"The Hound of the Baskervilles": A Review

It seems hardly necessary to summarize Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s best-known Sherlock Holmes novel.  Not only is it so familiar that even those who haven’t read the book can give an adequate outline of the plot, the plot itself is not the most complex of the Holmes adventures. 

The beginning of The Hound of the Baskervilles takes place, not with Holmes and Watson ‘round their hearth at 221b Baker Street, but actually outside.  I mean outside the book itself.  See, prior to writing Baskervilles Doyle had committed the perfect crime: he had murdered Sherlock Holmes in front of the entire world, right there, plain in black and white.  And there was nothing anyone could do about it.  Doyle got away, scot-free (which, since he was a Scot, explains how he knew how to do it in the first place…).

Doyle was faced with a Frankensteinian issue some authors encounter when they achieve the popularity they’ve desired for so long: their characters come to life, the public loves them more than the author, and the author can’t get on with other projects because their audience is always clamoring for more of their old characters. Fellow mystery writer Agatha Christie had the same problem with Poirot. L.M. Montgomery got stuck writing an entire series about Anne Shirley. And A.C. Doyle thought his historical novels were his best works, but they were constantly being overshadowed by Holmes! So what was he to do but to kill him off to make room for Sir Nigel and the White Company?*

Unfortunately for him, Holmes adventures meant big bucks, and he needed the money.  He didn’t want to resurrect Holmes from the dead (just yet). So, in order to capitalize on Holmes’ name, Doyle wrote a novel set before the incident at Reichenbach Falls.  Using a story and setting that were too good to pass up, Baskervilles is set in Dartmoor, in the southern county of Devon. 

Sir Charles Baskerville has died of a heart attack, but the local doctor James Mortimer suspects some sort of foul play, partly due to a story of an ancient curse on the Baskerville clan: that a giant hound roams the moors around Baskerville Hall, seeking revenge on the entire clan for an act of violence done by one of their forefathers. Dr. Mortimer hires Holmes to protect the new Baskerville heir from an untimely death. Holmes sends Dr. Watson as bodyguard for Henry Baskerville as they journey into the eerie moors of his estate. 

Because Holmes is absent—working behind the scenes, as it were—for most of the narrative, Doyle allowed himself some distance from his over-popular creation. Instead, it is almost a spin-off novel, starring Watson as the bemused and wary protector of clueless and reckless young man.  It is Watson who gathers the clues, thought Holmes puts them together in the end.  And in the end, as in every self-respecting Holmes adventure, the solution is not so much mystical as it is methodical.

 

*Doyle was wrong, by the way.  I’ve read a few of his historical fiction and, while they’re not bad, they don’t ring with the same quality prose or endearing characters as in Holmes. His Challenger books, The Lost World and The Poison Belt, however, could have done with a few more entries, in my humbly biased opinion.