The Hound of the Baskervilles

1900

crime novel
english civil war
mires
tors
tombs
dogs
england, fiction
watson, john h. (fictitious character), fiction
british and irish fiction (fictional works by one author)
fiction, mystery & detective, traditional

The story

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set in 1889 largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England's West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. Holmes and Watson investigate the case. This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in "The Final Problem", and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character's eventual revival. One of the most famous stories ever written, in 2003, the book was listed as number 128 of 200 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novel". In 1999, a poll of "Sherlockians" ranked it as the best of the four Holmes novels.

What it’s like

Misty moorland atmosphere carries most of this book: wide, open Dartmoor under drifting fog, granite tors rising out of bog and bracken, mires that swallow the unwary, and ancient stone tombs and crumbling manor walls at the edges of the frame. Doyle's prose is clean, brisk and Victorian in its courtesy, with the narrator Watson's measured, slightly fussy voice doing most of the description, so the landscape arrives through careful, observant sentences rather than lush imagery. Evenings bring lamplit studies, damp cold, and the distant, unsettling howl of something out on the moor. The mood is eerie and wintry rather than gory: a steady undercurrent of dread, with the supernatural legend kept deliberately ambiguous and the scares built from suggestion and silence. Violence is present but restrained, a death on the moor and a few tense confrontations, with nothing lingering on the body. The pace is brisk, with short chapters and frequent clues, and the arc follows the rational detective and his companion pressing through fog toward a rational answer. It suits a rainy weekend, a comfort reread on a dark evening, or readers who love gothic atmosphere, country-house intrigue and a puzzle that stays spooky to the last page.

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