Original subtitles

The Hound of the Baskervilles, written, of course, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It

was first serialized in The Strand magazine in 1901 and 1902 and then was

published as a novel.

And Tabby, it's by far the best known Sherlock Holmes story, isn't it?

Arguably the most famous of all detective stories.

I mean, I definitely say so.

And Lamond ranked it as the 44th best book of the century.

And that's two places ahead of The Great Gatsby and 14 ahead of The Lord of the

Rings.

Shocking.

Tragic. I think we both like The Head of the Baskers, but we like The Lord of the

Rings more, don't we? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's a win-win, really, in my book.

Yeah. So I first read it when I was about nine. And I remember it very well

because it was on a family holiday.

And I remember being tough. Totally enthralled by it, but also very

genuinely very frightened by it. I remember I had to have a nightlight on

because I was really spooked out at night.

I know, but and then this time, God, I found it such a joy to reread. I would

hope that my tube would carry on so that I didn't have to stop and get off and

stop reading.

It's such a page turner. Yeah, no, it's a great book. I think it's a wonderful

book. I don't think anyone...

Listening to this will be surprised by us saying this because it's a book that

people feel very fondly about.

Yeah. I think it's the...

The combination, I know we've talked about this, the combination of the

coziness of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the familiarity of the formula,

the fact that we're in safe hands with them, but also, as you say, the

supernatural sort of horrific mystery of the Hound on the Moors. I mean, that's

something that really sticks in your mind.

There's more action in this than actually Wuthering Heights.

There is. Yeah, much, much more.

So for people who haven't read The Hound of the Baskervilles and are sort of

puzzled why we're so enthusiastic about it, we'll give a bit of the plot, but we

won't give the end away. We are going to be incredibly disciplined in this

podcast and not talk about the villain too much. We will not be revealing the

identity of the murderer.

So no spoilers for those who will be reading it in the future. So we open...

Far from these kind of creepy moors, we open in a reassuringly familiar scene,

and that is 221B Baker Street, of course, as always, where the great

Victorian detective, Sherlock Holmes, is in conversation with his loyal friend,

flatmate, chronicler, helpmate, Dr. Watson.

And so, I mean...

Everyone has heard of Sherlock Holmes. Everyone knows about Sherlock Holmes.

But he is the most brilliant detective of his age.

He's a genius. He's eccentric.

And he has a kind of endearingly selective knowledge. So he knows

everything about the different types of tobacco ash. But he doesn't know, didn't

know, for instance, that planets revolve around the sun, stuff like that, which I

think is such a clever little detail.

And then Dr. Watson is the guy who narrates the story.

Dr. Watson was a former British army surgeon injured during the Afghan wars

who goes to live with Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street. And the two friends

are in conversation at breakfast.

Holmes is putting Watson through this kind of slightly patronizing test to see

if he's kind of assimilated what Holmes calls his methods.

And Watson is trying to analyze the character of a mysterious doctor who's

called earlier that day purely by studying his walking stick.

He does this pretty well, but not even nearly well enough to please Holmes, who

then kind of blows him out the water with his own takes or conclusions.

Holmes is unbelievably condescending, isn't he? Yeah. So Watson is a bit

embarrassed, isn't he? Because Holmes has made a fool of him. But that's

basically set the tone perfectly.

It's reminded us of the... the dynamic between them because as we shall discuss

there has been a bit of a hiatus in the Sherlock Holmes canon so this is the

return of Sherlock Holmes after a long absence and it is just classic Sherlock

Holmes like it's everything you expect like the condescension the way that

Sherlock Holmes picks extraordinary details out that no one else humanly

would be able to.

There's even a violin.

It's just fantastic.

So that has set the scene very nicely for the arrival of this guy, this

anxious visitor who has come to consult the one man in London, the top

consulting detective, not just in Britain, but in the world.

who can solve this most serious and extraordinary problem.

And this is, he turns out to be a doctor and he's from Dartmoor and he is Dr.

Mortimer. And Dr. Mortimer has come to see Holmes because his friend, Sir

Charles Baskerville, has been found dead on the grounds of his estate,

Baskerville Hall, on the sort of fog-wreathed moors of Devon.

And Dr. Mortimer says, you know, In the newspapers, it was reported as just he

died of natural causes. But I think something weird has been going on. My

friend was running away from his house towards the moors, which seems weird.

And on his face was an expression of perfect fear.

And around him, there were these footprints. And this is one of the most

famous passages in the book. Tabby, since you're the great dramatic

performer, would you like to read this excellent passage?

So it's this. It's so good. It's so good. It's just literal chills.

Footprints, footprints.

A man or a woman's.

Dr Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to

a whisper as he answered.

Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.

A gigantic hound. Wow. So the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman,

John Fowles, great novelist, he said that the title of the next chapter,

which is The Problem, must be the least read chapter title in all literature.

Because basically, people are so desperate to skip on to find out what

happens next, they ignore the heading at the top and they move straight on to the

text. And you are. I mean, when you see that, the footprints of a gigantic

hound, you are hooked.

Because it's the perfect, it's one of the things about the Sherlock Holmes

stories, there's always this element of the weird and the kind of a possibility

of the supernatural or something utterly inexplicable.

