Talk to The Hound of the Baskervilles like its author wrote you back.
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The Hound of the Baskervilles, in detail
The Baskerville family has been haunted for generations by the legend of a spectral hound — a creature of supernatural vengeance said to pursue the heirs of a wicked ancestor across the Dartmoor fog. When the latest heir dies under mysterious circumstances, his doctor brings the case to Sherlock Holmes, who sends Watson ahead to the Devonshire moors with the new heir while he remains in London. The setup allows Conan Doyle to run the novel half as Gothic horror and half as detective story, and the combination is what makes it his most successful long-form work.
The Holmes novels vary considerably in quality — The Valley of Fear and The Sign of the Four are uneven — but Hound is tight and atmospheric in a way none of the others quite achieve. Much of this is Watson's narration from Dartmoor in Holmes's absence: the moors are fog, treacherous bogs, strange lights, unexplained howling. The supernatural pressure is maintained long enough that even readers who know Holmes will deliver a rational solution may find themselves unsure. Conan Doyle understood that the Gothic requires sustained dread, not just a spooky setting.
The plot mechanics are somewhat contrived — the identity of the villain requires a leap — but Conan Doyle compensates with atmosphere and pace. The set-piece confrontation is one of the best in the series. The novel also makes effective use of Holmes's unusual deployment: his absence from most of the action, and the revelation of what he was actually doing, is a piece of structural misdirection that the short story format never allowed.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the obvious entry point for anyone who has only encountered Holmes in adaptations. It is the single Holmes work that functions as a complete, fully satisfying novel — with a beginning, a sustained middle, and a resolution that pays off the setup. Those who came first to the BBC series or the films will find the source both simpler and more effective than they expected.
The big ideas
- 1.
The novel is structurally built on a tension between two explanatory modes: the supernatural and the rational. Conan Doyle runs them in parallel long enough to make even confident readers uncertain.
- 2.
Watson as sole narrator for much of the novel — rather than Watson-reporting-Holmes — gives the book a different texture than the short stories. The uncertainty is more sustained because Watson genuinely doesn't know.
- 3.
Holmes's strategic absence from the moors is a piece of formal misdirection: it forces the reader to sit with Watson's limited perspective before the revelation of what was actually happening.
