By Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes investigates a spectral hound stalking Dartmoor.
Subject
Themes
An ancient terror and a thoroughly modern crime meet on Dartmoor. The Baskervilles of Devonshire are said to be cursed: since wicked Hugo Baskerville hunted an abducted girl across the moor in the seventeenth century and had his throat torn out by a gigantic black hound, sudden and bloody deaths have shadowed the family, and the legend warns its heirs never to cross the moor in the dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead at the end of his yew alley, his face convulsed with horror and the fresh footprints of an enormous hound nearby, the country doctor James Mortimer brings the problem to Sherlock Holmes. The inquest blamed a weak heart; the countryside whispers of the hell-hound; and the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, is about to arrive from Canada.
An ancient terror and a thoroughly modern crime meet on Dartmoor. The Baskervilles of Devonshire are said to be cursed: since wicked Hugo Baskerville hunted an abducted girl across the moor in the seventeenth century and had his throat torn out by a gigantic black hound, sudden and bloody deaths…
The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in 1901 and 1902, first as a serial in the Strand Magazine and then in book form, at the precise hinge between the Victorian and Edwardian worlds. Queen Victoria died in January 1901, and the story's atmosphere belongs to the era then closing: hansom cabs and…
The most original feature of the Baskerville case is that the murder weapon is fear itself. Sir Charles Baskerville dies without a mark of violence upon him; what kills him is a weak heart confronted by a sight his own imagination has spent years preparing him to dread. Stapleton's genius lies in…
The case is constructed as a formal duel between scientific reason and supernatural belief, and the terms are set in the very first interview at Baker Street. Mortimer, a trained man of science who writes on atavism and reversion, nevertheless half believes the legend, and he frames the dilemma…
Beneath the gothic trappings, the Baskerville case is a crime about money, and the story is unusually exact about the sums. Sir Charles, who rebuilt the fallen family fortunes through South African speculation, leaves an estate worth close to a million pounds, with a residue of seven hundred and…
The Baskerville murder is designed to be invisible as a crime, and the story's deepest interest lies in the gap between knowing and proving. Stapleton's plan has what Holmes calls a devilish cunning: a victim killed by his own heart leaves no wound to examine, a hound is an accomplice that can never…
Formal justice barely functions in the Baskerville case, and the story keeps measuring the distance between law and what is actually right. The coroner's inquest, the system's first instrument, gets the central death entirely wrong, returning a comfortable verdict of cardiac exhaustion that buries a…
Sherlock Holmes presides over the Baskerville case even when he seems absent from it. The opening scene establishes his method in miniature: handed nothing but a visitor's forgotten walking stick, he conjures a young, amiable, absent-minded country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel, and is proved…
Dr John Watson carries this story on his shoulders. For long stretches Holmes is invisible, and the investigation on Dartmoor belongs to Watson alone: he interviews witnesses, tests alibis, shadows suspects and stakes out midnight corridors. The form of the tale itself, letters and diary entries…
Sir Henry Baskerville is the prize over which the whole contest is fought: the last of his line, heir to a title, a haunted hall and nearly a million pounds, and the intended third victim of a patient murderer. He arrives from Canada a small, sturdy, dark-eyed man of about thirty, weather-beaten…
Jack Stapleton is the quiet centre of the whole design: a small, neat, flaxen-haired naturalist with a butterfly net who proves to be, in Holmes's words, the most dangerous man they have ever helped to hunt down. The disguise is nearly perfect because most of it is true. He really is a recognised…
Dr James Mortimer sets the entire story in motion. It is his forgotten walking stick that gives Holmes and Watson their opening exercise in deduction, his trembling reading of the 1742 manuscript that introduces the curse, and his whispered revelation, "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a…
Beryl Stapleton lives the most painful double life in the story. Introduced as the naturalist's sister, she is in truth his wife, Beryl Garcia of Costa Rica, one of the beauties of her country, carried through her husband's serial reinventions from embezzler's bride to schoolmaster's wife to…
The Barrymores are the resident mystery of Baskerville Hall, and for half the story they carry the weight of every suspicion the case generates. John Barrymore, butler at the Hall as his family has been for four generations, is a remarkable-looking man: tall, handsome, pale and distinguished, with a…
Laura Lyons holds the key to the case's central riddle: why a frail old man who feared the moor stood waiting at the wicket gate in the dark on the last night of his life. She is the woman behind the initials L. L., the author of the burned letter begging Sir Charles, as he was a gentleman, to be at…