That's the hook that draws you in. Even at this moment, you know, the cogs are

turning in Holmes' mind and he's probably figured it all out. Yeah. But

of course we haven't.

So then after this, Mortimer gives him this manuscript and we learn about the

curse of the Baskervilles. And this is a legend surrounding the family in

question of Sir Charles Baskerville, in which an ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, was

murdered by a gigantic hellhound who kind of came for him after Sir Hugo

himself committed kind of a terrible crime against a young maiden. And the

curse is said to have dogged the... Dogs. Yeah. Do you notice that?

That's it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I'm here for a reason.

It's said to have haunted every Baskerville ever since, with several

members of the family dying under strange circumstances.

And Sir Charles lived in fear of this. He was terrified of them all.

And then we are introduced to his nephew and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, who in

a very, very classic Sherlock Holmes way has travelled from America to take up

his fortune and his estate.

And he's, I find him quite an amusing character.

He's a very sturdy man with a pugnacious face, but alert, brave and practical.

And there's this really funny moment when...

He and Watson have to rush out to confront a terrifying murderer living

wild on the moors. And he's armed with nothing more than a riding crop.

But that's because he's a hardy sort of stalwart soul who's been in North

America, hasn't he? He's been in the US and in Canada. Yes. And so he's another,

as you said, he's a very familiar figure in the sort of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

world of the sort of the guy who's gone out to the British Empire or to, you

know. similar parts and has been outdoors. He's got a ruddy face.

He's a man's man.

He's young and he's vigorous and all of this kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely.

But because of this, because he's young and vigorous, he is determined to live

in the hall despite the warnings, despite the curse, despite the fact that

Holmes himself fears for his safety. But then while still in London, mysterious

things start happening. He sent this warning.

with words cut out from yesterday's times, with only the word more written

in ink. And it's, as you value a life or your reason, keep away from the more.

And then his boot mysteriously disappears from his hotel. And you love

this detail, don't you? This is the best part for you.

But again, that's the kind of really weird, bizarre detail that sticks in

your mind. So when you first read this as a child, so I read this when I was, I

don't know.

um 10 or 11 or something and it's sort of a sort of abridged kids version and

it really stuck in my mind that his boot had been stolen you know who would steal

one boot now we find out the reason later on of course this is the kind of

detail that sherlock holmes loves yes because he's able to now you know create

the sort of put the puzzle together with the missing boot and the words cut out

of the times and the mysterious hellhound and the curse and all of this

kind of thing but interestingly At this point, Watson says, well, I'm going to

go off to Dartmoor with Sir Henry to find out what's going on. But Sherlock

Holmes doesn't go because there's a big blackmail case in London and he has to

stay behind and deal with that.

So Holmes, our hero, is taken out of the narrative, isn't he? Yeah, it's left to

Watson to help Sir Henry and kind of solve the case and report back to Holmes

everything that he witnesses.

But they arrive now at the moor and the house. And this is really when we get

into this kind of... gothic, creepy, supernatural part of the book. Because

it's a really gloomy, desolate place.

Anyway, while there, they encounter a cast of characters who all kind of turn

out to be suspects to some degree or another.

So there's the Hall's servants, the Barrymores. It turns out that Mrs.

Barrymore's brother is this terrifying convict that's been on the loose and

he's hiding on the moor. And the Barrymores are kind of protecting him.

Do you know what you're not mentioning about the Barrymores?

Wait, let me guess.

I know you know, and you're not saying it just to be difficult.

I've played Frank Barrymore in our sister podcast, Sherlock and Co.

Yeah, it was a great performance.

I'm the underkeeper. I was so hoping this wouldn't come up.

Well, it has.

Yeah. Okay. So that's the least interesting thing about the Barrymores.

Thank you, Dominic.

But it's really interesting because this murderer being on the loose is kind of a

red herring because we're kind of, At some point or another, kind of

encouraged to think of him as maybe a suspect, as maybe like a force of

danger. But actually...

Not so.

Or perhaps so.

Anyway, then there's this naturalist, Jack Stapleton. And his appearance is

oddly familiar.

But he has, and he's obsessed with catching butterflies in the net. And he

has a beautiful sister, Beryl, with whom Sir Henry quickly becomes infatuated.

And Stapleton, her brother, is furious about this, disproportionately, really.

And Watson kind of dislikes him from the first.

And there's a lot of stuff about... people's features in this, the way your

face looks, the way your skull is shaped, whatever.

It says a lot about who you are.

And then Stapleton's sister, the one that Sir Henry's kind of infatuated

with, is secretly warning Sir Henry and Watson to get back to the safety of

London. You know, there's danger here.

And then there's another character, Mrs. Laura Lyons. She's a woman abandoned by

her husband, but she's also entangled in some way with the dead Sir Charles and

this Stapleton. We don't know why.

So they're there with this strange sort of cast of characters.

There's all kinds of strange howling on the moors, eerie kind of nighttime

howls. It's genuinely creepy, the howling. It is creepy, completely.

Watson is reporting back all the time his clues to Holmes in London.

And then they find there's another man, there's a strange man on the moors.

And they spot him, don't they? Or there's reports of him in the distance.

In the moonlight, his silhouette.

This sort of long, lean figure.

Amazingly, Tabby, this turns out to be now.

