Hound of the Baskervilles

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1902. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

As I mentioned earlier, Hound is probably one of the most influential books in the Holmes canon. Entire books have been written about just this novel, including Sherlock Holmes was Wrong by Pierre Bayard, which attempts to refute just about every point in the case. More than twenty films over the course of nearly a hundred years have been made adapting the novel, with varying degrees of faithfulness to the original. There’s even a medical contribution named after the book – the “Hound of the Baskervilles” effect is the observation that the fatality of a heart attack is increased by psychological stress, especially stress imposed by the victim’s supernatural beliefs.¹

Part of the reason why this story resonates so strongly is that it addresses a strong theme in the Holmes canon – the conflict between superstition and scientific observation – over and over throughout the book. Although later stories like “The Sussex Vampire” also address superstition, this book constantly dances over the line, evoking the Gothic ghost stories popular in the 19th century and convincing the audience that Holmes might have found his match in the supernatural before pulling back the curtain and showing everyone that there’s a perfectly logical (if convoluted) reason for everything. Holmes’ conflict with the supernatural is a rich area for countless pastiches since, including The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr (which is probably the most like Hound in terms of structure and how the supernatural incidents resolve themselves).

As much as the book contributes to modern science, it brings to light one element of Victorian science as well. In chapter one, Holmes is referred to being second-best only to “Monsieur Bertillon.” This is actually Alphonse Bertillon, the French creator of the Bertillon system, which is the first-ever scientific system of criminal identification. His method relied on physical measurements of suspects to clarify and support eye-witness data. Part of his system involved taking pictures of suspects from the front and from the side to give a better sense of their appearance, and example photos from the time look identical to the mug shots that police still use today. The system turned out to be flawed, so much so that some of the flaws ended up in one of the stories of the “gentleman thief” Arsene Lupin, written by Doyle’s French counterpart, Maurice Leblanc. No wonder Holmes chafes at being considered inferior to Bertillon…

On to the inevitable chronology tangle. Hound starts off with no reference to “The Final Problem,” so the case is set before Holmes’ death. The whole story feels very pre-marriage (especially since Watson doesn’t mention his wife once), and that’s reinforced by Holmes asking Watson to stay when the client arrives – a very early aspect of their relationship. Watson’s failure in developing correct deductions from the walking stick also points to an earlier phase in their relationship. And yet, that same stick is dated 1884, which is “five years ago,” making the date 1889 – one year after Watson’s marriage!

Holmes’ claim to have handled five hundred cases by this point doesn’t help us as much as one would hope in dating the case – at first glance, it seems to indicate the half-way point in Holmes’ career, since in “The Final Problem” he boasted of a thousand cases solved. However, it’s likely that he started off with a few cases here and there, and then gained more and more as his popularity grew, so the time of going from five hundred cases to one thousand is probably much shorter than it was going from one to five hundred. But five hundred cases from 1889 to 1891 is quite a lot, even for Holmes.

Even Sherlockian scholars have trouble dating the case. The references I have access to date it anywhere from September 28, 1886 to September 25, 1900 – a span of fourteen years! It’s certainly one of the stickier cases to slot into the chronology. In fact, once this is all over, I’ll likely write an essay about Sherlockian chronology, because by this point you can see just how confusing and intricate it can be.