A walking stick left behind at 221B Baker Street opens the affair. Its owner, a visitor who called while Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were out, has left a thick country stick with a silver band engraved "To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H." and the date 1884. Holmes,…
Holmes cross-examines Mortimer with sudden keenness. The hound's prints lay some twenty yards from the body, enormous, and no sheepdog's. The yew alley is bounded by two impenetrable twelve-foot hedges with a gravel walk between, and a single wicket gate, found closed and padlocked, opens onto the…
At the Northumberland Hotel, Holmes glances over the register and establishes by casual questions that the only guests who arrived after Sir Henry, a Newcastle coal-owner and an invalid lady from Alton, are genuine regulars. The conclusion is suggestive: whoever watches Sir Henry has not settled in…
Morning sunshine restores the Hall's good humour, but not its innocence. Sir Henry also half-heard the sobbing in the night. Questioned, Barrymore insists the sound cannot have come from his wife, yet when Watson passes Mrs Barrymore in the corridor her eyes are red and swollen between puffed lids.…
Watson's second report begins with a small but telling discovery: the window Barrymore visits is the only one in the house that commands a clear outlook on the moor. The butler was watching for someone. Sir Henry, who has also heard the night wanderings, agrees to sit up with Watson and follow…
Two facts now guide Watson: Laura Lyons made the fatal appointment, and the lurking stranger lives among the prehistoric stone huts. He drives alone to Coombe Tracey and finds Mrs Lyons at her Remington typewriter, a strikingly beautiful woman with rich hazel eyes and hair, though something subtly…
Why not arrest Stapleton at once? Because, Holmes explains, there is not a shadow of a case, only surmise and conjecture. Sir Charles died without a mark on him; no twelve stolid jurymen could be made to see the hound that frightened him to death. Even Selden's fall offers no provable link to any…
A raw, foggy November evening finds Holmes and Watson on either side of a blazing fire in Baker Street. Sir Henry and Dr Mortimer have called that afternoon, on their way to a long voyage round the world prescribed for the baronet's shattered nerves, and the moment is right for a full retrospect of…
Sherlock Holmes presides over the Baskerville case even when he seems absent from it. The opening scene establishes his method in miniature: handed nothing but a visitor's forgotten walking stick, he conjures a young, amiable, absent-minded country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel, and is proved…
Dr John Watson carries this story on his shoulders. For long stretches Holmes is invisible, and the investigation on Dartmoor belongs to Watson alone: he interviews witnesses, tests alibis, shadows suspects and stakes out midnight corridors. The form of the tale itself, letters and diary entries…
Sir Henry Baskerville is the prize over which the whole contest is fought: the last of his line, heir to a title, a haunted hall and nearly a million pounds, and the intended third victim of a patient murderer. He arrives from Canada a small, sturdy, dark-eyed man of about thirty, weather-beaten…
Jack Stapleton is the quiet centre of the whole design: a small, neat, flaxen-haired naturalist with a butterfly net who proves to be, in Holmes's words, the most dangerous man they have ever helped to hunt down. The disguise is nearly perfect because most of it is true. He really is a recognised…
Dr James Mortimer sets the entire story in motion. It is his forgotten walking stick that gives Holmes and Watson their opening exercise in deduction, his trembling reading of the 1742 manuscript that introduces the curse, and his whispered revelation, "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a…
Beryl Stapleton lives the most painful double life in the story. Introduced as the naturalist's sister, she is in truth his wife, Beryl Garcia of Costa Rica, one of the beauties of her country, carried through her husband's serial reinventions from embezzler's bride to schoolmaster's wife to…
The Barrymores are the resident mystery of Baskerville Hall, and for half the story they carry the weight of every suspicion the case generates. John Barrymore, butler at the Hall as his family has been for four generations, is a remarkable-looking man: tall, handsome, pale and distinguished, with a…
Laura Lyons holds the key to the case's central riddle: why a frail old man who feared the moor stood waiting at the wicket gate in the dark on the last night of his life. She is the woman behind the initials L. L., the author of the burned letter begging Sir Charles, as he was a gentleman, to be at…
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Subject
Themes
An ancient terror and a thoroughly modern crime meet on Dartmoor. The Baskervilles of Devonshire are said to be cursed: since wicked Hugo Baskerville hunted an abducted girl across the moor in the seventeenth century and had his throat torn out by a gigantic black hound, sudden and bloody deaths have shadowed the family, and the legend warns its heirs never to cross the moor in the dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead at the end of his yew alley, his face convulsed with horror and the fresh footprints of an enormous hound nearby, the country doctor James Mortimer brings the problem to Sherlock Holmes. The inquest blamed a weak heart; the countryside whispers of the hell-hound; and the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, is about to arrive from Canada.