The Hound of the Baskervilles

The book runs on gothic machinery from first page to last: the 1742 manuscript of Hugo's pact with the Powers of Evil, the cursed estate with its brooding hall, staring ancestor portraits and ivy-hung towers, the legend pressing on the living heir, the gloomy dinners and the woman sobbing in the dark house. The supernatural curse is the story's driving device even after reason dismantles it.

Chapter 2: “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.”

Chapter 6: “The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.”

Chapter 6: “It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow.”

The book is a fair-play murder puzzle built around one death: the yew-alley prints, cigar ash and hound footprints are laid before the reader, and the pasted Times warning, the stolen boots, the L.L. letter and the ancestral portrait are all clues the reader could assemble before the Retrospection confirms them. The whole fifteen-chapter structure — evidence in London, surveillance on the moor, deduction, trap, fireside solution — is the genre's spine.

Chapter 4: “The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare.”

Chapter 2: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Chapter 14: “He held an old black boot in the air. "Meyers, Toronto," was printed on the leather inside.”

Dread is one of the book's deliberate pleasures even though the hound is finally explained: Sir Charles dies of terror on-page by inference, the cry on the moor is kept genuinely ambiguous for chapters, the luminous beast of the peasants' tales stalks the fog, and the phosphorus-painted hound bursting fire-mouthed from the fog bank is staged for horror before it becomes a chase. The moor chapters sustain real menace to the characters.

Chapter 9: “It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away.”

Chapter 12: “Again the agonised cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it, a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea.”

Chapter 14: “Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.”

Written for grown readers: the leads are middle-aged professionals (Holmes and Watson) and a thirty-year-old heir, the concerns are murder, inheritance and land tenure, and the diction and ironies ("you are a conductor of light"; a £740,000 stake "for which a man might well play a desperate game") are pitched over the heads of children. Not softened or gentled for younger readers.

Chapter 1: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”

Chapter 5: “Dear me! It is a stake for which a man might well play a desperate game.”

The moor is the book's co-star. Fog banks as ice-fields and seas on which the house floats like a strange ship, the mire's green wave-crests that are not solid, rain squalls and slate-coloured clouds trailing grey wreaths down the tors — the landscape carries the emotional weight the whole middle act runs on, and the climax is literally fought against weather.

Chapter 14: “banked itself up like a wall on that side of us, low but thick and well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface.”

Chapter 7: “It is a wonderful place, the moor,” said he, looking round over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges.”

Chapter 10: “Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills.”

Holmes's mastery is one of the book's standing pleasures: deducing a visitor's profession and dog from a walking stick, reading the pasted warning's hotel, ink and agitation out of its typography, reconstructing Sir Charles's run from tiptoe prints, and solving the genealogy from an old school record. The reader watches the expert work, including — unusually — him being checkmated in London.

Chapter 4: “The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare.”

Chapter 15: “In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine.”

The plot is one central question — what killed Sir Charles and threatens the heir — seeded in the first two chapters and answered in deliberate layers: the boot thefts, the hound prints, the L.L. assignation letter, the mistaken-identity warning, the wife-posing-as-sister reversal, and finally the portrait revelation that Stapleton is a Baskerville with designs on the succession. Each layer is planted before it fires.

Chapter 10: “Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o clock. Beneath it were signed the initials L. L.”

Chapter 12: “The lady who has passed here as Miss Stapleton is in reality his wife.”

Chapter 13: “The face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas.”

Nearly the whole second act is set in deep wild country far from help: a mire that swallows a pony before the characters' eyes, prehistoric hut-circles and tin workings, granite tors, and an escaped convict loose on the moor with armed soldiers on the roads. Terrain and weather are characters — the Grimpen Mire even takes the villain in the end.

Chapter 7: “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.”

Chapter 11: “He and I seemed to be the only living things between the huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it.”

Chapter 8: “if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own”

The whole book is Dr. Watson's memoir — he narrates every chapter as a participating character, catches Barrymore lying in a corridor on his own observation, and his partial viewpoint (his letters and diaries fill three chapters) is the device that lets Holmes's movements stay hidden from the reader until the hut reveal.

Chapter 7: “And yet he lied as he said it, for it chanced that after breakfast I met Mrs. Barrymore in the long corridor with the sun full upon her face. She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern set expression of mouth. But her telltale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids.”

Chapter 1: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light.”

A complete case in one volume: the Retrospection answers the hound, the boots, the warning letter, the wife and the motive, the villain is dispatched, and the book closes on a fireside dinner with no threads left for a sequel — the reader can pick it up knowing nothing else of Holmes and lose nothing.

Chapter 15: “So far as the case of the hound goes, however, I will give you the course of events as nearly as I can, and you will suggest anything which I may have forgotten.”

Chapter 15: “I do not know that anything essential has been left unexplained.”

The resolution lands warm and earned: the hound is killed before it reaches Sir Henry's throat, the client escapes unwounded and recovers on his world tour, the tortured wife is freed and guides the pursuers to her husband's end, the villain is punished in the mire, and the book closes with the two friends turning to opera and dinner at Marcini's. The cost (Sir Henry's broken engagement, Selden's death) is real but the register of the close is relief and warmth, not grief.

Chapter 14: “The two of them were destined to travel together round the world before Sir Henry had become once more the hale, hearty man that he had been before he became master of that ill-omened estate.”

Chapter 14: “We tore away his collar, and Holmes breathed a prayer of gratitude when we saw that there was no sign of a wound and that the rescue had been in time.”

Chapter 15: “And now, my dear Watson, we have had some weeks of severe work, and for one evening, I think, we may turn our thoughts into more pleasant channels.”

No sex anywhere in the book, on the page or off: the one love thread — Sir Henry's courtship of the woman he knows as Miss Stapleton — runs entirely on walks, dinners and a rejected proposal, and dies when she proves to be a married woman and a victim. Watson has no romance; the Holmes–Watson bond is friendship.

Chapter 9: “He had come to offer apologies for his rudeness of the morning, and after a long private interview with Sir Henry in his study the upshot of their conversation was that the breach is quite healed, and that we are to dine at Merripit House next Friday as a sign of it.”

A captive woman is found bound, gagged and beaten in the climax — tied to a beam with towels round her throat, a whip weal across her neck, arms mottled with bruises, "fainted from ill-usage" — and the Retrospection establishes the blows as habitual in her marriage. Brief, aftermath rather than process, but a deliberate infliction of suffering on a captive, shown on the page.

Chapter 14: “To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman.”

Chapter 14: “As her beautiful head fell upon her chest I saw the clear red weal of a whiplash across her neck.”

Chapter 15: “Threats and even, I am sorry to say, blows refused to move her.”

Animals are harmed on the page in three separate chapters, and the deaths do plot work: a pony is swallowed screaming by the Grimpen Mire before the reader's eyes (ch. 7), Mortimer's spaniel wanders onto the moor and its skeleton is later found on the hound's island (chs. 10 and 14), and the giant hound itself is shot down at last — five revolver barrels — in the climax (ch. 14).

Chapter 7: “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.”

Chapter 10: “I found him much troubled over the disappearance of his little spaniel. It had wandered on to the moor and had never come back.”

Chapter 14: “But the next instant Holmes had emptied five barrels of his revolver into the creature’s flank. With a last howl of agony and a vicious snap in the air, it rolled upon its back, four feet pawing furiously, and then fell limp upon its side.”