VII. Introduction to

The Hound of the Baskervilles

In the year 1901, Sherlock Holmes had been dead for nearly eight years, tossed into the crashing foam of the Reichenbach Falls by his creator, whose growing resentment of the great detective finally drove him to cold-blooded murder. During the two brief years of more or less monthly episodes, amounting to two dozen stories in the Strand magazine between July 1891 and December 1893, Holmes and Watson had propelled Arthur Conan Doyle straight into the storytellers’ stratosphere. By the end of the first twelve installments, the writer felt as if he were being eaten alive; twelve more, and he was desperate: Holmes had grown bigger than his author, and was threatening to dominate Conan Doyle’s real literary work. He had to go.

News of the detective’s tragic and untimely death shot in headlines around the world. Mourning bands appeared across England, young men made violent protest, thousands of Strand subscriptions were canceled by return of mail, and a story even made the rounds (perhaps apocryphal) that Conan Doyle had been physically attached by a handbag-wielding lady. But the doctor stood firm against the blandishments of the distraught publishers, the demanding public, and even (hardest of all to resist) his beloved mother: The brief, thrilling, and immensely profitable reign of Sherlock Holmes was over. Better literary work awaited his attentions.

Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (the Conan is a given name, after a journalist great-uncle) was born in Edinburgh in 1859, to an Irish Catholic family bristling with artists, writers, and natural storytellers such as his mother. His upbringing was typical of the middle classes, with long months of cold and occasionally brutal English boarding school relieved only by summers at home. He went on to do a degree in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, during the same period that James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson were there, although he does not seem to have encountered them there.

One of his professors was to have a profound influence on Conan Doyle’s later life, although in ways neither of them could have imagined at the time. Dr. Joseph Bell was a tall, thin, hawk-nosed individual with a strikingly analytic eye. With one look at a patient he could take in the peculiarities of dress, callus, and chronic injury characteristic of that individual’s personal and medical history. Each time it seemed like magic, until he explained the process of his thinking and observation; it seemed like magic to Dr. Watson as well when tall, thin, hawk-nosed Sherlock Holmes performed the same kinds of analyses on his clients. The first collection of Holmes stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, is dedicated to the Holmes paradigm, Dr. Bell.

The decade between Conan Doyle’s graduation from medical school and the publication of his first Holmes short story in the Strand saw a series of unsuccessful medical practices alternating with sheer adventure under the guise of practicing medicine: A whaling expedition to Iceland taught him the brutal art of seal-clubbing and turned him from a gangling teenager into a man; a tramp steamer carrying passengers and goods to West Africa brought him malaria, near-shipwreck, and an encounter with a shark, broadening his horizons even more than the Arctic expedition had. His subsequent commitment to settling into a doctor’s life must have been dull indeed to this hot-blooded sportsman with the scent of the world’s excitements vivid in his nostrils, but settle he did, and although the first couple of years were rocky financially, he slowly attracted enough patients to support a family.

And always he wrote stories, as an undergraduate or sitting in his surgery waiting for patients to wander in. Arctic adventures and Gothic mysteries, articles for medical and photographic journals, short stories and sprawling novels flowed from his pen. A number of them were even published. Then, six years after he graduated, one of his longer stories was bought by Beeton’s Christmas Annual, and Dr. Watson returned from Afghanistan with his Jezail wound to meet the young and eccentric Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It took another four years before Conan Doyle abandoned his medical practice entirely to become a full-time writer, but by then the world was beating down his door for more Holmes stories.

Actually, Conan Doyle tired of his character early—before the first series was finished, he was thinking of killing Holmes off. Soon he began to feel like a worried parent watching a child snatch up a candy bar and turn his back on a nutritious meal. Holmes was a lesser creation, Holmes was an uncontrollable addiction, Holmes was taking his mind off better things.

So Holmes had to die.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Holmes stayed dead for seven and a half long years, aside from an attempted stage play later completely rewritten by its producer, the actor William Gillette. The lengthy hiatus is understandable in retrospect. The same autumn that “The Final Problem” came out in the Strand, Conan Doyle’s unbalanced, alcoholic father died in a mental asylum and his wife was diagnosed with the end stages of tuberculosis, an invariably fatal disease that had been both overlooked (by him, a doctor) and exacerbated by the demands of the life they had led under the regime of Holmes.

News of the fuss raised by the story’s publication reached Conan Doyle at a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps, where his wife lay struggling for breath. No mourning bands appeared in London’s streets for his father; no loud protest was raised against Louisa’s death sentence. Small wonder his bitterness against Holmes and all he represented took so long to fade.

But eventually fade it did, until the spring of 1901, when Conan Doyle began a “creeper” of a story. It had begun to root in his mind during a sea voyage from South Africa the previous summer when he struck up a friendship with a young journalist and ardent collector of Devonshire folklore, Fletcher Robinson. Robinson entertained Conan Doyle with supernatural tales of ghosts and goblins, including the legend of a great, ghostly hound said to haunt a local family.

