When Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” in 1893, he was taken aback by the strength of feeling it incurred: fans reacted as if he had killed a real person. The author was also aware of how lucrative the Holmes franchise had been—and could be again. And so he eventually relented and incorporated Holmes into a supernatural horror story that he was already working on: The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is something of a cliché that every major crime writer since has had to think twice about killing off a hero they’ve grown tired of. As comebacks go, The Hound of the Baskervilles (actually a prequel), is a mightily impressive and memorable one. Not only did it see the dramatic reintroduction of Conan Doyle’s most famous literary creation, but it was also to become the most famous of all Holmes’s adventures.

The first appearance of The Hound of the Baskervilles was in August 1901, when it was published in nine monthly installments in the great detective’s spiritual home, The Strand Magazine. Once again the installments were graced with illustrations by Sidney Paget, who used a more detailed wash style than he had previously. However, like many subsequent film-makers, he discovered that no image of the hound could do justice to the hellish creature conjured by Conan Doyle in the mind of the reader: “…there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.”

Unsurprisingly, Holmes’s reappearance was a phenomenal success in both Britain and the US. Newnes initially produced 25,000 copies of the collected installments as a novel, but the print run was soon extended for readers in the colonies, and the US edition was published with a print run of 70,000. Noting the remarkable interest in the book, the US magazine Collier’s Weekly made a favorable offer to Conan Doyle for further stories featuring the great detective. As a result, it was in Collier’s, not the Strand, that subsequent Holmes stories were first published. Meanwhile, The Hound of the Baskervilles has become one of the truly great supernatural myths in literature. The book has been translated into almost every major language; adapted—with varying degrees of success—more than 20 times for cinema and television; and the story still remains fully embedded in the public imagination.

The eponymous 1939 movie is the best-known and perhaps most successful cinematic adaptation of the novel. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce played Holmes and Watson in 13 more films.

The novel begins in a pleasingly familiar fashion. At 221B Baker Street, Holmes demonstrates to Watson his genius for scientific observation and deduction by analyzing Mortimer’s walking stick in his typically masterful style. But it is not long before the fantastical legend of the Baskerville hound intrudes into their ordered, rational, modern world. It sets Holmes and Watson off on a quest to track down a fabulous beast—reminiscent of those in medieval literature—a genre in which Conan Doyle was well versed.

The cover of the first edition of the novel was adorned with a woodcut by British artist and illustrator Alfred Garth Jones (1872–1955).

In later life, Conan Doyle displayed a personal—and, to many, a gullible—belief in the supernatural. Just after World War I, as he was mourning the deaths of both his son Kingsley and his brother Innes, Conan Doyle was famously duped by doctored photographs created by two Yorkshire schoolgirls, purporting to show fairies in their backyard (see Spiritualism). In 1901, however, through the cool, calm reasoning of Holmes, he gives the supernatural pretty short shrift. From the start, Holmes grasps the essential fact about the hound. The paw prints found at the scene of Sir Charles’s death were real: therefore the hound must be a flesh-and-blood animal, and not a specter. This is confirmed to Holmes when one of Sir Henry’s new boots is stolen from his London hotel room, only to be returned and another, older, boot taken. Crucially, Holmes does not reveal the meaning until the end of the story: the boot was stolen so that the hound would have a scent to follow, but the new boot, being as yet unworn, did not carry Sir Henry’s scent, so the thief put it back and stole an old one instead.

Another key clue that Holmes discovers early on in the story, but keeps to himself until its very end, is the faint scent of white jasmine on the warning note sent to Sir Henry. Holmes knows that only one of the handful of neighbors living within a few miles of Baskerville Hall could have sent the message. When he detects the scent, he realizes the source must be a woman and his suspicions fall on Stapleton, whose “sister” might have written the note.

The details of the case established, the reader accompanies Watson, Mortimer, and Sir Henry to Dartmoor to face what is still an unknown enemy. Once there, the wonderfully sinister atmosphere of the moor and mire evoked by Conan Doyle, and the dramatic events that unfold, combine to deepen the sense of dread in the reader’s mind (never mind Mortimer’s) that the hound might really be supernatural—until Holmes’s reappearance sees reason triumph over superstition.

The detective is actually conspicuously absent for a large part of the narrative, but this is not a misstep on Conan Doyle’s part, for Holmes’s absence only builds a sense of anticipation in the reader, particularly since much time is now spent describing events, without the usual excitement of seeing the detective’s skills in action. When the reader discovers that Holmes has in fact been secretly on the scene all the time, the ploy is retrospectively all the more pleasing.

The doctor may not have the genius of the detective but he is, as Holmes puts it, “a man of action,” whose “instinct is always to do something energetic.” Certainly, in Dartmoor Watson is energetic, confronting Barrymore head on, bluntly interviewing local people, ambushing the stranger hiding out on the moor—who turns out to be Holmes—and charging recklessly after Selden, a convicted murderer.

Watson’s account of his adventures on Dartmoor comprises a mixture of recollection, written reports sent back to 221B (from where, unknown to the good doctor, they are then sent all the way back to Holmes in his Dartmoor hideout), and detailed diary entries. This gives The Hound of the Baskervilles an episodic feel that is unusual in the Holmes canon. Rather than being punctuated with climactic moments of suspense and horror, as in most other Holmes stories, the narrative builds, with an insistent and increasing tempo, in a series of disparate and provocative scenes. This endows the narrative with a persuasive authenticity, making it easier for the reader to suspend disbelief in the face of the rather unlikely happenings that occur. But above all, the tale gives the reader Dartmoor, the unseen but eerily baying hound, and a deliciously sinister villain.

