Impact: The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Man Who Resented His Own Creation

Arthur Conan Doyle was, by the late 1890s, a deeply frustrated man. He had trained as a physician, served as a ship's doctor on an Arctic whaler, set up a struggling practice in Portsmouth, and begun writing fiction largely to fill the hours when patients failed to show up. Holmes arrived almost accidentally — modeled, it is often said, on Dr. Joseph Bell, a Edinburgh professor whose habit of deducing patients' occupations from physical details Doyle found astonishing. The first Holmes story sold for twenty-five pounds.

By 1893, Holmes had made Doyle famous and reasonably wealthy, and Doyle hated him for it. 'I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras,' he once wrote, 'of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.' He wanted to write about the Hundred Years' War. He wanted serious literary recognition. Instead, every editor in London wanted another Holmes story. Killing the detective off felt, to Doyle, like a liberation. It turned out to be only a hiatus.

The trigger for the resurrection was a golf game. In 1901, Doyle's friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson told him about the legends surrounding Dartmoor — the desolate, fog-bound moorland in Devon — and particularly the folklore of a spectral hound. Doyle was captivated. He initially conceived of the story without Holmes at all, but his publishers at The Strand Magazine knew what would sell. Holmes was slotted in, framed as a case from before the Reichenbach incident, and the serial began running in August 1901 to circulation numbers that stunned everyone involved.

A Sensation on Two Continents

The serialization of The Hound of the Baskervilles in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902 was a publishing event of the first order. Readers queued outside newsagents on publication day. The magazine's circulation, already healthy, spiked dramatically with each new installment. When the book edition appeared in 1902, it sold out immediately and went into multiple printings within the year. This was not a slow burn or a critical rediscovery — it was an instant triumph.

Reviews were almost uniformly ecstatic, though some critics noted, with what now reads as considerable irony, that the book's atmospheric power was something new for Doyle — that he had somehow exceeded himself. The Times Literary Supplement praised the novel's sustained suspense. American readers were equally enthusiastic. The book confirmed what the Holmes short stories had suggested: that detective fiction could be genuinely literary, not just a puzzle delivery mechanism. It also, practically speaking, made the full-length Holmes novel a viable commercial form — something the two earlier novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, had not quite managed to establish.

What the Book Is Really About

On the surface, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a murder mystery with a rational solution: no actual supernatural hound, just a large dog painted with phosphorus and deployed by a scheming relative. Holmes solves it. Rationalism defeats superstition. Case closed. But this reading undersells the book considerably, because what Doyle actually wrote is a gothic novel that happens to have a detective in it — and the gothic elements do not simply dissolve when the mystery is explained.

Dartmoor is the key. The Grimpen Mire, the ancient stone huts on the hillside, the fog that swallows men whole, the sense that the land itself is hostile and very old — none of this is decoration. Doyle spent time on the moor researching the book and renders it with a specificity that still unsettles. The landscape activates something pre-rational in the reader, the same thing it activates in the characters. When Watson writes of hearing the hound's cry across the moor at night, the reader's pulse does actually quicken, even knowing, on re-read, exactly what produces the sound.

The book is also, more quietly, about the limits of Watson. The first chapter — that elegant, slightly cruel scene where Watson examines Dr. Mortimer's walking stick and gets almost everything wrong — establishes something important. Watson is not stupid. He is, as Holmes puts it with characteristic backhanded warmth, 'a conductor of light.' He stimulates Holmes not by his insights but by his errors, which Holmes uses as stepping stones toward the truth. For much of the novel, Holmes is absent from Dartmoor and Watson is on his own, doing his honest best in conditions of genuine danger. He is more capable than Holmes usually lets him appear — and more vulnerable. This is the novel where Watson becomes a full protagonist rather than a narrative convenience.

The Gothic and the Rational

Victorian England was fascinated by the tension between scientific materialism and older, darker ways of understanding the world. Darwin had done his work. The spiritualist movement was simultaneously booming — Doyle himself would become a devoted believer in spiritualism later in life, to the bafflement of many. The Hound of the Baskervilles sits exactly on this fault line. The Baskerville curse is ancient, visceral, and emotionally compelling. Holmes's solution is modern, logical, and faintly deflating. Doyle seems to understand this: the novel's atmosphere survives the explanation because the moor doesn't care about explanations.

This is what separates the book from other mystery novels of the period and from much of the Holmes canon. Most Holmes stories are essentially intellectual games — the pleasure is in watching the reasoning unfold. Here, the pleasure is partly that, but also partly pure gothic dread. The two modes coexist uneasily, and that unease is productive. The book asks, implicitly: what if rationalism is correct about how the world works, but inadequate to how the world feels? It does not answer the question. It lets it hang over the moor like fog.

Cultural Footprint

Few books have been adapted as relentlessly as The Hound of the Baskervilles. The first film version appeared in 1914, within twelve years of publication. Since then, the novel has been adapted for cinema and television dozens of times across multiple countries — conservative estimates put the number above forty distinct productions. Basil Rathbone played Holmes in a celebrated 1939 version that defined the character for a generation of American audiences. Peter Cushing brought a colder, more intellectual Holmes to the role in the 1959 Hammer version. The BBC's 2002 adaptation with Richard Roxburgh took the story in a darker psychological direction. Each era seems to find something new to emphasize.

Beyond direct adaptation, the book's fingerprints are everywhere in popular culture. The 'ancient curse that turns out to have a rational explanation' is now a genre convention unto itself, used in everything from Scooby-Doo (the debt is explicit and affectionate) to countless thriller novels. The image of the phosphorescent hound has become one of literature's great visual moments. Dartmoor itself — atmospheric, treacherous, associated with the legendary and the criminal — owes a significant portion of its cultural identity to this novel. When people imagine the English moor as a place of mystery, they are often, without knowing it, imagining Doyle's version of it.

Why It Still Matters

There is a version of the argument for this book that focuses on its historical importance — the role it played in establishing the detective novel as a serious form, its influence on everything that came after, its place in the Holmes canon. All of that is true and worth knowing. But it is not the real reason to read The Hound of the Baskervilles in the present day.

The real reason is that it works. It works as a thriller, producing genuine suspense across more than a century of readers who know, in outline, how it ends. It works as atmosphere — the moor sequences have a textural richness that most contemporary literary fiction would envy. And it works as a character study, because the relationship between Holmes and Watson — prickly, warm, asymmetrical, deeply loyal — is rendered here with more emotional complexity than anywhere else in the canon. That first chapter scene, with the walking stick and the coffee pot and the quietly devastating 'I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous,' contains an entire friendship in miniature.

Doyle wrote the book under some commercial pressure, trying to satisfy a readership that had been demanding Holmes's return for years. The result is better than it had any right to be under those circumstances. He gave the public what they wanted and accidentally made something that lasts. That is rarer than it sounds.

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