The Hound Of The Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle

. . . in a literary sense, that is. Reading some of the excellent existing reviews nearly put me off writing mine. But I must have my say, and will therefore take a slightly different approach. Doyle's background and the story's background have been covered in great detail. So I'll dwell on the points that set it apart from anything else of this kind. First a quick summary of the story itself. The Baskerville family has been hounded, pun intended, for hundreds of years by the family curse, in the shape of a hell hound. It began with the depraved Hugo Baskerville, and most of his descendants have died violent and unnatural deaths. This includes the ...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not invent what we now consider to be the classic detective novel. That claim can be forcefully made by Wilkie Collins with his novel 'The Moonstone', but Doyle more than anyone else developed the genre and with Sherlock Holmes the original gentleman amateur detective, he created one of the most enduring characters in literature and cinema. 'The Hound Of The Baskervilles' published in 1902 was the third Sherlock Holmes novel and in many ways is the most well written and ambitious of all. It is not only a brilliantly crafted detective story but also crosses over in to the realm of the supernatural and horror, an early ...