I bet you didn't guess this when you first read it. It's Sherlock Holmes.

Yeah.

Of all people. Extraordinary. So he's been here all along solving the case

under our very noses. And Paul Watson, who's been kind of writing and, you

know, large portions of the book are Watson's kind of journal. And Watson has

been sending him these long, painstaking letters with every detail of the case.

Turns out, like.

Never even needed them.

Holmes had it in hand all along. Poor Watson.

This is like me doing my own notes for these episodes. And then it turns out

you've actually been doing them all along. I know. I know. It's always so

sad. So Holmes says to Watson, you know, I know what's going on here. It's

murder, Watson.

Refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder.

And then they hear the hound one night.

They hear the terrifying howl. They hear a man screaming.

Even Holmes, the great man of iron, you know, with his kind of iron will.

And rational mind.

Yeah, he's shaken to his very soul.

And they then stumble across the body of the latest victim.

Well, if you want to find out who the victim is.

the truth behind the hound, all of this kind of thing, we will come to this,

won't we? We'll be exploring the story behind the hound of the Baskervilles. We

will. And particularly, there's going to be a lot of stuff. We're the book club,

not the kennel club, but there's a lot of stuff about dogs. You've done a lot

of dog-based canine research, Tavi. Yeah, exactly.

We're hoping to get sponsorship from Kraft at some point.

No dead dogs. Actually, no. Actually, there are dead dogs in this. I take that

back entirely. It wouldn't be the book club without...

Dead dogs.

Without dead dogs, exactly.

So let's talk a little bit about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah. So put this

into some context.

Because obviously it's a product of the late Victorian Edwardian period.

It's a wonderful kind of period piece and a great window into the anxieties of

the age and whatnot.

And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, one of the great celebrities of the day, he

is a tremendous, tremendous character, isn't he? He absolutely is. He's got a

very striking face. He looks just as you would hope the man who wrote Sherlock

Holmes would look. But he was born in Edinburgh in 1859 to an Irish Catholic

background.

His father is a civil servant turned artist, suffered from alcoholism and

mental illness.

And they live in some pretty... grim tenement flats.

But then the young Arthur's uncle sends him to a Jesuit prep school and then on

to Stonyhurst in Lancashire.

And he finds school very austere and harsh, very like Emily Bronte.

Complains that the curriculum is kind of pre-modern, it's all kind of rhetoric,

the classics, geometry, all of that.

And then at some point in his teens, he goes and spends a year in Austria to

perfect his German.

And then from 1876 to 1881, he studies medicine at Edinburgh.

But he also, this is when he also starts writing his short stories and tellingly

his first, which is published in 1879, is The Mystery of Sasasa Valley.

And this is, so this is very kind of foreshadowing what will later come. It's

an adventure story about a diamond hunt in South Africa. And the valley is

haunted by this frightful fiend. And people who see its glowing eyes are

blighted by the malignant power of this creature, which obviously anticipates.

the hellish hound of the Baskervilles. And then after this, Arthur Conan Doyle,

he has a very adventurous life.

He becomes a doctor on a Greenland whaler, which is a fascinating detail, I

think. Then a ship surgeon on a voyage to West Africa.

So very master and commander.

He graduates as advanced doctor of medicine in 1885 with a dissertation on

neurosyphilis. Yeah, neurosyphilis. Interesting.

Valuable information that.

And then he sets up a practice in Plymouth and then Portsmouth, but is

neither very successful.

He spends a lot of his time writing fiction, goes to Vienna for a bit to

study, you know, eyes. I don't know how to say the word, but he's an eye

surgeon. Ophthalmology.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, not very successful.

And, you know, charmingly spends most of his time ice skating with his wife,

Louisa. So I approve of that.

Anyway, then back to London, tries to set up a practice again. Total failure.

No patients.

And I know, Dominic, that you're a very big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, and I can

see why.

So just give us a portrait of the man, the character, a bit more.

So, I mean, he's not a terribly successful surgeon.

It's absolutely true. But he's a really, really endearing character, I think,

Arthur Conan Doyle. He's a man of great enthusiasms. He's irrepressible. He's

got a real zest for life. So among other things, he was a goalkeeper.

He played cricket. He's a goalsman.

He's a goalsman, as you would call it. Yeah, like Albert Camus.

It's great to have the Goalsman back on the show. Great to have Goalsmans back

on the show.

Goalsmans. Goalsmans.

Surely Goalsmen. Anyway, we're getting... We're lost.

We're lost.

He's a Goalsman. He's a cricketer for the MCC.

He founded his own rifle club.

He was a keen amateur boxer.

He loved playing golf.

He was a judge, I discovered from doing some important research in the Bodleian

Library. He was a judge at the world's first... bodybuilding competition.

So he's all in.

He'll do anything, basically. He's always available. He literally is a jack

of all trades, master of none.

He is. So you mentioned him going ice skating with Louisa, his wife. So she

was called Tui, was her nickname.

They had two children.

She got TB.

By the time he writes The Hound of the Baskervilles, I think she's already

quite seriously ill.

And he has become infatuated with a younger woman called Jean Leckie.

It's not clear whether they had an affair or whether he just completely and

utterly fell in love with this Jean Leckie.