The setting for the story was carefully constructed by Conan Doyle, based on a combination of reality and invention. The elements are real—tors, hut circles, and dangerous peat bogs are all features of Dartmoor—but the arrangement and the names (except for Vixen Tor and Bellever Tor) are the author’s creation.

Conan Doyle draws so vivid a picture of Dartmoor, with its bleak moorland, Neolithic ruins, craggy tors, twisting paths and streams, lonely dwellings, and fog-shrouded, menacing mire, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Looming over it all is the very real Princetown Prison. As Holmes observes, it is a worthy setting for such a dark tale. Says Watson of his first glimpse of the moor from the train, “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.” Later, he describes Dartmoor as “…this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul….” Like the local “peasants,” Sir Charles believed the legend of the hound, and nothing could induce him to go out on the moor at night. Watson and Sir Henry are made of sterner stuff, but even they are shaken to the core when they are out on the moor at night looking for Selden and suddenly hear the hound baying. “It came with the wind through the silence of the night,” Watson reports, “a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away.” Watson never once believes the hound is supernatural, but Sir Henry’s faith is not so unshakeable. As he tells the doctor, “…it was one thing to laugh about it in London, and it is another to stand out here in the darkness of the moor and to hear such a cry as that.”

A group of prisoners and their guards pass through the main gate of Dartmoor Prison, Princetown, in 1906. Built for prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the jail later housed murderers like Selden.

Like his uncle Sir Charles, Sir Henry is of necessity a sympathetic character, for Conan Doyle wants the reader to be concerned for his safety. The two are a far cry from their ancestor Sir Hugo, who rode roughshod over the local peasants and had his wicked, drunken way with kidnapped maidens. Sir Charles originally made his fortune in South Africa, and he donated generously to both local and county charities, according to a report in the fictional Devon County Chronicle. Sir Henry’s years in Canada have evidently given him a similarly democratic outlook, for he is determined to build on the work his uncle did in the community.

Very different is the other Baskerville nephew, Jack Stapleton, the secret only child of Sir Charles’s youngest brother, Rodger. “The black sheep of the family” and the “very image” of Sir Hugo, according to Mortimer, Rodger’s deviant activity had made England “too hot to hold him” and he fled to South America. There, unknown to his English relatives, he had married and had a son, Jack. The younger Stapleton stole some money and left for England with Beryl, a Costa Rican beauty, under the name Vandeleur. They settled in Yorkshire, where they founded a private school, but it soon sank “from disrepute into infamy,” says Holmes, until they found it prudent to change their names once again and, disguising themselves this time as a naturalist and his dutiful sister, moved to Dartmoor. Here Stapleton learned of the legend of the hound and hatched his dastardly plot, forcing Beryl to be his reluctant accomplice.

Grimspound was one of the Dartmoor sites visited in 1901 by Conan Doyle and Bertram Fletcher Robinson, while researching the novel’s grim setting.

The human agency behind the real hound, Stapleton is one of the best villains in the canon. From the start, Holmes realizes he is dealing with a criminal almost as brilliant as himself. Paraphrasing Sir Walter Scott, he tells Watson: “this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel.” In London, when a disguised Stapleton hires a cab to follow Sir Henry and Mortimer, he at once spots Holmes and Watson trailing the pair on foot, and gets away. Knowing that Holmes will trace and interview the cabbie, he cheekily tells the man, “It might interest you to know that you have been driving Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” When the cabbie then duly informs Holmes of this, the detective bursts out laughing. “I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own,” he says, quoting Laertes in Hamlet.

Holmes knows his only chance is to fool the “wary and cunning” naturalist into dropping his guard. He sends Watson on alone to Baskerville Hall, announcing, “I’ve been checkmated in London, I can only wish you better luck in Devonshire.” In order to allay his adversary’s suspicions, Holmes knows it is essential that everyone thinks he is staying in the capital.

That Stapleton may be slightly unhinged as well as brilliant is evident when, during Watson’s first encounter with him on the moor, he suddenly sets off into the mire in manic, “zigzag” pursuit of, appropriately enough, a Cyclopides, or skipper, butterfly, so named for its rapid, darting flight (Conan Doyle knew his butterflies). Later, Watson sees Stapleton confront Sir Henry over his courting of Beryl, Sir Henry being unaware she is the naturalist’s wife. “He was running wildly towards them, his absurd net dangling behind him,” reports Watson. “He gesticulated and almost danced with excitement in front of the lovers.” Afterwards, a confused Sir Henry asks Watson, “Did he ever strike you as being crazy[?]… you can take it from me that either he or I ought to be in a strait-jacket.”

When Holmes first spots the uncanny resemblance between the butterfly collector and the portrait of Sir Hugo, he exclaims, “We have him, Watson, we have him… A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!”, at which the great detective bursts out laughing once more—an event that, as Watson notes, always bodes ill for someone.

And indeed, in classic detective-story tradition, Holmes ultimately triumphs over Stapleton, one of his greatest-ever opponents. After a lengthy period of chaos, his success definitively restores order to Dartmoor.

A stone hound guards the entrance to Hayford Hall in South Devon, believed by many Holmesians to be the model for Baskerville Hall.

Holmes, his Baker Street rooms, and the bustle of London are all inseparably linked in the reader’s mind, but with The Hound of the Baskervilles, the great detective is indelibly connected to Dartmoor too. As Watson unknowingly says of him, in an iconic image, when describing the stranger hiding out on the moor, “He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place.” As the man who hunts Stapleton down, Sherlock Holmes—so often likened by Watson to a bloodhound in their adventures together—is arguably the real hound of the Baskervilles.