The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [19]
They weren’t disappointed, and few readers since have been either. The Hound of the Baskervilles is to my mind the best of all the Holmes stories. Most readers will agree with Conan Doyle that Holmes is at his best here. Watson, too, was never better: He acquits himself well in all the tasks Holmes gives him, even to the point of getting Holmes’s unqualified approval. The minor characters are for the most part well drawn, and the plot is skillfully paced. Conan Doyle wonderfully sustained a mood of danger and dread that hangs over the story until the very end. He also created perhaps the most dramatic line in all the Holmes stories. What reader hasn’t felt a tingle along the spine upon reading Dr. Mortimer’s hushed confession: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” When first published in the Strand, that line ended one of the monthly installments. Readers had a whole month to savor the salutary thrill of that horror. I imagine thousands of them reading the line over and over, recapturing that pleasurable shudder before they bought the next chapter the following month. I confess to indulging in that guilty pleasure myself.
Most impressive of all is the masterful way in which Conan Doyle uses language to create symbols that reverberate throughout the novel. The short stories provide little opportunity for any sort of symbolic development, and nothing in either of the two earlier novels could be said to rise to any symbolic level. But The Hound of the Baskervilles contains several symbols. The hound is as much a symbol of an implacable force that punishes human sins as it is a flesh-and-blood creature. As a character in the Baskerville legend, the hound is an instrument for retributive justice, haunting only the heirs of Hugo Baskerville, but as symbol it extends its baleful sphere to all of us. Like Moby Dick, it’s a reminder of an evil that lies at the center of existence, with which humans must eternally wrestle.
The story also makes the moor a character in itself, having as much effect on the action as any of the living beings. Exactly what it symbolizes isn’t easy to say, as it’s in the nature of symbols to defy easy summary, but Stapleton gives an indication. “You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious” (p. 662). Watson goes further: “Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track” (p. 627).
The story seems to be set in 1889, long before Holmes’s fatal tumble at Reichenbach Falls. Holmes notes that the date on Dr. Mortimer’s walking stick, 1884, was five years ago. In his Sherlock Holmes Commentary, Martin Dakin makes a persuasive case from a number of clues in the story that it is actually post-Reichenbach, and that Watson may have had good reasons to hide the true date, but this is the one of those puzzles that only scholars worry over. On the face of it we’re intended to see this as an old case Watson simply hadn’t recounted before. Conan Doyle hadn’t yet decided to bring his greatest creation back from his watery grave. That decision was some way off. But being back in the company of Holmes for this grand episode, after nearly a decade of absence, must have made his heart grow fonder of his problem child. Great things lay just ahead.
Kyle Freeman, a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast for many years, earned two graduate degrees in