But he's basically in this love triangle, possibly a kind of platonic

love triangle.

But he's in it nonetheless.

He's also very interested in his politics.

So he stood twice a parliament as a liberal unionist. So these were liberals

who were keener on the empire.

um more kind of hard line on foreign policy issues than than mainstream

liberals and they ended up in coalition with the conservatives he lost both

times but he's very into his kind of social activism so one example of this

is he lends his voice to the campaign against the atrocities in the belgian

congo very admirable good man another one actually so people always laugh at

conan doyle because Part of being such a massive enthusiast, he's an enthusiast

for spiritualism, for seances.

He believes in fairies. I love that.

You know, there's all this stuff. We'll come on to this, his interest in the

supernatural, because it's a really important part of the Hand of the

Baskervilles. But he's also really passionately devoted to the underdog and

to justice.

So there's a brilliant book by Julian Barnes called Arthur and George.

It's such a good novel.

And it's the story of how Arthur Conan Doyle crossed paths with this guy who

was a lawyer called George Adelge, just outside Wolverhampton, actually. He was

framed for all these attacks on horses, I think it was, called the Wiley

Outrages. Basically ended up in prison.

And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lent his voice to try to free him.

And it's a really, really moving story. And it's a good example of the sort of

humanity and decency that I think is part of the Arthur Conan Doyle story.

Definitely. When everybody laughs at him about the fairies, which we'll come to,

I think they're being a bit harsh.

Anyway, we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves because obviously all of his

fame is based on one character above all, and that is Sherlock Holmes.

And he started writing Sherlock Holmes in 1886.

He sent a story to this company called Ward Lock and Co. who did a Christmas

annual every year.

And the story was called A Study in Scarlet. Of course, so famous.

And this is Watson.

He's come home to London.

He's been wounded in the Second Afghan War.

He's somewhere to live. And a friend says, there's a bloke in 221B Baker

Street who's looking for a flatmate. This enthusiast in some branches of

science. And Watson goes to meet him. And this bloke.

He's very tall. He's very lean.

He's got a sort of hawk-like nose. He's got sharp, piercing eyes.

He's got a general air of kind of alertness and decision.

And this is Sherlock Holmes, who, it turns out, is actually modelled on one

of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former tutors.

I love this guy. This is so funny.

So he's, yeah, he's inspired by...

Conan Doyle's former tutor at Edinburgh and this guy called Joseph Bell, who is

a pioneer of forensic science.

And Arthur Conan Doyle said of Bell, he would sit in his receiving room and

diagnose people as they came in before they even opened their mouths.

He would tell them their symptoms and even give them details of their past

life. And hardly ever would he make a mistake. I mean, if someone's going to

tell you details about your past life, it's not like you can be like, actually,

that's wrong.

I was...

the Duchess of York or whatever.

But still, I mean, that is very, very Sherlock Holmes, isn't it? Yeah, I mean,

I guess, well, a doctor does that.

I mean, that's part of, I guess, a doctor's... You know, how many GPs would

say they can actually read things about people when they're describing their

symptoms or whatever?

They definitely don't go into past lives, though, GPs, in my experience.

No, they don't. But anyway, he... And then Arthur Conan Doyle actually said to

Bell in a letter, It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.

Around the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have

heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man.

Yeah. Yeah, lovely. Really good. But then there's also...

You know, the other main character of the Great Sherlock Holmes duo, and

that's Dr. Watson.

He's another great creation.

He's curious. I mean, there's something of Arthur Conan Doyle in him, I think,

maybe. He's curious, he's honest, he's warm-hearted, he's very brave.

And I was very struck by his humanity because Sherlock Holmes isn't always

very human. I think, you know, he's too genius, except perhaps in his kind of

fondness for Watson.

And through Watson, you know, we have a more human reaction. He reacts to scary

or dangerous scenarios.

in the way that a normal person would, you know, rather than Sherlock Holmes

himself. Yeah. He speaks for the audience, doesn't he? I guess. He speaks

for the audience, except in this story when Sherlock Holmes is genuinely

rattled. And so through him, we experience the mystery as a normal

person would. And his loyalty to Holmes is so touching and so unwavering, no

matter how many times he's told, kind of, you've got it wrong or you haven't

put the method to proper use.

And he admits time and time again that he's no match for Holmes' intellect.

But nevertheless, he's brave and capable under pressure.

The thing is that Sherlock Holmes himself is very, very fond of Watson.

You know, theirs is one of the great literary friendships. And there's this

lovely moment when Watson is almost killed by a bullet and Holmes is very

relieved. This is Watson.

It was worth a wound. It was worth many wounds to know the depth of loyalty and

love which lay behind that cold mask.

The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment and the firm lips were shaking.

For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as...

of a great brain.

All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of

revelation. Oh, Tabby, if someone shot you, that's how I'd react.

What? No, I'm Holmes in this scenario. Oh yeah, of course, I've mistaken

myself. Yeah, I forgot that I'm actually the junior partner.

Get back in your box.

Yeah, okay.

Yes, it is as emotive as, you know, the firmest and most loving goal-hanger

presenter dynamics.

Right. So you can see why this friendship is kind of the beating heart

of the book and I think a massive attraction for a lot of readers.

