Foreword

By David Stuart Davies

It is very pleasing to have this inventive and atmospheric script available to the general reader at last. It presents yet another facet of Conan Doyle’s masterpiece, one that is tangible and terrifying.

One of the remarkable things about this novel is the speed with which it was written. The book was famously conceived on a golfing holiday the author took with his friend Fletcher Robinson in Norfolk in March 1901. The first episode of the story appeared in the Strand Magazine in August that year. The idea of the phantom hound and mystery surrounding the Baskerville family inflamed Doyle’s imagination in such a fashion that his pen must have flown over the pages in the novel’s composition.

In 1902 The Hound of the Baskervilles came out in book form and was a tremendous success. It has never been out of print since. It is the most famous of all Sherlock Holmes’ adventures and has been filmed and staged numerous times. Indeed the novel, with its cunning blend of detective story and gothic horror, is ideal for dramatisation. The power of the book lies as much in its creation of atmosphere and the description of the bleak Dartmoor location, with its strange tors and its treacherous mire, as that of its characters. Watson’s first view of the moor sets the tone for the dark mood that suffuses the story once the action moves to Devonshire:

‘Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream’.

Published on the brink of a new century, the novel cleverly combined the myths and superstitions of the past with the rationality and scientific boldness of the future, implying that as we embrace the latter, we still cannot necessarily eliminate the former. While we are sure that Sir Henry can banish the shadows around Baskerville Hall with ‘a thousand-candlepower Swan & Edison’ bulbs, we are not so sure that he can banish the darkness beyond the shadows. Equally we know that if Sherlock Holmes, the supreme logical thinker, dismisses the existence of a phantom hound, we are assured of this fact - until we are taken onto the mist-enshrouded moors at night and hear the spine-tingling baying of a hound. Then we are not so sure.

Simon Corble’s clever and imaginative version of The Hound of the Baskervilles manipulates these elements with great skill and effectiveness. The text for his outdoor production begins brightly - in daylight - but as the evening progresses and the sky darkens so does his narrative until by cloud-wrapped moonlight, the great hound appears. Without doubt this script captures the spirit and the thrill of the original.