The seed fell onto fertile soil and soon blossomed into the idea for a supernatural thriller featuring, yes, the great rationalist Holmes. Within months of the voyage, Conan Doyle was proposing a book-length story entitled The Hound of the Baskervilles to his ecstatic publishers and his equally overjoyed mother. Whether through honesty or, more likely, generosity, the credit for authorship was originally to be shared with Robinson, and indeed, Robinson later claimed that large portions of it were from his own pen.

However, close scrutiny reveals no seams, and even a cursory glance assures the reader that this can only be a product of the same pen that produced The Sign of Four and “The Red-Headed League.” The spectral dog may have been Robinson’s and the name Baskerville that of the coachman who drove the two men over Dartmoor, but the book is pure Conan Doyle.

One can suggest a number of reasons why the author chose to resume his chronicles of the world’s foremost consulting detective. Not the least of them, it must be said, was Conan Doyle’s innate generosity of heart, which made it hard for him to hold a grudge against anyone, even a character of his own creation. The writer had matured, and discovered that a man in his forties may feel less threatened by sharing the stage with an outsize character such as Holmes than a man in his thirties.

By 1901, Conan Doyle had proved himself to the critics, and had to some extent adjusted to fame by stepping back from it. He had spent seven years finding success (in varying degrees) as a playwright and writer of historical fiction, had fallen in love with the woman he would marry after Louisa’s death, had served as an army doctor in the Boer War, and had stood (unsuccessfully) for Parliament. Louisa, against all expectations, was still alive (and would be until 1906) and the Conan Doyle expenses were mounting.

The nasty truth was, historical fiction and sweeping world histories didn’t sell all that well. So in 1901, with what may have been an exaggerated reluctance (no author actually enjoys a waning of fame) Conan Doyle took a deep breath and prepared to dust off the man with the pipe, the violin, and the hooded gray eyes, sending him and the good doctor off on the adventure of their lives—and coyly obscuring the date when the story takes place, so as to continue the pretense that the scoured bones of the great detective still lay in the Reichenbach waters.

The public didn’t care about such authorial niceties. They pricked up their ears at the “step upon the stair”, knowing it could only bode well.

Their faith was not disappointed. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a glorious tale, the work of a gifted storyteller at the top of his powers, who moreover throws himself fully into the adventure, betraying not the slightest breath of his earlier resentment and disdain. “The hound of the Baskervilles”—the very taste of the phrase in the mouth, first rotund, then sharp and sibilant, says it all: Here is a book that has everything. And it does: brisk action; a dark and moody setting; fear and courage; loyalty and betrayal; a beautiful woman and the monstrous, glowing embodiment of a family curse; and the cold mind and passionate heart of a great man braced against a diabolical plot. Humor and yearning, evil and simplicity. Even the central character is a delight, returned to us undamaged from the cold depths of the waterfall.

So great is the pleasure in the book, in fact, that the hapless commentator hesitates to pick over it, wanting only to thrust the book, whole and unanalyzed, into the reader’s hand and urge, “Enjoy! Oh, this is your tenth read? Well, have a grand time!”

Still, with any great work of art, analysis cannot detract, it can only enrich. As the rabbis might say, God is great enough to receive our questions.

The reference to Hebraic scripture is considered, for the story-telling in The Hound of the Baskervilles possesses much of the enigmatic power, and a great deal of the curious style, of the Old Testament, where elements one might expect to find in a narrative are often omitted (for example, we are not told Holmes’ reaction to hearing that the overenthusiastic phrenologist Dr. Mortimer covets his skull) while other elements are drummed into the reader with an insistent emphasis (such as the word “thrill,” which seems to appear on every page, or the repetition “He was running, Watson—running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face.”)

A single word or gesture may carry an inordinately heavy burden (Holmes holding the letter “an inch or two from his eyes”, the import of which we do not learn until much later) while at other times lengthy excursus brings crystal clarity to matters of no real importance (the legalistic minutiae beloved of the neighbor Mr. Frankland).

Unlike the meandering Old Testament, however, this is a novel, and despite having been originally published in monthly episodes, it remains under the author’s tight control at each moment. No images are wasted; no characters appear but that they are fully used (although, admittedly, Conan Doyle does seem ultimately uncertain of what to do with his stalwart colonial, Sir Henry Baskerville.)

Look at the way the story begins (and fear not, those of you new-comers who insist on reading an introduction first: I shall give away little here apart from my own pleasure and awe). A client absentmindedly leaves his walking stick in lieu of a calling card, giving rise to a humorous exchange: Holmes and Watson are introduced and their relationship established.

The anticipation that comes with the sound of feet upon the stairs is resolved—Yes! This will indeed be a case worthy of the Great Detective. Not, however, because of the horrifying family history Dr. Mortimer reads them, of thirteen drunken squires set on rape, the bravest (or drunkest) of whom pursue their host and his intended victim across the moor to a prehistoric stone circle, there to witness a terrible revenge.

This ancient tale culminates in one of the many splendid phrases in which this narrative abounds, a heartfelt exhortation (best spoken in lowered tones even by daylight) to the Baskerville descendants that they keep from venturing onto the moor “in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.”