Anyway, so it turns out that Sherlock Holmes is a massive hit, huge success.

So Wardlock asks for much more. And then The Sign of the Four is published in

February 1890.

That's another hit.

And so it seems that Arthur Conan Doyle has kind of perfected his famous

formula. for these books he absolutely has because he then goes to the strand

magazine and he does he takes homes with him and he publishes i think 23 more um

sherlock holmes stories and he mentioned a formula i mean there is a formula um

they open at 221b baker street sherlock holmes is usually you know he's

injecting himself with cocaine or playing the violin or behaving madly

because he's a bit bored a visitor arrives holmes does all his rigmarole

with the kind of bizarre details

There is a weird story and the weirdness is often the point of the story. It's

not just a sort of generic whodunit story.

There's some mad thing like with orange pips or a blue carbuncle, a missing

goose or any of these kinds of weird things.

And there's often, it turns out, a connection to the British Empire, a set

of things that have gone on abroad.

You have that in the Siren of the Four. You have that in the Hound of the

Baskervilles with the idea of the guy returning from North America to claim

his inheritance.

Holmes will think for a while, he'll play the violin, stare out the window.

Then he and Watson will rush off somewhere by cab or by train.

Holmes will often arrange some deranged trap or put on a kind of incredibly

baroque disguise, disguise himself as a washerwoman or something.

And then the villain is revealed and Holmes explains all to a bewildered

Watson and everybody loves it and everybody goes home happy, except for

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

because he writes these stories they're very successful and he gets quite bored

of it and he actually says of Holmes I must save my mind for better things even

if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him in other words I'm being very

well paid but actually I would much rather write the sort of stuff that Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle wants to write which are basically historical novels about

the Napoleonic Wars and stuff so in December 1893 he publishes the final

short story The Final Problem and this is this you know Absolutely titanic

confrontation with Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, at the

Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

And it ends with Watson looking down into the waters.

Holmes has disappeared in this cauldron of swirling water and seething foam. And

there, says Watson, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the

foremost champion of the law of their generation, a man whom I shall ever

regard. as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.

Oh, you're crying.

It's so sad, Tappy.

Watson is sobbing into his microphone. Exactly, because Holmes is dead.

Or is he?

Or is he? This is the twist.

Whether he's dead or not, there certainly is a long hiatus from the

Sherlock Holmes novels.

as Arthur Conan Doyle throws himself into writing what he calls his real

books.

So this is actually very like A.A. Milne, the guy that became very famous

for Winnie the Pooh, but always considered it kind of beneath him and

his real talent in his other works.

So the real books that Arthur Conan Doyle believes are kind of his magnus

opuses, these are historical novels set in the Hundred Years' War, the

Napoleonic Wars, etc.

I think they sound excellent. Have you read any?

I've read some of them. I think they're all right, but they're not as good as

Sherlock Holmes. I mean, this is the reality.

There were some people listening to this who say, oh, what about the white

company? Isn't that wonderful? Or whatever.

They're nice period pieces, but the Holmes formula is what you come back

for. Yeah.

And, you know.

For that very reason, the public is constantly pestering him to bring Holmes

back. And at first he says no.

He said, I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do

towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of

it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. That's how I feel about kettle

crisps, actually.

Really? I mean, you would get this about foie gras or something like that. No,

Pringles, the green Pringles.

Yeah, you always eat those on planes, actually, don't you? Yeah, I do.

But then...

Two years later, he allows there to be an American stage adaptation, but says,

as long as there's no love business.

So, you know, strictly kind of English values.

Yeah, that'll be a big contrast to the book we're doing next week, Debbie. I

was going to say, that's a far cry from Sarah J Maas' A Court of Thorns and

Roses. Or is it?

And then in December 1900, he does an interview with Titbits and says, he has

never regretted the course I took in killing Sherlock. That does not say,

however, that because he is dead, I should not write about him again if I

wanted to. For there is no limit to the number of papers he left behind.

And then this sets the stage for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Yeah. So we can date precisely when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came up with the idea

for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

He is in North Norfolk.

It's great to have North Norfolk back on the show, Alan Partridge's hunting

ground.

So he's gone to North Norfolk with his mate Bertie Fletcher-Robinson, who's a

young journalist, and they've gone golfing in Cromer.

And he's feeling very low, Conan Doyle. He can't sleep.

He went to the Boer War as a kind of war correspondent, and he got a fever.

He then lost his campaign to become a Liberal Unionist MP in Edinburgh.

He was blown away in the sort of khaki election, as it was called, during the

Boer War.

And then he took part in Queen Victoria's funeral procession. God, it's

all so Victorian, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

It's a sign of his celebrity that he's doing all these things.

And he was in Queen Victoria's funeral procession. He started having these very

melancholy reflections about the state of the nation and all this kind of

thing. Also, his soul is, and I quote, wrenched in two because he's torn

between Tui, his wife, who's bedridden with TB, and this woman, Jean Leckie,

that he's fallen in love with.

It's all going on for him mentally.

And on Sunday the 28th of April, they can't play golf, him and this bloke,

Fletcher Robinson, because it's so windy.

And so they sit around at the hotel kind of having tea and whatnot.

