Hound of the Baskervilles
- Written By Arthur Conan Doyle
Hound of the Baskervilles
- Arthur Conan Doyle
$19.99
Dead men leave warnings.
Sir Charles Baskervilleโs sudden death might have passed as natural heart failure โ were it not for the terror carved into his face and the monstrous pawprints found nearby. When young Sir Henry Baskerville arrives to claim his inheritance, he meets Dr. Watson, dispatched by Sherlock Holmes to investigate. Watson finds a household steeped in unease: the legend of a demonic hound has stalked the family for generations, neighbors evade questions, and the fog-bound moors of Devonshire seem to swallow secrets whole.
On the great Grimpen Mire, where a wrong step means death, the case assembles itself too slowly for Watsonโs comfort. Holmes, when he finally appears, finds a tangle that resists even his methods. Conan Doyle constructs this puzzle-box novel through nested mysteries: the legend inside the crime inside the inheritance, each layer casting doubt on the one above it.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the novel that secured Holmes’s place in popular imagination. Published in 1902, nearly a decade after Conan Doyle had killed off his famous detective, it returned Holmes to a public that had never accepted his death โ and proved that literary mysteries could bear genuine dread.
โThe world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.โ
About the Author
- Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and trained as a physician, a background that shaped the diagnostic habits of his most famous creation. He introduced Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and over the following decades produced four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the detective.
In 1893, frustrated by Holmes’s dominance over his literary reputation, Conan Doyle killed the character, only to resurrect him under sustained public pressure. The Hound of the Baskervilles, set before Holmes’s death, appeared serially in The Strand Magazine beginning in 1901, to immediate and enduring success. Conan Doyle went on to write across many genres โ historical fiction, science fiction, spiritualist non-fiction โ but Holmes remains the hinge around which his fame still turns. He was knighted in 1902, the year this novel appeared in book form, and died in 1930.
No fictional detective has matched Holmes’s cultural reach โ adapted for stage, screen, and radio, reimagined in dozens of languages and registers. Conan Doyleโs fusion of atmosphere, deduction, and myth defines the grammar of crime fiction, a template writers have been answering, and challenging, for more than a century.
