The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles
15 chapters
4.13from 402,265 ratingson Goodreads
Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on his own moor, his face contorted, and near the body are the footprints of a gigantic hound. A family legend says what the hound is. Holmes sends Watson to Devon with the heir while he attends to business in London, and the account Watson sends back is the best thing in the canon.
About the book
Serialised in 1901 and 1902, eight years after Holmes had gone over the Reichenbach Falls, The Hound of the Baskervilles is set before his death and was the book that brought him back. Dr Mortimer brings Holmes a seventeenth-century manuscript about a hellhound loosed on the Baskerville family, and the inquest on Sir Charles, found dead on the yew alley of his own park with the marks of a gigantic hound in the earth nearby. The heir arrives from Canada, and Holmes sends Watson to Dartmoor with him. The middle of the novel is Watson’s — his letters and diary from Baskerville Hall, with an escaped convict on the moor, a neighbour collecting butterflies, and a light in a window at night — and it is the best sustained writing in the canon. The question the book keeps open is not who, but whether the thing on the moor is natural at all.
Characters
Sherlock Holmes — Detective
Retained to protect the last Baskerville, and absent for a third of the book on business of his own.
Dr Watson — Narrator
Sent to Dartmoor as bodyguard and correspondent, and left to make what he can of the neighbours.
Sir Henry Baskerville — The heir
A plain-spoken young Canadian who inherits the estate and refuses to be frightened off it.
Dr Mortimer — Country doctor
The family’s physician and friend, who brings the legend and the inquest to Baker Street.
Jack Stapleton — Naturalist
A neighbour who collects moths on the moor and knows the safe paths through the Grimpen Mire.
Beryl Stapleton — Stapleton’s sister
Beautiful, frightened, and urgent that Sir Henry should leave Devon before he has unpacked.
Barrymore — Butler
The butler at Baskerville Hall, caught signalling from a window to somebody out on the moor.
Selden — Escaped convict
The Notting Hill murderer, loose on the moor and living on what is carried out to him.
About the author
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a Scottish physician who began writing Sherlock Holmes stories while waiting for patients who did not come. He modelled the detective on Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon who could name a stranger's trade and recent travels from the state of his hands and boots. Doyle thought his historical novels the serious work, killed Holmes off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, and was pushed into resurrecting him by public protest and a great deal of money. He spent his last decades campaigning for spiritualism, and twice for men he believed wrongly convicted.