Novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1902
Opening lines
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A country doctor brings to Baker Street a manuscript from 1742: a debauched ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, dies in it on the moor under the fangs of an immense beast. Sir Charles, the head of the family, has just been found dead at night at the end of the yew alley of his estate, his face convulsed, without a wound. The doctor said nothing of this to the inquest: some twenty metres from the body, he saw footprints, those of a gigantic dog.
Context
The idea came from the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, with whom its author had become friends on his return from South Africa, and who told him, during four days of golf at Cromer, in Norfolk, in the spring of 1901, a legend of a spectral dog; the two men explored Dartmoor in Devon together, where Robinson had grown up, and it was at first intended that they would sign it together. The detective had been killed off nearly eight years earlier, and twenty thousand readers of the magazine that published him had then cancelled their subscriptions. Its author dated the story from before that death, and the magazine had to make, for the only time in its history, a seventh printing.
Who it is for
A short novel, one of the four devoted to the character; it can be read without knowing the other stories.
Prizes and reception
According to a 2012 record, its detective is the human literary character most often adapted for cinema and television.
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