Great Mystery Novels: “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

It feels a little silly, writing SPOILERS BELOW considering I am discussing a novel that came out 123 years ago. Is it possible that any reader of this blog—or, for that matter, any book nerd over the age of thirty—is not already familiar with the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles? Even those who haven’t read the book have probably seen the movie in one of its many incarnations over the decades. I first saw the Basil Rathbone version from 1939 (which is free on Youtube) when I was about ten years old. This was about the same time my mom gave me a faux-leather bound edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes collection, which I read and re-read many, many times. And the work I re-read the most was The Hound of the Baskervilles (henceforth, HOTB).

Which might lead one to ask: Why would anybody re-read a mystery? After all, the whole point of a mystery is to figure whodunnit, right?

For the average mystery, this is largely true. But the great mysteries—like great books of any kind—operate on many levels and hold different kinds of appeal. For me, the very best mystery novels are character-driven, with a vivid setting and a lot of drama that stands above mere plot mechanics. HOTB  is such a novel.

Take the opening chapter, in which Holmes challenges Watson to deduce as much as he can from a walking stick, which an unseen visitor has left in their foyer. Watson does his best, making a series of seemingly plausible deductions, which Holmes pretends to admire.

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval.

It doesn’t last, of course. A moment later, Holmes takes up the walking stick and begins to examine it.

“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.”

“Then I was right.”

“To that extent.”

“But that was all.”

“No, no, my dear Watson, not all—by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials ‘C.C.’ are placed before that hospital the words ‘Charing Cross’ very naturally suggest themselves.”

“You may be right.”

Over the next few paragraphs, Holmes continues to demolish Watson’s assertions one-by-one with barely disguised glee. And yet, we sense how much Holmes genuinely admires and even loves Watson—almost as much as the doctor admires and loves him.

It’s this interplay of different personalities that makes the Sherlock Holmes stories work so well, even today.  As Jeremy Brett, the great Shakespearean actor who was also my all-time favorite on-screen Holmes, once said, “…the Sherlock Holmes stories are about a great friendship. Without Watson, Holmes might well have burned out on cocaine long ago.” So, true. While Watson and Holmes are both intelligent, brave, decent men, they nonetheless serve as dramatic foils for each other. Watson is moral, upstanding, straightforward, reticent, empathetic, and unassuming. Holmes is cold, scientific, creative, shameless, and a bit of a diva.

Watson is a doctor. Holmes is a wizard.

This contrast is also the source of quite a bit of humor. Watson is a kind and empathetic man who is often scandalized by Holmes’s outrageous behavior (as are we). Sometimes, the humor comes at the expense of a third character, as is the case with poor Dr. Mortimer in the opening chapter of HOTB. As Holmes asks questions of Dr. Mortimer, he is actually checking his deductions—the same ones he showed off to Watson previously.

“[This walking stick was] a presentation, I see,” said Holmes.

“Yes, sir.”

“From Charing Cross Hospital?”

“From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.”

“Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, shaking his head.

Dr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment. “Why was it bad?”

“Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?”

Classic.

But as much as I love the interplay between Holmes and the other characters, my favorite aspect of The Hound of the Baskervilles is its setting—the great moor that surrounds Baskerville Hall. Take this moment, when Watson (traveling without Holmes) first sees the moor.

Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely around him.

I love how original and against-type this choice of setting is, especially for a Victorian novel. Instead of a dense, dark forest or a huge, moldering castle, Doyle sets his narrative on a vast, empty plane. It’s not too much of a stretch, I think, to suggest that Doyle is using the void of the moor as a literary symbol for the emptiness and evil of some human hearts (and, specifically, that of the story’s villain, Stapleton). It’s also a great evocation of an indifferent, perhaps Godless universe, echoing the Naturalism literary movement of Stephen Crane and Jack London that was just getting started.

Another thing I’ve noticed about HOTB is that the mystery is pretty easy to solve, in terms of whodunnit. Early in the book, Doyle establishes that the villain is a man (disguised with a beard), and there are only a few plausible characters in the story that could be that guy (Barrymore, the butler, Franklin, the crazy old rich-guy; and Stapleton). Nonetheless the story remains compelling simply because the reader wants to see how Holmes will catch the bad guy.

There is, in fact, a whole genre of mystery—the reverse whodunit—that is founded on this approach. In a reverse mystery, the story is often centered around the killer themselves. The reader sees the murder happen, and the drama that ensues is based on seeing how the great detective will catch them. (The old TV show “Columbo” is a great example of this.)

In the case of HOTB, we suspect that Stapleton must be the killer. But Doyle throws up many obstacles to the matter of proving it. First, he separates his two heroes, Holmes and Watson. Then, he throws in a subplot about an escaped prisoner hiding on the moor. Best of all, Holmes reveals who the killer is (Stapleton) well before the end of the book, the last chapter being devoted to the matter of how to prove Stapleton’s guilt (without getting the new Lord Baskerville killed).

As for Stapleton himself, he is one of the best villains in all genre literature. In fact, he serves as a kind of mirror-image of Holmes, being a scientist and person of high intellect. At one point in the story, he even pretends to be Holmes, to Holmes’s subsequent chagrin. But, of course, Stapleton differs from Holmes in the areas where it matters most. Namely, he is an evil and ruthless man. The reader senses this when he brags to Watson that he can find his way to the center of the moor without falling into its many, hidden pockets of quicksand.

“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!”

Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonised, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror, but my companion’s nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.

There are so many different things happening in the passage that I always stop reading for a moment just to admire it. On the one hand, we, as readers, discern that Stapleton is an evil bastard. (Watson, being Watson, charitably explains Stapleton’s lack of horror at the dying pony to “stronger nerves” when, in fact, we sense that he is actually a full-on psychopath, as turns out to be the case.) Beyond that, I love how Stapleton had decided to use the entire Grimpen Mire as a weapon—along with the hound—with which to kill the lords of Baskerville Hall. There is something of Dr. Faust in Stapleton. He’s playing with dark forces, which he only thinks he controls.

And so, it is perfectly fitting that, at the end of the story when Stapleton has been revealed as the murderer, he falls victim himself to the sucking bog that claimed the pony. It’s almost too bad that Doyle felt the need to relate this off-camera, as it were, without Watson actually being present to witness Stapleton’s (surely horrific) death. As Watson explains,

…we were never destined to know, though there was much which we might surmise. There was no chance of finding footsteps in the mire, for the rising mud oozed swiftly in upon them, but as we at last reached firmer ground beyond the morass we all looked eagerly for them. But no slightest sign of them ever met our eyes. If the earth told a true story, then Stapleton never reached that island of refuge towards which he struggled through the fog upon that last night. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.

Foul slime, indeed.

If Doyle had been writing later in the Twentieth Century, he might have ended the novel there, on this dark yet very satisfying note of existential horror. But no. THOB is still a very English mystery, and so it must somehow show the ideals of civilization being somehow restored onto the remaining characters. In other words, all the loose ends need tying up in a way that shows the triumph of reason, justice, and goodness—as embodied by Holmes and Watson, naturally, but also by the young Henry Baskerville and the freshly, happily widowed Beryl Stapleton. In the final chapter, entitled “A Retrospective,” we learn how Stapleton had been planning to claim Baskerville Hall for himself without raising suspicion. We also learn that Henry and Dr. Mortimer are heading off to travel the world together, and that Beryl Stapleton is, in Holmes’s ultimate assessment, a good person. (We assume that Henry will marry her, eventually, although this is never spelled out.)

And, with that, Holmes and Watson head out for an evening on the town, dinner and a show. Order is restored. Evil is defeated.

Until the next time.