After “The Final Problem” you could be forgiven for thinking it was over for Sherlock Holmes. Not so much because the famous detective had apparently plunged to his death from the top of the Reichenbach Falls, but because Doyle had said he was done with him. What’s more, there were good reasons for believing he meant it. Many of the stories he’d written leading up to that “final” episode had been uninspired efforts, not worth bothering with. Doyle himself clearly wanted to move on.
Which makes it all the more surprising that he did bring Holmes back in his greatest adventure and, as Christopher Frayling puts it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “one of the greatest crime novels ever written . . . if not the greatest.” Normally, when a writer or any artist feels so checked out, you don’t expect them to bounce back. But perhaps the amount of downtime helped in this case. “The Final Problem” had come out in 1893 and The Hound of the Baskervilles was published in 1901. That was a lot of time off and it seems to have allowed Doyle to fully recharge. He did write several novels and numerous stories in the interim, little of which has lasted, but when he brought Holmes back (and that was not, initially, his plan) it was with a renewed sense of energy.
Doyle’s energy is mirrored by Holmes’s enthusiasm in taking up the Baskerville case. You can hear it in his voice when Dr. Mortimer tells him how he judged from the amount of cigar ash dropped on the ground how long Sir Charles had stood by a wicket-gate. “Excellent!” Holmes cries. “This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart.” The analysis of footprints (which Mortimer has also observed) and cigar ash being two of Holmes’s three favourite go-to clues. The other, in case you’re interested, being handwriting, which also comes into play here.
A second jolt of excitement is felt when Holmes finds out that the killer who has been stalking Sir Henry in London told his cabman that he was a detective and that his name was Sherlock Holmes. “The cunning rascal!” Holmes exclaims. “I tell you, Watson, this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel.” The game’s afoot and Holmes is loving it. As a reader, how can you not share his joy?
Aside from the form the clues take there are other familiar elements. Holmes talks about his method, for example, saying things like “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” It goes without saying that it is those unobserved-because-obvious things that are of supreme importance. Then a page later he tells us that “a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought.” This is a point he hasn’t pushed “to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.” Unlike his point about observing the obvious I think we can take this as more of an eccentricity. He’s on firmer ground when he responds to Dr. Mortimer’s accusation of guesswork by claiming that his method inhabits “the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculations.” That’s excellent advice. But as a final example, his claim that “It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise” may make us think of how badly he was embarrassed in A Study in Scarlet when he didn’t recognize a healthy young man disguised as a little old lady.
There are also some slips, of the kind that keep annotators active. The most glaring of these is the way the hound is painted in phosphorous. Not bloody likely! But we should keep in mind that Doyle didn’t care very much about such mistakes. “I have never been nervous about details,” he wrote, “and one must be masterful sometimes.”
And it is a masterful performance. Despite Holmes himself disappearing from the middle part of the book the pace never flags as. Watson himself points to how, near the end of his stay at Baskerville Hall, “these strange events began to move swiftly towards their terrible conclusion.” Even having read this book many times I still find it a page-turner. The business with the stolen clothing is a great hook, as is the motif of the net, with Holmes and Watson as both the hunters and the hunted. There’s also an interesting class element to pick up on. When Mortimer names the “only men of education” in the neighbourhood we know these are the only real suspects, as early British detective fiction rarely paid much attention to the “peasants” (as they are always referred to here). And finally there’s the odd treatment of the escaped convict Selden. In film adaptations they often try to soften this character, as someone with the mind of a child or some such disability. But Doyle paints him as a wicked man, someone who was spoiled growing up and then sank “lower and lower” until he is now little better than a beast. In our only glimpse of him he appears as “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions.” This does not, however, stop Watson and Sir Henry agreeing to allow him to escape. A reciprocal sense of loyalty to one’s loyal servants apparently went a long way.
A real treat then – in my opinion the best of the Holmes adventures and a landmark work in its own right. Because the story takes place before the events of “The Final Problem” it wasn’t necessary to explain Holmes’s escape, but I think it’s just as remarkable anyway how Doyle was able to bring him back from the dead.
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Alex Good 