suspicions, Holmes knows it is essential that everyone thinks he is staying in the capital.

That Stapleton may be slightly unhinged as well as brilliant is evident when, during Watson’s first encounter with him on the moor, he suddenly sets off into the mire

It is something to have touched bottom anywhere in this bog in which we are floundering.

Dr. Watson

A stone hound guards the entrance to Hayford Hall in South Devon, believed by many Sherlockians to be the model for Baskerville Hall.

in manic, “zigzag” pursuit of, appropriately enough, a Cyclopides, or skipper, butterfly, so named for its rapid, darting flight (Conan Doyle knew his butterflies). Later, Watson sees Stapleton confront Sir Henry over his courting of Beryl, Sir Henry being unaware she is the naturalist’s wife. “He was running wildly towards them, his absurd net dangling behind him,” reports Watson. “He gesticulated and almost danced with excitement in front of the lovers.” Afterwards, a confused Sir Henry asks Watson, “Did he ever strike you as being crazy[?]… you can take it from me that either he or I ought to be in a strait-jacket.”

When Holmes first spots the uncanny resemblance between the butterfly collector and the portrait of Sir Hugo, he exclaims, “We have him, Watson, we have him… A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!”, at which the great detective bursts out laughing once more—an event that, as Watson notes, always bodes ill for someone.

And indeed, in classic detective-story tradition, Holmes ultimately triumphs over Stapleton, one of his greatest-ever opponents. After a lengthy period of chaos, his success definitively restores order to Dartmoor.

A sense of place

Holmes, his Baker Street rooms, and the bustle of London are all inseparably linked in the reader’s mind, but with The Hound of the Baskervilles, the great detective is indelibly connected to Dartmoor too. As Watson unknowingly says of him, in an iconic image, when describing the stranger hiding out on the moor, “He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place.” As the man who hunts Stapleton down, Sherlock Holmes—so often likened by Watson to a bloodhound in their adventures together—is arguably the real hound of the Baskervilles. ■

I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep.

Sherlock Holmes

THIS EMPTY

HOUSE IS MY

TREE

AND YOU

ARE MY TIGER

THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE (1903)

IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

US: September 1903 UK: October 1903

COLLECTION

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905

CHARACTERS

Honourable Ronald Adair Second son of the Earl of Maynooth.

Lady Maynooth

Ronald’s mother.

Hilda Maynooth

Ronald’s sister.

Edith Woodley Ronald’s former fiancée.

Colonel Sebastian Moran

Ronald’s card partner.

Inspector Lestrade

Scotland Yard detective.

T

his story sees the dramatic resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, after his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, killed along with his nemesis, Moriarty, in “The Final Problem” (pp.142–47).

It is sometimes said that Conan Doyle was forced to bring Holmes back to life by public pressure. If that was the case, it took him a whole decade to yield. Given that that pressure is likely to have diminished rather than increased over the 10-year period, it seems more likely that Conan Doyle was swayed by the substantial financial deal being offered by the successful American periodical Collier’s

THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE 163

The royal

baccarat scandal

Weekly. Therefore, the news of Holmes’s amazing return reached the US one month before it arrived in the UK, when the story was published in The Strand Magazine.

By the time Conan Doyle wrote “The Adventure of the Empty House,” it was the start of the 20th century and Queen Victoria had been dead for two years, yet he chose to set Holmes’s return in 1894, firmly in the Victorian era, and only three years after Holmes’s disappearance.

Murder on Park Lane

The story opens with Watson relating the strange murder of the Honorable Ronald Adair. He explains that the whole of London society was aghast at the killing of the young aristocrat, but Watson has taken a special interest in the case because he feels that the peculiar circumstances of Adair’s death were of the kind that would have appealed to his late friend Holmes. The doctor misses his friend’s company, and is keenly aware of the loss of Holmes’s unique crime-solving abilities to the wider community. Adair was the second son of the Earl

The card game in “The Adventure of the Empty House” was very likely based on the royal baccarat scandal (“the Tranby Croft affair”) of 1890. A group of aristocrats and ex-army officers attended a house party at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire in order to play baccarat, an illegal gambling game. One of the party was the future King Edward VII. While playing, one of the guests, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was accused of cheating. Like Moran, Gordon-Cumming was a decorated army officer. He agreed to never play cards again in return

of Maynooth, the governor of an Australian colony, and lived with his mother and sister on London’s exclusive Park Lane. A pleasant young man, he had no obvious enemies, and his only vice was that of playing cards. He was a member of several card clubs, and typically played whist, but apparently never gambled beyond his means. Just a few weeks ago, he had won £420 playing with his regular partner, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

On the evening of his murder, Adair returned home at 10pm and retired to his upstairs sitting room.

All day I turned these facts over in my mind, endeavouring to hit upon some theory which could reconcile them all.

Dr. Watson

for the guests’ silence. But when rumors began to circulate, Gordon-Cumming decided to sue his accusers for slander. Prince Edward was obliged to appear in court as a witness— the first time a royal prince had appeared in court for hundreds of years—and the story made headline news in Britain. Conan Doyle had met Prince Edward just a year before writing “The Empty House.” One of Adair’s card-playing associates is called Lord Balmoral (the name of the Queen’s Scottish estate), linking him unmistakably to the prince.

When his mother, Lady Maynooth, came home later with his sister Hilda, she found his door locked from the inside. Failing to rouse him, she had the door forced open and discovered him dead— part of his head blown off by an expanding bullet.

The locked room mystery

There was no sign of a murder weapon in the room, nor any indication that anyone other than Adair had entered. Outside the window was a drop of at least 20 feet, and the flowerbed below showed no sign of disturbance. A brilliant marksman might have fired through the open window from the street, but no one outside on the busy Park Lane had heard the sound of a shot.

On the table at which the dead man was sitting were neat piles of money, and a sheet of paper with names and figures, suggesting Adair had been adding up his winnings and losses at cards. The sums were all modest, however, and so there seems to have been neither motive nor means for the young man’s murder. Watson is mystified. At this stage, it seems ❯❯

164 A LEGEND RETURNS

At Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, Holmes apparently falls to his death, locked in a fatal struggle with his archenemy Moriarty.

1891

Arrives in Florence, Italy, one week later, the first destination in his three-year journey.

During the “Great Hiatus,” as his three-year disappearance is called, Holmes certainly does not rest on his laurels. Among other adventures, he travels to Tibet, enters the holy city of Islam, and becomes a secret agent for the British government.