On the Trail of the Hound

These are some notes I wrote up for a discussion of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, part of the Bryant Park Word for Word Series, July 30, 2013

I came late to the Sherlock Holmes books. I was already in my thirties, working for Oxford University Press in New York City, when the Press produced a handsome new hardcover edition of the Holmes stories. I had been in the States for a few years, long enough to contract a serious case of sad-expat nostalgia, and Sherlock seemed just the thing to feed that particular condition. Still, I started reading the first of these books, A Study in Scarlet, more out of curiosity than anything else. Soon enough, I was through the first volume and on to the second, by which time I was firmly gripped by a page-turning obsession. I was finished with the complete series of nine volumes in an embarrassingly short space of time.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective was not entirely new to me, of course. From childhood, I had an innate familiarity with a certain Sherlock Holmes stereotype who did things that never actually happened in the original stories (such as wearing a deerstalker hat in the city, and saying, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’). This was the Basil Rathbone version of Holmes in the two famous films made in 1939, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, wartime favourites of my parents’ generation and watched avidly on our dysfunctional little black and white TV whenever the BBC deigned to show them, usually at Christmas-time.

Then there was Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes in the Granada Television series in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I fell immediately for Brett’s portrayal of Holmes, with his intellectual intensity, his short violent bursts of laughter and dramatic hand-gestures and little facial tics. When I came to read the books, Brett formed my natural mental image of the protagonist. I found myself at first congratulating Conan Doyle on his fidelity to Brett’s portrayal.

But it was the escapist power of the books themselves that drew me inexorably in. There’s something immediately compelling about the vividly drawn antic behaviours of Holmes, the suggestion of a deeply internalised psychological life that is never properly elucidated, the idea that we would be frightened at what we might find inside his head if we were to look too closely. This is layered on to a backdrop of cosy familiarity, razor-sharp description and cleverness in plotting, the always one-sided give and take between Holmes and Watson. Here’s a favourite example of that, taken from the opening scene of The Hound of the Baskervilles. We picture Holmes and Watson in the famous study at 221B Baker Street:

I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before…

“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

“How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”

“I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,” said he. “But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor’s stick?”

[Holmes goes on to give his analysis…]

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light…”

“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”

Conan Doyle began serialisation of the Hound of the Baskervilles in the Strand magazine in 1901. The central idea of the story had been suggested to him by a friend who had grown up in the West Country and knew something of the mythology of Dartmoor. The intriguing case of the Hound seemed to require the talents of Sherlock Holmes, and so it was a reincarnation of sorts for the great detective, who had ostensibly been killed off at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893 in ‘The Final Problem’. (There are many very serious Sherlockians who debate to this day the fictional chronology of the stories.)

From the charming opening scene, in which Dr. Mortimer’s walking-stick is comprehensively analysed, the author gradually weaves a sense of disquiet into the story, beginning with the reading by Dr. Mortimer of the tale of Hugo Baskerville (who is described as ‘a most wild, profane, and godless man’) and his dreadful fate in the jaws of the Hound. A later Baskerville, fearful of the curse, advises his own children thus: ‘I counsel you by way of caution to forebear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.’

Conan Doyle uses landscape to great effect as a co-conspirator with the Hound in the sense of dangerous otherness that begins to pervade the story. A nervous Watson, charged by Holmes with the protection of the new heir to the Baskerville estate, makes a pleasant enough journey with Sir Henry by steam-train from London to Devonshire. But his mood begins to change with the landscape:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his eyes fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.

The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge, and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the country-side, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year.

The author turns up the intensity by placing armed soldiers on the hilltops, on the look-out for the vicious murderer Selden, escaped from a remote moorland prison.

[We] had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely around him.

The game is afoot. How could one not want to find out what happens next?