It was the book that Arthur Conan Doyle did not want to write. As far as he was concerned, after two novels and twenty-four short stories, Holmes was definitely dead, and unquestionably buried beneath the gallons of water produced by the Reichenbach Falls, as related in The Adventure of The Final Problem. Conan Doyle was happy to have buried a troublesome and demanding creation who threatened to keep him from his ‘serious’ literary efforts, but he had not reckoned with the collective will of the reading public. Since Holmes’s watery death in 1893, Doyle had received a relentless barrage of requests from the public, as well as from magazine proprietors, to resurrect the world’s leading fictional detective. To all entreaties, and sometimes threats, Doyle was impervious. But the barrage showed no signs of weakening; after nearly ten years of silence on the subject of Holmes, Doyle finally relented, and as a compromise reluctantly agreed to relate an early case of Holmes’s involving a monstrous beast and the terrible consequences of its appearance on Dartmoor – The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The gestation of the book had been quietly taking place for two years before its publication in 1902. The year before, in 1901, Conan Doyle had taken a golfing holiday in Cromer, on the Norfolk coast, where coincidentally he had previously had the idea for the plot of The Adventure of the Dancing Men. He had just returned from the Boer War, where having been unceremoniously turned down as a participant (he was 41), and had served, in what was to him, the less appealing job of supervisor in a field hospital. On the return journey, he had met a young and energetic war correspondent, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, and, liking his youthful enthusiasm, Doyle invited Robinson to join him on the links at Cromer. During their holiday together, on a windy day unsuitable for golf, they sat in a private sitting room of the Royal Links Hotel regaling each other with stories. Robinson told Doyle of the legend of a great black demon dog which had terrorised the West Country – he may have also mentioned a local Norfolk legend: Black Shuck, who was ‘the size of a calf, easily recognisable by his saucer-shaped eyes weeping green or red fire.’ Doyle’s imagination was always fired by the bizarre, and within hours, the two had concocted the outlines of a sensational story. Doyle wrote to his mother that it would be ‘a real creeper’.

Doyle went to stay with Robinson at his family home near Dartmoor in Devon for further research. The wild and desolate moorland had many mysterious legends of black dogs attached to it; not least the story of Sir Richard Cabell of Buckfastleigh who murdered his wife, and was so evil, that on the night of his death in 1677, black hounds breathing fire and smoke raced over Dartmoor and howled around his manor house. This legend appeared in the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s Little Guide to Devon, and it was the Reverend’s later guide, A Book of Dartmoor, which was to prove invaluable to Doyle as he developed his plot.

The Cabell legend, and others, sparked the fertile imagination of Conan Doyle. His mind was always at its most alert when he was writing, and he seized on anything that came to hand to flesh out the story – the coachman, for instance who drove Doyle and Robinson around Dartmoor on their researches was called Harry Baskerville, and much of the geographical and geological detail of Dartmoor, that gives the tale so much atmosphere, was copied almost word for word from Baring-Gould’s Guide.

At first Doyle intended to use the real names of locations on the moor, but perhaps to give himself a greater opportunity to fantasise the moor, which appears almost as a main character in the story, he changed them. Thus, Newton Abbot became the fictional ‘Coombe Tracey’; Laughter Tor was converted to Lafter Hall; the Fox Tor Mire was transformed into the treacherous Grimpen Mire, and so on. As so often in his stories, Doyle liked to mix fact and fiction, and the prehistoric huts, the Belliver and Vixen Tors, not to mention the famous prison at Princetown, all real places, feature significantly in the story. It is difficult to ascertain for certain the house Doyle used as a model for Baskerville Hall, but it is interesting to note that the makers of the 1932 film version of the novel used the Manor House at North Bovey for the ancestral home.

As the novel began to take shape in Doyle’s mind, there was a large question looming that he was avoiding having to answer. A story involving death, mystery, suspense and legend needed a strong protagonist to bind all these elements together – a brilliant detective perhaps? It was foolish to avoid the obvious solution. Nevertheless Doyle seems eager to show that his great creation, about whom there had been so much fuss, has feet of clay; Holmes is not always at his best in this novel. He underestimates the power of the Hound, despite Sir Charles and the convict having been literally frightened to death by it, and consequently puts his client Sir Henry Baskerville in danger of attack. For a moment, when he believes that it is Sir Henry’s corpse he and Watson have discovered on the moor, he has a nasty turn: ‘It is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career.’ His actions in The Hound of the Baskervilles are consistent with The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips and The Adventure of the Dancing Men, where he recklessly puts his clients’ lives in danger with tragic results, seemingly for the aesthetic satisfaction of neatly tying up the loose ends of a case before cornering the suspect. Doyle, by giving so much of the investigation over to Dr Watson, seems to emphasise that the success of their cases, was in fact the result of teamwork, rather than Holmes’s singular powers.

If Holmes at times misjudges, we can put it down to the fact that this is described as one of his early investigations. Yet it cannot be that early. Watson describes himself as ‘fleet of foot’ as he sprints across the moor after the convict – but what has happened to Watson’s infamous Afghan war wound that was causing him so much trouble when he and Holmes first met? We must believe that the Doctor has been in training, and that Holmes, who outruns Watson at one point, is not yet suffering from the effects of his cocaine habit. Weaknesses aside, Holmes shines and reminds us of his intensely scientific approach by noting the differences between typefaces used by newspapers and his knowledge of the fragrances of 75 different perfumes!

The Hound of the Baskervilles is considered by many, the distinguished crime writer P.D. James among them, to be the finest detective story ever written. It is Conan Doyle’s inspired mix of the supernatural, the unexplained, with the entirely rational approach of his detective that gives the book a tension that excites. The moor is presented as Nature uncontrolled, something primeval, prehistoric, where man’s nature becomes uncivilised too from a close association with it. The convict living rough on the moor is described as an animal; Stapleton, whose intimate knowledge of the moor and its ways, has a brutal nature, sadistically torturing his innocent wife. Other women in the vicinity are victims too – the yeoman’s daughter in the 17th-century legend, and Laura Lyons who suffers ‘incessant persecution’ from her husband. The manly virtues, exemplified by Holmes and Watson, and the fresh American values of Sir Henry eventually redress the balance. The city subdues the country.

Conan Doyle, as usual, worked fast when he knew he had a good story, and what had started as a mere idea in March 1901, was a completed manuscript by August. That manuscript suffered a strange fate. The American publishers of The Hound of the Baskervilles, McLure Phillips in New York, gave away individual sheets to booksellers all over the country for display to publicise the novel, and very little of the original manuscript has survived.

The worldwide success of The Hound of the Baskervilles established Holmes as an international icon. William Gillete’s play ‘Sherlock Holmes’, sanctioned by Conan Doyle, which was playing at the Lyceum in London as the story was being serialised by ‘The Strand’ magazine, contributed to its success. Conan Doyle would bow to the inevitable; he wrote to ‘The Strand’ editor, Greenhough Smith: ‘As far as I can judge the revival of Holmes would attract a great deal of attention.’ He dutifully resurrected his hero therefore in The Adventure of the Empty House in 1903, and went on to write a further novel: The Valley of Fear and 31 more short stories.