Week 1 - Summary
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Week 1 of 8 Chapters I & II. Read along with us in The Weekly Serial app
You've just met him in Chapter I, doing his party trick with Dr Mortimer's walking stick, deducing the owner's life from a few scratches in the wood. I used to think that scene was just Doyle showing off Holmes for readers who hadn't met him yet.
Reading it again this time, I'm not sure that's all it's doing. It feels more like Doyle making sure you know exactly who this man is, right before sending him somewhere very dark indeed.
"Has anything escaped me?" I asked with some self-importance. "I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?"
"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal."
Then something arrives that doesn't get demolished quite so easily.
Dr Mortimer hasn't come to Baker Street to admire Holmes's parlour tricks. A man is dead, he doesn't believe the official explanation, and he's frightened. He pulls out a manuscript dated 1742 and starts to read.
This is the bit that got me. In the space of a single chapter, Doyle steps out of the crisp, rational world of gaslight, tobacco, and cold logic, and into something older and stranger. Hugo Baskerville, a man of "a most wild, profane and godless" character, becomes obsessed with a tenant farmer's daughter. Not a romance. A fixation. He locks her in his room while he feasts with his companions below. She escapes across the moor. He hunts her.
I don't think this reads like a detective story. I think it reads like a ghost story, and I think Doyle wants you to feel that shift happening.
What strikes me most is Mortimer himself. He's a man of science, a doctor, a rationalist, and he still believes something unnatural has been stalking the Baskerville family for generations. He watched Sir Charles die of fright at the gate of his own estate. The footprints he found nearby weren't made by any human foot.
Holmes listens to all of this and dismisses it entirely.
One of them is wrong. You've just finished Chapter II, so you know which way you're leaning.
