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This is the closing piece in the collection, and it's the one Dickens is remembered for. A lonely railway signalman is haunted by a spectral figure that appears before disaster strikes, and warns him each time, though never clearly enough to prevent what's coming. A visitor, our narrator, hears his story and tries gently to talk him out of it.

There's a detail worth knowing before you read it. Dickens wrote this not long after surviving a real train crash himself, the Staplehurst disaster of 1865, in which he helped pull the dead and dying from wrecked carriages and was shaken by it for the rest of his life. That's not incidental to the story. It's the reason a piece about warnings nobody heeds in time feels less like invention and more like something Dickens was still working through.

The narrator spends most of his visits trying to offer the…

Before We Begin: The Accidental Novel

In early 1836, a young newspaper reporter was offered a job that didn't look like much. The publishers Chapman and Hall had a series of comic sporting prints by the popular artist Robert Seymour.

They showed hopeless Cockney gentlemen failing at hunting, shooting and fishing, and the publishers needed someone to write the words to go underneath. The reporter was 24 and wrote under the name "Boz". His real name was Charles Dickens.

Dickens had other ideas almost immediately. He talked the publishers into letting the story lead and the pictures follow.

The sportsmen became the Pickwick Club: Samuel Pickwick, a round, kind-hearted, retired businessman, and three friends who set out to travel England and report back on everything they find.

It didn't go well at first. The first monthly number sold only a few hundred copies. Then Seymour died suddenly, before the second…

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By this point in the collection, the ground has shifted. We're fully in Dickens's uncanny register now, a murdered man appears to the narrator, and later to the jury trying his killer, steering the verdict from beyond the grave.

What makes it unsettling isn't just the ghost. It's the narrator himself. He insists, calmly and repeatedly, that he's a rational man simply describing what happened to him, and yet what happened to him is something no rational account can explain. He never once seems to notice the contradiction he's living inside.

Dickens gives us no way to resolve it either. The verdict lands as Guilty, the story ends, and the question of what actually happened, justice, coincidence, or something else entirely, is left standing exactly where it started.

Something to think about: 

the narrator insists throughout that he's simply reporting facts as a rational man would. Do you believe that's…

The Hound of the Baskervilles — Week 4 of 8 Chapters VII & VIII. Read along with us in The Weekly Serial app

Everyone on the moor is hiding something.

Barrymore lied about the sobbing. The postmaster’s boy delivered the telegram to Mrs Barrymore, not to Barrymore himself — so Holmes’s clever ruse proved nothing. Beryl Stapleton warns Watson to leave Dartmoor immediately, then runs half a mile across the moor to retract it before her brother notices she’s gone. Stapleton himself watches Watson with small, light eyes that miss nothing, smile fixed, butterfly net in hand, giving nothing away.

And somewhere out there on the moor, Selden the Notting Hill murderer is still hiding in the dark.

Watson puts it better than anyone could:

Five couriers sit together at the top of a mountain pass as the light fails, trading stories to pass the evening. One of them, German, is insistent on a point: he doesn't believe in ghosts. He's quite firm about it. There are no ghosts, he says, only strange things that really do happen.

Then he tells two stories that make that distinction very hard to hold onto.

It's a clever piece of framing on Dickens's part, and it gives the whole collection its title for a reason. This is a writer who spent his whole life insisting he didn't believe in the supernatural while being unable to stop writing about it, and here he's built a narrator who makes exactly that same claim, in exactly the same breath as the story that undermines it.

Something to think about: 

the courier tells us he doesn't believe in ghosts, only in strange…

Ok Holmes got got this week and it was kind of great to watch.

Every lead in London falls apart. Barrymore was at the Hall the whole time, not the guy in the cab. The Times page is gone from every bin near Charing Cross. And the cabman reveals the mystery fare gave his own name before vanishing into Waterloo Station.

The name was Sherlock Holmes. He's just been trolled by his own opponent, and to his credit he takes it well. "A touch, Watson, an undeniable touch." No sulking, genuine respect.

So it's off to Dartmoor. The train ride down does so much work, green England slowly turning bleak and grey outside the window, until Mortimer just goes "there is your first sight of the moor." Chills.

Then they roll up to the Hall itself. Iron gates, boars' heads gone green with lichen, and waiting at the door is…

The Hound of the Baskervilles — Week 3 of 8 Chapters V & VI  Read along with us in The Weekly Serial app

Holmes is beaten.

Not dramatically. Not with a villain’s flourish. Just quietly, methodically, thread by thread.

By the end of Chapter V three separate lines of investigation have collapsed. Barrymore is confirmed at the Hall so not the bearded man in the cab. The cut page from The Times has vanished from every waste-paper basket in the hotels around Charing Cross. And the cabman, John Clayton, delivers the final blow: his mysterious fare gave a name before disappearing into Waterloo Station.

The name was Sherlock Holmes.

Ok so this week I'm just fully in Holmes-appreciation mode.

The map thing got me. He doesn't even go to Dartmoor. Just sends Watson out for tobacco, shuts himself in with a pile of pipe smoke and an Ordnance Survey map, and by the time Watson gets back he's basically already been there and back in his head! "My spirit has hovered over it all day." Who talks like that and also somehow earns it.

And then straight after that he loses the guy in the cab. Bushy beard, watching Sir Henry, gone into traffic before Holmes can catch him. He's properly annoyed about it too, and tells Watson to write it down as a failure.

Then we have Sir Henry straight off the boat from Canada, more rancher than aristocrat by the sound of it, and already being watched before he's even chosen a hotel.

Anyway - who do…