And Fletcher Robinson tells him a story of a black dog that haunts the

countryside. And we shall come, because I know you've done absurd amounts of

research into folkloric dogs.

Yeah, I can't get enough of folklore.

So Conan Doyle loves this story.

about the dog haunting the countryside. He actually writes to his mother a few

days later and says, you know, I've actually had a brilliant time. I've

slept soundly at last.

All goes well in every way.

Fletcher Robinson and I are going to do a small book together, The Hound of the

Baskervilles, A Real Creeper.

And then he writes to the editor of The Strand magazine as well. He uses the

same expression.

I've had the idea of a real creeper for The Strand. He says...

It'll be at least 40,000 words.

You'd love it. It'll really suit you. It's going to be called The Hound of the

Baskervilles. And he says, I'll co-write it with Fletcher Robinson.

I'll do all the writing and it'll be kind of in my style. But Fletcher

Robinson will provide the ideas and the colour.

And the point about the ideas and the colour takes us to...

what's at the heart of this story, which is this idea of the supernatural and of

the kind of the dog from the realms of folklore.

So you love all this, don't you, Tabby? Because you love, bizarrely, I would

never have had you down as a folklore enthusiast, but here we are. I

absolutely love it. Yeah, I can't get enough.

My flat is listed with kind of books of mythical beasts and stuff like that. But

we'll probably get into this in the second half, but it's kind of, it's

rooted in this long tradition of English.

folklore these kind of hellhounds that kind of roam the countryside and and and

there's this idea that it may have derived in kind of a real story

featuring an ancient English family but that itself is kind of a mythology but

Conan Doyle loves this whole idea because he's as we've said he's a huge

enthusiast for the supernatural he loves stories of curses spells ghosts haunted

houses etc

That's also very Victorian. This is a period of fairies and seances. And they

kind of tap into that in one of the, I think, Robert Downey Jr.

Sherlock Holmeses. It's all to do with like, you know, wizards and not wizards,

like magicians, mystical practices, that kind of thing.

And Conan Doyle himself, he's a founding member of various kind of psychical

research groups. And then later in life, he's the best known champion of

spiritualism, seances, as we've said, mind readings, etc.

And then in 1922, he kind of famously endorses this whole hoax around the

existence of fairies. Yeah, the Cottingley fairies. Yeah, I think

there's a film about it, a charming film, actually. Yeah, so there's these

girls who basically sent him photos that they've mocked up of fairies in the

garden. And everybody laughs at this and says, well, obviously these are

completely fake, but poor Conan Doyle.

He wants to believe it. He loves all this.

And he basically lends his name to these hoaxed photographs.

And everybody laughs at him again. Of course, by this point, he's getting on a

bit. And so he's kind of a bit of a sort of old war horse. And people like poking

fun at him.

But it's a sign of this sort of longing within him that he really wants to

believe in the power of the supernatural and stuff.

So this is why he loves the story.

And at first, he's not thinking of it as a Sherlock Holmes story.

But then he starts to sort of ponder it and he says, well, if I'm going to have

this hound on the moors, I need a really, really good central character. I

need a hero.

And he basically says to the editor of The Strand, look, I can do you two

options. Option one is it'll just be The Hound of the Baskervilles, a kind of

ghost story, and I'll charge you £50 for every 1,000 words.

Or I can put Sherlock Holmes in it and I'll charge you £100 for every thousand

words. Which would you prefer?

And then he adds, Holmes is at a premium in America right now.

And the directors of The Strand magazine immediately come back and they say,

we'll pay you the £100 per thousand words.

And so Sherlock Holmes is back.

Yeah. And on that extremely exciting note, Dominic, I think we should take a

break. And when we come back, we will be explaining how Sherlock Holmes is

resurrected. We'll be discussing the book itself in much more detail. And

most excitingly of all, we will be definitively solving the dark mystery of

the hellish hound of the Baskervilles itself.

Oh, exciting.

Welcome back to the book club. Now, Dominic, before the break, you taunted

us with the prospect of Sherlock Holmes' resurrection in The Hound of the

Baskervilles. So how is it that he's written back into existence?

So he's got the idea when he's been on the golfing trip with this guy.

What's his name? Fletcher Robinson in North Norfolk.

And he has come back and he is absolutely enthused because, as we said,

Conan Doyle is a man with this tremendous zest for life. And his future

wife, Jean Leckie, said he could write a Sherlock Holmes story in a room full of

people talking. He could write it in a train. He would just, once he got stuck

in, you know, you couldn't stop him.

He's a machine.

And so he had that idea in late April 1901.

And a month later, he and this guy, Fletcher Robinson, go on a sort of

walking tour of Dartmoor to get, you know, local colour and stuff.

And by that point, he's already written half of the book. God, he's faster than

you. Well, he's as fast.

He's turned it around really quickly.

They stay near Dartmoor Prison, which gives him the idea for that part of the

book, because Dartmoor Prison features in the book.

And Conan Doyle, we know he's writing to his mother and he says, you know, I'm

exploring the moor over our Sherlock Holmes book. It's a great place, very

sad and wild, dotted with dwellings of prehistoric man, strange monoliths and

huts, graves.

