The Hound of the Baskervilles [antikvár]

ForewordThe Hound of the Baskervilles is, I suppose, the most widely remembered of all Conan Doyle's accounts of Holmes and Watson at work. What most of us have forgotten is that it was, for reasons that had very little to do with the story itself, among the most rapturously received when it first saw the serialized light of day in August 1901. The reason for the rapture was simple. Holmes had disappeared on May 4th, 1891, locked in a literal cliff-hanger at the Reichenbach Falls with his arch-enemy Moriarty. In The Final Problem (1893) Watson had told the story of Holmes's end - ' the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world'. The real murderer had, of course, been Conan Doyle himself. He was through with frivolous yarn-spinning, and for eight long years he resisted all blandishments; he was a much more serious man than that, as he had proved by his courage as a field doctor and his outspokenness as the man of letters with a public conscience during the Boer War. But in 1901, while he was recovering in Norfolk from his South African experiences with a journalist friend and golfing partner, it one day rained too hard for the course. Fletcher Robinson amused the writer by telling him some Dartmoor legends, including one about a spectral hound. A month later Conan Doyle was striding over the moor, cultivating the seed of a new novel. Holmes was still firmly dead in his mind, and the first conception was presumably of something in the historical line. But when it came to the writing the hound demanded Holmes, and Holmes it got, though Conan Doyle insisted adamantly that the story dated from the pre-1891 past. No one was really deceived. The serialization ended in April 1902. In October 1903 appeared7