The Hound of the Baskervilles

**** By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Literary schmiterary. This book gets four diamonds in my book because it is rip-roaring fun. The only novel-length Sherlock Holmes mystery, Hound is a who-how-whydunnit so exciting that I made Joe read it to me over the course of three evenings and was sorely disappointed when it came to an end. (It's a short book, too.)

The premise is this: a young man has recently inherited the Baskerville estate, only the Baskerville men, in the past, have apparently been cursed to be haunted and hunted to death by a mysterious hellhound. The new heir hires Sherlock — who in turn hires Watson, of course — to solve the mystery before he ends up dead as well.

Aside from sheer plot movement, I particularly appreciated the descriptive passages. Sir Art makes the wild moors of England, creepy mists and ancient cairns and all, vivid and surrealistically beautiful. As with the shorts, however, character development is lacking.

This story is probably tied with “The Speckled Band” for my favorite Holmes mystery.

Posted by Lisa on September 9, 2002 05:00 PM