Clever idea, but I didn’t think Andrew Grant pulled it off.

Here’s the clever part: a retelling of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the form of text messages. Note that the story itself isn’t updated to modern times. We’re still out on the moors at the end of the nineteenth century. But I guess everyone has some kind of Internet connection and iPhones. So the events are presented as a series of brief posts with follow-ups and likes/dislikes from other characters.

So, clever idea. You’ll have to know the novel pretty well because if you go into this cold you’ll get confused trying to follow the plot. But given the target audience I think familiarity with The Hound can be taken for granted. Where Grant lost me is, first of all, in how public the posts were supposed to be. People like and dislike things that they shouldn’t know about, at least if the plot is to make any sense. Then, as a second point, things get a bit woolly when the Hound and Sir Charles Baskerville’s ghost “like” different posts. I realize this is all tongue-in-cheek and having a bit of fun, but there’s a failure of internal logic that I found myself digging my heels in against. I

So it had potential, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other writers have had a go at something similar (I seem to remember seeing Shakespeare done as text messages), but it didn’t work for me in this instance.

Holmes index