Baskerville 101
This is a silly book about my experiences with The Hound of the Baskervilles, but you aren’t required to have any knowledge of me or the novel before reading it. In fact, those readers who’ve never read Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterpiece might well enjoy this book more than those already familiar with it. As people say, ignorance is bliss, and I’m bound to have gotten things wrong. There’s a fine, scholarly Sherlock Holmes fan community made up of experts on all things Sherlockian, and then there’s me… I have a sketchy grasp of facts, I have no area of expertise other than Google, and I naturally shirk from any form of effort. All this means is that I do not lay claim to be authoritative and I fully expect more learned readers of this book, should there be any, to find blood-boiling blunders that immediately send them to their writing desks to fire off incensed emails beginning with “Dear Imbecile…” In fact, I welcome every correction, rant, and warning to keep away from the moor – not least because it might mean I can talk the publisher into releasing a second edition, and I’ve promised my wife a new fridge.
This is also a book about me, in part. I shall try not to bore the reader with the occasional autobiographical snippet pertinent to the subject of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I can’t guarantee everyone is going to fall for my charms. That said, this book welcomes everyone. There is the (very) occasional swear word and incredulous rant, but overall, this is a well-behaved, polite and positive book that you can take home to meet your mother.
With all that in mind, I feel it will be useful to begin with a breezy primer on Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, if only because it affords me the opportunity to make a few gags that I’ve been dying to get into print.
Let’s start by meeting the creator…
Arise, Sir Arthur!
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859. He studied medicine and, after graduating and serving as a ship’s surgeon, set up a medical practice in Plymouth with a scoundrel and crook, which failed miserably. He then moved to Southsea to open another practice – this time without going into partnership with a scoundrel and crook, and things went considerably better for him. Conan Doyle wrote as a side-gig – principally non-fiction – and was published in many journals and magazines. In 1886, he dreamed up Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson and the first Holmes story – A Study in Scarlet, which was published the following year in Beeton’s Christmas Album. After that, fiction became the bulk of his output. Sir Arthur moved to London to become an eye specialist. Meanwhile, in 1891, the Strand magazine published the first six Sherlock Holmes short stories. A second run of stories soon followed, and England succumbed to’ Sherlockmania[1]’.
In 1893, The Adventure of the Final Problem sees Holmes fall to his death, along with Professor Moriarty, as the yin and yang of Victorian crime give up their brief-yet-celebrated clash of wits to instead punch each other to death other over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland – as all warring couples end up doing, of course. Doyle had tired of Holmes and wanted to concentrate on his historical novels, which is a bit like The Beatles abandoning hit pop songs like Hey Jude to concentrate exclusively on tracks like Revolution 9[2].
When his wife fell ill with tuberculosis, the Doyles moved to Surrey and, in 1900, Arthur signed up to become a volunteer army doctor in South Africa. On his return to England (with enteric fever), he wrote a propaganda piece in which he argued the case for England’s involvement in the Boer War, for which he was knighted. He stood for parliament as a Liberal Unionist in Edinburgh Central, but lost by just over 500 votes to his own publisher, the Liberal candidate George Mackenzie Brown. Frankly, the man was robbed. If I’d been Doyle’s campaign manager, I fancy I’d have secured him the win through some catchy sloganeering: “Doyle: The Elementary Choice!”; “ACD FTW!”; “When You’ve Eliminated the Impossible All that Remains is to Improbably Vote Conan Doyle!” And I’d have had actors dressed as Holmes and Watson knocking on doors and telling voters that the opposition candidate was an evil criminal mastermind who needed to be stopped at all costs. Vote Doyle!
Licking his wounds on a golfing holiday at an hotel in Cromer (as you do), Doyle and his young friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson got to talking about local ghost stories and, particularly, those legends involving ghost dogs – or shucks, as local folklore terms them. Robinson, who became friends with Doyle because all men with three names strike up immediate friendships, lived in Devonshire and knew well the stories of spectral hounds. Doyle was inspired – he wanted to write a classic Victorian ‘creeper’ and was keen to collaborate with Robinson. But somehow (details are sketchy), Robinson never got to co-write the novel; Doyle wrote the book himself.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialised monthly in the Strand magazine before its hardback release in 1902 which sold (and continues to sell) more copies than any book currently on my bookshelves other than Clifford the Big Red Dog - Colouring Book. You really can’t beat the Clifford the Big Red Dog - Colouring Book, so that’s fair enough.
And finally, for those who have sketchy memories of the big black dog on Dartmoor, here’s my wife to explain the plot:
The Hound of the Baskervilles According To My Tipsy Wife (Who Has Never Read It)
My wife loves reading. She’s claimed Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams for her favourite novels. She has not, however, read The Hound of the Baskervilles, nor any other Sherlock Holmes stories, nor any of ACD’s other writings. By and large, my wife has avoided sitting through all the screen adaptations I binged for this book, save for the final version which she joined me in watching all the way through. She drank several glasses of wine as we watched the movie.
A few hours after it had finished, I asked my rather tipsy wife to relate the plot as best as she understood it to be. Feeling like Woodward and/or Bernstein hot on the Watergate scandal, I used a Nixonian recording device on my phone to capture my wife’s explosive testimony on tape:
Me: What happens in The Hound of the Baskervilles?
My Wife: Um… There’s, uh, Lord of the Baskervilles, who is found dead, um, and he was scared to death by a huge dog but, like, his friend keeps silent about it ‘cause he thinks people won’t believe him and the judges decide that he died of natural causes… But then his nephew comes over, and his friend (can’t quite remember his name) gets worried and goes to Sherlock Holmes and says what’s happened and that he’s really scared for this, erm, Lord Henry, is it? The new one. And so Sherlock Holmes first of all says, ‘Don't tell him,’ but then he sends Watson down. He don’t do nothing about it, Holmes, and says, ‘I’m gonna stay here’ and poor old Watson gets sent down with him – with these lot – to investigate it. And there’s lots of wandering around the moors, there’s an escaped prisoner who is hiding out in the big house, um, ‘cause the butler and his wife, um, he’s his wife’s brother, so that all that adds a bit of intrigue to it. And the baddie is this doctor of archelogy bloke whose got a sister, but she’s not his sister – she’s his wife! Um, and first Watson gets a bit of the hots for her, and then this Lord Henry definitely gets the hots for her. And, um, yeah, they see the hound at some point and then, yeah, it goes after… Um, is it Sir Henry, or something? Anyway, it eventually gets shot by Watson and it was a hound, but it wasn’t a spectral hound. And it was the doctor who did it because he was actually a relation who was after the money, see, instead of this Lord Henry whatsiname…
Me: Baskerville.
My Wife: Yeah, him.
Me: Anything else you can remember?
My Wife: Yeah, I’ve just remembered there’s another bottle in the kitchen.
There you have it – the bare bones of the plot laid out by a tipsy woman who couldn’t care less about it. My wife didn’t miss anything important, so I think her precis could be considered definitive.
Reader, you need know nothing else to enjoy this book. All will be explained.
Off we go!
[1] A bit like ‘Beatlemania’, but with considerably less screaming.
[2] This is a bit unfair because, unlike The Beatles, who set out with Revolution 9 to make something provocative, avant-garde and unsettling, ACD only ever wrote popular, readable fiction designed for a mass readership. On the other hand, I rather like Revolution 9, but I can’t sit through at least three of Conan Doyle’s big historical epics.
