The Hound of the Baskervilles Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes
What it is about
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of Arthur Conan Doyle's four Sherlock Holmes novels. It was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, and it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon, in England's West Country.
The story opens in London in 1889. Dr James Mortimer calls on Holmes and Watson and reads them a legend that has followed the Baskerville family since the English Civil War. Sir Hugo Baskerville kidnapped a farmer's daughter. When she escaped, he chased her across the moor, cursing himself in his rage. His companions found the girl dead of fright and Hugo killed by a demonic hound, a creature said to have haunted Dartmoor ever since and to have brought early death to many Baskervilles.
Mortimer has a reason for telling it. His friend Sir Charles Baskerville, a philanthropic baronet who made a fortune in South Africa, took the legend seriously and had a weak heart. Sir Charles was found dead in a yew alley with an expression of horror on his face. The death was put down to cardiac arrest, but Mortimer noticed large canine paw prints near the body. The heir is Sir Henry Baskerville, a Canadian nephew, and Mortimer wonders whether it is safe to bring him to Dartmoor at all.
Holmes calls the legend a fairy tale. Then odd things start happening to Sir Henry in London. One of his old boots is stolen. He receives an anonymous letter warning him off the moor. Someone follows him in a hansom cab. The inheritance is worth about £740,000, a vast sum, and Holmes decides the stakes are high enough to send Watson to Devon as Sir Henry's bodyguard and his eyes on the ground.
The main characters
Holmes spends much of the middle of the book off the page, which is part of the design. Watson carries the investigation and sends detailed written reports back to London, so the reader follows the case through a narrator who is capable but not infallible.
Sir Henry Baskerville is the new baronet, a plain-spoken outsider who refuses to be frightened out of his own house. Dr Mortimer is the country doctor and executor of Sir Charles' will, keen on excavating ancient barrows. John and Eliza Barrymore are the butler and housekeeper at Baskerville Hall, and they are plainly hiding something.
The neighbours matter more than they first appear. Jack Stapleton is a naturalist who is over-friendly, drops hints about the hound, and warns Watson away from the deadly Grimpen Mire. His sister Beryl repeatedly urges Sir Henry to go back to London, without her brother's knowledge. Mr Frankland is a litigious busybody, forever threatening lawsuits, and his estranged daughter Laura Lyons turns out to have written to Sir Charles. Hanging over all of it is Selden, a convicted murderer loose on the moor after escaping Princetown Prison.
The themes
The central tension is between superstition and evidence. Doyle builds a genuinely frightening ghost story, complete with a family curse and a baying animal in the fog, then sets a man who refuses to believe in any of it against the whole apparatus. The moor itself does a lot of the work. Grimpen Mire swallows what walks into it, and the landscape is as much an antagonist as any person.
Inheritance and bloodline run underneath. A fortune passes down a family line, and the question of who is really entitled to it drives everything. Doyle also works in the idea of a face repeating across generations, with the portrait of Sir Hugo at Baskerville Hall quietly doing detective work of its own.
Justice is the third thread. Holmes reaches the truth long before he can prove it, and much of the final act is about manufacturing the evidence the law will accept.
How it ends (spoilers)
Stop here if you want the case fresh.
The man Watson sees watching from a tor is Holmes, who has been living rough on the moor to conceal his involvement. He names Jack Stapleton as the murderer. Beryl is not Stapleton's sister but his abused wife, forced into the pose. Selden dies in Sir Henry's cast-off clothes, the hound having followed the scent of the stolen boot to the wrong man.
Holmes uses Sir Henry as bait. He and Watson fake a return to London, then wait near Stapleton's house with Inspector Lestrade and shoot the hound in heavy fog. Stapleton has tied his wife to a column and fled into the mire, where he is presumed drowned. Stapleton was Rodger Baskerville II, the secret son of Sir Charles' youngest brother and a throwback to Sir Hugo in looks and temperament. The beast was a savage black hound painted with phosphorus.
Why it still matters
This was the first Holmes story published after the detective's apparent death in The Final Problem, and its success led directly to the character's revival. In 1999 a poll of Sherlockians ranked it the best of the four Holmes novels, and in 2003 it placed 128th in the BBC's Big Read poll of the UK's best-loved novels. It works as a horror story and as a fair-play mystery at the same time, which is why it is still the Holmes book most readers start with.
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