They go to the... bog they go to some abandoned stone forts and they read

books about local folklore which is where they get the idea of resemblances

being passed down through the generations so kind of your so your face

the face recurs in the portraits of the baskerville family yeah there's this

scene where they walk down this gallery and it's it's almost like i mean it's

almost like comical then it's like these faces repeated down the generations very

victorian theme that yeah With different wigs. And it is a very Victorian theme,

I agree with you, because a lot of writers in this period, so 1880s, 1890s,

1900s, they are fascinated by ideas of heredity, which is, of course, what

gives rise to eugenics later on. So if you look at novelists of this period,

1890s, 1900s, like Émile Zola in France or Thomas Hardy, the idea that traits

are passed down through the generations, particularly criminal traits or violence

or drunkenness or whatever, that they are inherited. Yeah.

These ideas play a big part in the kind of novels, the realist novels of the

late 19th and early 20th century. And you can see that, admittedly, in this

very cosy kind of benign way in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

And then there's one last element, which, of course, is the title. A few

days after they finish this trip, they go to Fletcher Robinson's family seat,

which is also in Devon.

And the coachman to the Fletcher Robinson family is called Harry.

And later on, Fletcher Robinson gave a copy of the book to his coachman, to

Harry Baskerville, with apologies for using the name Red the Dedication. So

that's nice.

Yeah. And also the first release carries this footnote acknowledging Arthur Conan

Doyle's debt to Fletcher Robinson. And then he later expands this in the

novel's dedication, which is reprinted in all editions today.

to the publication.

So the first nine instalments come out in Strand magazine again in August.

1901 and runs alongside, interestingly, the first part of HG Wells' The First

Man in the Moon. So obviously, you know, the fantastical is kind of very in vogue

right now among kind of Victorian audiences.

Yeah, I love that. The fact, I mean, the fact that you could imagine buying that

magazine, you can read the first instalment of The First Man in the Moon

by HG Wells and the first instalment of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It gives

you a sense of how rich literary culture is at this point. And also, these are

people who are commanding enormous sums of money. by today's standards, for

their serializations and short stories and things. It's a literary culture that

dwarfs anything that we have today, I think. Yeah, I mean, there'd be the same

kind of enthusiasm for the release of those two stories as there would be now

for kind of the new big blockbuster. Yeah, definitely. That's what it was.

Yeah, and it's obviously a massive hit.

There are queues outside the Strand Magazine's offices and at bookstores for

the first time in its history.

The magazine goes into seven prints and circulation rises to about 300,000 from

an average of 180,000. So that's massive. And it's such a huge hit that

Holmes' full-time return obviously just becomes inevitable.

The US publisher Colliers offers Arthur Conan Doyle a staggering sum of $30,000

for eight new stories. And in income terms, that's more than $7 million

today.

Colossal amount of money. That's what queues up the adventure of the empty

house, which is the next short story, which is when it turns out that he

didn't die at the Reichenbach Falls.

He was alive all along.

He was alive all along. Exactly.

But the fact that he's returned is down to this one book, The Hound of the

Baskervilles, which becomes by far the most celebrated Sherlock Holmes story.

In fact, I would say that if you asked 100 people in the street, can you name

one Sherlock Holmes story?

I'm guessing.

90% of them would say the Hound of the Baskervilles. And very few would be able

to name many more, I think. This is by far the most best known, even though in

some ways it is not typical.

Not least because the supernatural element, for example, is much more

pronounced in this than any other. Much more gothic. Much more gothic. But I

suppose there are some ways, aren't there? I mean, it starts with the

formula. It starts with them in 221B.

I mean, it's undeniably.

a very Sherlock Holmes story. There's a lot in it of the traditional formula.

So, you know, Ruth Rendell says...

Conan Doyle often featured in his fiction a protagonist who returned to

his homeland after half a lifetime in foreign parts. The exotic country would

most usually be America, India, Australia or South Africa, giving him

the opportunity to make his main character a prospective of gold or

adventure in some local war. So there we have Sir Henry Baskerville. Some

protagonists return to exact revenge on the man or woman who all those years

before was instrumental in sending them away.

A few as blackmailers, others because they have inherited a fortune or a

property in England. This is all very handy. of the Baskervilles.

It's the classic Arthur Conan Doyle. And actually, we were talking beforehand, so

our executive producer, Tony Pastor, was saying The Hound of the Baskervilles,

who's a massive Sherlock Holmes fan, was saying to us... Yeah, and actually, I'd

really recommend the Sherlock and Co.

rendition of this. It's brilliant. Yes, the Skullhanger does, exactly.

So Tony was saying to us, oh, The Hound of the Baskervilles is unusual because

Sherlock Holmes is absent for so much of the story.

Which is, I mean, it's true he is absent, but he's often absent for bits

of the short stories as well. So bits where Watson will go off on his own and

then Holmes pops up later on in disguise as he does in this. But I mean, Holmes

is always in basically whenever you meet a homeless person,

somebody, an old crone on the streets or something. Yeah. You know that three

pages later they will cast aside the hat and it will actually be. What ho Watson.

Yeah, exactly. The great detective.

But then this absence then opens the door for Watson, who actually, rather

than Holmes and his presence, it's actually Watson and his kind of very

sharp observations and his reports back and forth to Holmes that propel the

narrative of Sherlock Holmes. And as Christopher Frayling says, Watson is a

long way away from the buffoon figure of Hollywood films in this novel. And I

totally agree.

