Falls.
It has become the most beloved and best known of all the Sherlock Holmes tales, the name Baskerville being easily recognizable even to those who have never read a word of the story. It is also arguably the finest of the novels, perhaps of all the stories, for it displays a unity in time and texture, and a splendid series of perplexities and rising climaxes, unknown in any of the others. It has no long flashback (a device which disfigures all three other novels, as well as some of the short stories) but it does indulge in the luxury of varying points of view, several chapters being told as extracts from Watson’s diaries or letters to Holmes, while others are his usual more leisured narrative.
The case takes Watson, and then also Holmes, to desolate Dartmoor, in the vicinity of the fearful prison at Princetown, to investigate the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville, along with some peculiar collateral events. The plot is simple enough, although two sexual subplots complicate matters somewhat, but in this novel the atmosphere is immensely rich. There is the moor itself, with its relics of prehistoric man (emphasized by references throughout the story to anthropological studies and themes). There is the lurking presence of the prison, with Selden, the escaped murderer, a constant threat. There is the suffocating pettiness of village life; there is the gloom of Baskerville Hall, where the new squire, Sir Henry, announces at the end of the story that he is eager to install electric lights. There is constant tension between science and superstition, and Doyle was not wrong when he famously wrote to his mother that the book was “a real Creeper.” A textual analysis of The Hound by Wendy Machen (in Canadian Holmes, 1989) finds that the dominant colours in this story are the black and white of night, the grey of uncertainty, and the green of the moor’s vegetation. Somehow this grim environment has appealed to Sherlockians, among them Philip Weller, whose 2001 commentary on The Hound is titled Hunting the Dartmoor Legend, and Brian W. Pugh and Paul R. Spiring, who produced On the Trail of Arthur Conan Doyle: An Illustrated Devon Tour in 2008.
Doyle attributed the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles to his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson, declaring in a dedicatory epistle (of which three different versions appear) that Robinson had told him of “a west country legend.” But scholarship has not turned up any Devonshire legend involving a dog, a wronged woman, and supernatural vengeance, though there are “black dog” legends aplenty. Tradition has pointed to a legend associated with the Cabell family of Buckfastleigh, Devon; but that legend cannot be traced before 1907 and may itself be based on the Baskerville story. The Baskerville and Vaughan families of Herefordshire apparently are associated with a longstanding Black Hound story, as Maurice Campbell argued in the Sherlock Holmes Journal in 1975. The safest conclusion is that The Hound has overlapping and multiple sources — as Janice McNabb argues in The Curious Incident of the Hound on Dartmoor (1984).
The difficult question is just how much Fletcher Robinson contributed to the creation of what was published as Doyle’s work. Robinson (born August 22, 1870, died January 21, 1907) was himself an author, responsible for travel and sports writing as well as many short stories and several novels. His greatest contribution to posterity, apart from whatever he did to help give birth to The Hound, was The Chronicles of Addington Peace, a set of detective stories (1905). It is clear that he visited Dartmoor with Doyle in the spring of 1901, and the dedications variously credit him with “help” in “the general plot,” “the local details,” “all the details,” and the “evolution” of the story. Exactly what that involved is now unclear, despite careful teasing out of the available biographical evidence. Robin Paige presented one theory in the form of a light-hearted novel, Death at Dartmoor (2002). At about the same time, the question became fodder for the newspapers when a Devon man named Rodger Garrick-Steele called for the exhumation of Fletcher Robinson’s body in order to determine whether he had been poisoned by Doyle. Not only did Doyle steal the plot of The Hound from Fletcher Robinson, Garrick-Steele charged, he may also have had an affair with his friend’s wife, then murdered him to conceal his double offence. The charges were elaborated in a rambling, ill-punctuated six-hundred-page book, House of the Baskervilles (2003). Scholars have laughed Garrick-Steele’s claims out of court, and church authorities rejected the request for exhumation.
The Hound was first published as a serial in the Strand, between August 1901 and April 1902 (in the American edition, September through May).
Chapters I–II appeared together; Chapters III–IV; Chapters V–VI; Chapters VII–VIII; Chapter IX alone; Chapters X–XI; Chapter XII alone; Chapter XIII; and part of XIV; the remainder of XIV with XV. As soon as the final installment had appeared, book editions were ready, from George Newnes, Ltd., in England and from McClure, Phillips & Co. in the United States. They were best sellers, particularly after the American publisher obtained the manuscript, broke it into leaves, and distributed it to booksellers across the country as a publicity gesture. The Hound was also serialized in several American newspapers during the summer of 1902.
In 1903 Doyle was persuaded to bring Holmes back to life, or rather to invent a way in which his detective might have been alive all the time in spite of the report from Reichenbach. The persuasive influence was money, primarily from the American magazine Collier’s Weekly, although the stories continued to appear in the British edition of the Strand as well. Doyle’s own experience, and the emotional complexities he was undergoing during the first decade of the twentieth century, led him to write more realistic, more deeply coloured adventures for Holmes than anything the earlier two series had offered. The Return of Sherlock Holmes may be his finest work.
The thirteen stories in this sequence were collected in book form as soon as they had all appeared in magazines, even while they were still being republished in a group of American newspapers. The first edition appeared in the United States, from McClure, Phillips & Co., in February 1905; the rights were soon transferred to Doubleday, Page & Co. for subsequent editions. A British edition from George Newnes, Ltd., appeared in March, but the rights were soon taken over by Smith, Elder & Co. The American book edition was illustrated by Charles Raymond Macauley, and the British once again by Sidney Paget, whose drawings continued to appear in the Strand appearances. However, the illustrations most often associated with the stories in The Return are those of Frederic Dorr Steele, who drew dramatic covers for Collier’s as well as black-and-white illustrations to accompany the stories inside that magazine.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE. This tale is rather a chapter of biography, or autobiography, than a mystery story in the accepted sense, for the mystery Holmes solves is incidental to other matters, and explained in only a few sentences. What matters is the return of Sherlock Holmes to London, and the unsuccessful attempt on his life by Colonel Sebastian Moran, right-hand villain to the late Professor Moriarty. The memorable scenes involve Watson’s faint when he is confronted with his friend, whom he has presumed dead, and the vigil in the “empty house” across from 221B Baker Street while Moran tries to shoot the dummy which he supposes to be Holmes. The story first appeared in Collier’s for September 26, 1903, and the Strand for October 1903.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER. Collier’s published this story October 31, 1903, and the Strand in November 1903. Its most memorable feature is the use of a thumbprint as a clue; the print never has to be matched with anything, for its very presence is sufficient to tell Holmes that something is wrong, but any reference to the uniqueness of fingerprints marks the story as modern (fingerprinting, developed for police use in India, was introduced in England in a paper given to the British Association in 1899, and adopted by Scotland Yard in 1901). In other respects the story is of interest for its plot of sexual revenge, and for the device Holmes uses (an echo of what he tried in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) of enticing a fugitive out of his hiding place by raising an alarm of fire.
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