The Hound of the Baskervilles

It’s time again for our (almost) annual Halloween celebration. This year, we’ll spend it with none other than Sherlock Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Gothic mystery, in my opinion, makes for a perfect Halloween mood (for those who prefer outright horror, though, the novel does feature a man having his throat ripped out by a ghost dog as punishment for his misdeeds, so there’s that).

I’ll avoid spoilers, but to sketch out the scenario briefly: Wealthy philanthropist Sir Charles Baskerville dies suddenly outside his ancestral home. The executor of his will, Dr. James Mortimer, is set to meet his sole heir, Henry to escort him to the Baskerville estate, but first visits Sherlock Holmes to seek his advice. Sir Charles’s death was quite suspicious, and Dr. Mortimer suspects that the ghost hound that’s haunted this family for generations may have been the cause. Holmes criticises Dr. Mortimer for entertaining the idea despite being a man of science, but takes the case.

Interestingly, Holmes does not go along with Dr. Mortimer and Henry, but sends Watson in his stead. This means that we see far less of him than we’d expect in a Sherlock Holmes story, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the right decision in removing him. Holmes feels too competent, so that there’s less sense of danger as long as he’s around. Henry and Watson both remark that they wished he were with them out on the moor, and so do we in the audience. By the time he does reappear, the story is nearing its climax and there’s enough urgency that he doesn’t quite feel like a deus ex machina able to set everything right in an instant. Holmes’s dismissal of the supernatural tempts us to do the same, but this dismissal makes the appearance of the hound all the more startling (what form the hound takes, if it’s a true hound at all, I won’t spoil).

One portion of the novel is excerpted from Watson’s letters to Holmes. My experience with this literary device made me expect several pages of tedium, but I think it works, in large part because Watson is already the story’s narrator, so the change in style is not abrupt. He also has a touch of poetry in his writing, as in the opening of his letter from October 13th:

My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up-to-date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.

Since the Holmes stories are popular and in the public domain, there are about a million editions, but I read this in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by William S. Baring-Gould and published in 1967. The annotations included far more information than I really needed, especially on a first reading, but devoted Holmes fans may enjoy it. There’s a lot of discussion on what year the story takes place in and the timeline of events, for example. Baring-Gould also presents interesting alternate theories about the case besides what Holmes tells us in his summary at the end of the novel, and poses a few logical problems with the resolution, some of which would appear trivial in any other genre, but part of the fun of mysteries is seeing and understanding how every detail fits together.

Popular and in the public domain also means that there have been a massive number of film adaptations. I attempted to watch one with my wife, the 1959 version directed by Terrence Fisher and starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville, but my wife was too creeped out and bailed about twenty minutes in. I’ll watch almost anything with Cushing and Lee, so I’ll have to watch it on my own some other time.

There’s more that could be said, but I’ll leave it there. Like one of our previous visits to 19th century England, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hound is best enjoyed if one goes in mostly blind. I will say that it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. I haven’t read many Sherlock Holmes stories, aside from a couple back in high school, but this does have me wanting to check out a collection of them.