And Holmes’ response? He yawns, and tosses his cigarette end into the fire by way of comment. What really rivets his attention onto the case’s merits is not Mortimer’s “fairy-tale”, but the peculiar juxtaposition of a missing boot and an aged uncle’s death by natural causes. Those, he declares, make for a case that cuts deep.

One might suspect that Holmes is toying with Watson (and hence with us) by this pronouncement, but for the frank uneasiness he soon expresses, laying bare his deeper affections in a manner that is rare in the stories. Here he tells his companion that the case threatens to be “an ugly, dangerous business”, adding, “my dear fellow…I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street once more.”

Events follow fast on one another’s heels, curiosity upon curiosity, sweeping us along in a mounting anticipation of action before the case even begins to approach Dartmoor itself. A mysterious note, closely analyzed but its source undiscovered; a second boot missing, with Sir Henry’s choleric indignation provoking our smile even as we wonder; a dark and bearded spy who eludes Holmes and Watson, but not before presenting his name as (ah! pleasure upon pleasure!) “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Plot threads seem to weave around one another, only to be neatly and inexorably snipped. “There is nothing,” remarks Holmes, “more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”

With the reader well and truly stimulated, the case moves west to Dartmoor, where the bounce and humor of the opening pages gutters like a candle under the bleak and brooding breath from off the moor. Dr. Mortimer’s playful spaniel gives way to the mythic spectral hound, and alone Dr. Watson confronts the lonely landscape, the murderous peat bogs, a lurking escaped murderer, and the sound of weeping in the night.

The way in which the writer balances light moments with the darkness permeating the moor is masterful, and classic Conan Doyle. Even later on, when events are conspiring to make the tension nearly unbearable (and imagine having to read this in episodes, knowing at each climax that an entire month would have to go by before the next chapter arrived!), a vein of humor introduces itself, with the ridiculous Mr. Frankland allowing us to catch our breath before the good Dr. Watson forces himself to venture into the prehistoric dwellings that conceal a mysterious figure, glimpsed by night.

The book was written in the author’s customary fashion: at great speed and with few changes, so that the first chapter was in the hands of readers less than six months after the publisher’s contract was signed. The book’s flaws and holes should, no doubt, be attributed to the speed of composition and cursory editing.

And holes there are, if one looks: the denouement is not entirely satisfactory; Holmes exhibits a curious inability to notice an accent in a Costa Rican woman; Conan Doyle reveals a winsome naïveté in his assumption that a resident housemaid would not have noticed, shall we say, irregularities in the relations between her employers; and the ethics of inflicting a condemned murderer on the people of an unspecified South American country makes a later audience uneasy (indeed, the 1984 Grenada television production of the book took care to explain that the convict had been lobotomized to render him docile).

Despite the small glitches—or indeed, perhaps because of them—the relief of the reading public in August of 1901 was profound: Holmes was back, and he was still Holmes. He was, perhaps, even truer to life than he had been in some of the less inspired pre-Reichenbach stories, for Conan Doyle pulled out all the stops. The two instantly recognizable friends before the very same Baker Street fire; Holmes shaking his head as usual at Watson’s misguided attempts at the science of deduction; the laugh-out-loud humor when Holmes, faced with Watson’s sputtering protests at the quantity of tobacco smoke in the air, speculates that, if “a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought,” that maybe it would be logical to climb into a box in order to think—we are all home in Baker Street once again.

Conan Doyle would continue to produce Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927, three years before his death. The latest internal date in one of the Holmes stories, however (“His Last Bow”), is the eve of the First World War; all subsequent tales are set before the carnage of 1914-1918. The cutoff is necessary, for Holmes as Conan Doyle wrote him was a Victorian gentleman, at home with gas lamps, hansom cabs, and an unshakable faith in Science, who would no more have survived the Great War undamaged than did the author. Conan Doyle himself lost a son, and was driven to Spiritualism in the hopes of contacting those who had gone before him. He became a devout believer in mind reading and fairies, spirit possession and ectoplasmic oozings, and proved himself susceptible to half the charlatans of the Western world.

And being Conan Doyle, he made sure everyone knew about his beliefs, writing books and conducting worldwide lecture tours. The newspapers had a field day with the idea that the creator of the Great Rationalist could be as gullible as any farmboy in a carnival midway, and although Conan Doyle fought back with all his Irish-Scots-English will, the battle was not winnable and drained his resources on all levels.

Of course, in 1901 all that is in the future. In 1901, the gas lamps burn still, the hansoms rattle the cobbles streets, and the reader never really doubts, when Holmes sets his cold intellect against the ghostly hound, which will prevail.

But before that end there is a ripping story, with laughter to counteract the hackles rising on the back of the reader’s neck; with a long stretch of Watson operating all on his own, the drawn-out tension of both doctor and reader (where in heaven’s name is Holmes?) relieved at precisely the right instant; with a love interest to bring warmth onto the frigid moor; and with not one but a pair of deadly mysteries—ghostly hound and all-too-real convict—that dance around each other until they come together: This is story-telling at its finest, humane and intuitive, crafted by a man having the time of his life.

So I say again, whether this is your first encounter with the hound or your twenty-first: Take! Enjoy! And have a grand time on Dartmoor!