I think that's one thing that a lot of the versions of Holmes get wrong.

Yeah. He's a comical foil, almost.

Yes, exactly. The genius of Holmes.

But I don't think he is. He's certainly not comical in this book at all. No.

I think you're brilliant.

I don't think you're a buffoon at all.

Well, I think they should clip that bit and they should just use that. Just you

saying, I think you're brilliant. I don't think you're a buffoon at all.

It's what I've waited all my life to hear, to be honest.

So Watson is, I mean, I'm not talking about myself here, by the way, I'm

talking about Dr. Watson.

He's brave. He's very manly. He has a poncho for cashmere

sweaters.

Sammy, I'm unbelievable.

I couldn't believe that you laughed so scornfully when I said that.

That's shocking.

But actually, Sherlock Holmes.

So Watson in this book comes out rather well.

Holmes makes some demented mistakes because he keeps risking the life of his

clients as a sort of trap to lure the hound out, doesn't he? He does. He

absolutely does.

And then he says at one point, because basically they think that Sir Henry

is... kind of done for he's dead and he says I'm more to blame than you Watson

in order to have my case well rounded and complete I've thrown away the life

of my client it is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career but

how could I know how could I know that he would risk his life alone upon the

moor in the face of all my warnings and he doesn't actually catch the villain

unusually the villain escapes arrest and is

maybe survives.

Yeah. We actually never see, I was only thinking about that.

We think that the villain has been killed by the bog.

Yeah. But the villain's body is never found.

And Sherlock Holmes' body was never found at the Reichenbach Falls and he

came back from the dead.

Yeah. Well, exactly.

Someone's going to resurrect the villain. And the other thing is in this,

which is very unusual for Sherlock Holmes novels, is Holmes himself is

genuinely kind of frightened. Like there's this bit in the book where he

says,

It's like they hear this howling on the moor and he's genuinely unnerved by it.

And he says, come on now, Watson.

Didn't you think yourself that it was the cry of a hound? I'm not a child. You

need not fear to speak the truth.

He's seeking out reassurance from his sidekick.

Nevertheless, he confesses at the end of the story that he's mismanaged the case.

He's made mistakes. He's put his client in danger.

But he also makes excuses.

He blames it on the fog.

And the terrifying hound.

Yeah, but the hound was part of the business from the beginning.

Holmes at the end says, well, I could never have anticipated that terrifying

hound. But hold on.

That's like blaming a murder on the murderer.

Precisely. The book's called The Hound of the Baskervilles, mate. I mean, did

you not notice?

But I think this weakness in Holmes' otherwise kind of granite, you know,

deduction and his cold, rational mind, I think it's...

rather endearing I think it's the strength of the book and it also shows

you just how terrifying these supernatural forces that they are

working against are or are they supernatural well this absolutely brings

us perfectly to the dimension of the book that I think explains why uniquely

among Sherlock Holmes stories it has made such an imprint and then popular

imagination. And this is the fact that it is not just a detective story.

It's a brilliant gothic story, a supernatural story. The late Victorians,

the Edwardians loved stories of kind of horror and sensation.

Yeah, I mean, think of Dracula, which we did in our miniseries back in September.

Yeah, so we're only a few years after the publication of Dracula. We're only a

few years after the publication of things like King Solomon's Mines or She,

the kind of H. Ryder Haggard stories of the supernatural in Africa.

The Victorians love all this kind of thing. And actually, that gives it a

much darker tinge, I think, than almost all the Sherlock Holmes stories that are

set in London.

Because this feels like Holmes and Watson are going out to confront

something much more...

primal and ancient i suppose they're going back in time not just in to

confront a beast from folklore

but also in a literary sense, because they're going back to an older literary

form, the kind of Gothic novel of the 18th century or something, The Haunted

House, or the sensation novels of the mid-Victorian period, the kind of Wilkie

Collinses and things.

Yeah, I mean, definitely, because just think of The Curse, you know, that's

said to haunt the Baskerville family.

That's classic kind of late Victorian horror novel.

And, you know, this thing of the wild, profane and godless to Hugo Baskerville,

set upon by this hound and having his throat ripped out and being slaughtered.

And then those who saw it, one, it is said, died that very night of what he

had seen. And the other, Twain, were but broken men for the rest of their days.

Even the writing there, it's hearkening back to an older time, an older form.

And then there's Baskerville Hall itself, which is straight out of

Victorian sensation fiction. It actually reminded me so strongly of...

the gothic house of horror in Guillermo del Toro's movie Crimson Peak, which is

set in Victorian England.

And then also, to some extent, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre.

Right. It's so, it's just the typical gothic mansion that kind of features in,

you know, games or cartoons, whatever it may be.

The classic haunted house. That's exactly what it is. Exactly. And so

there's this passage. In the fading light, I could see that the centre was a

heavy blot of a building from which a porch projected.

The whole front was draped in ivy with a patch clipped here and there where a

window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block

rose the twin towers, ancient, crenellated and pierced with many

loopholes. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows and from the

high chimneys which rose from the steep, high angled roof, there sprang a single

black column of smoke. I mean, it's like...

It's like the archetype of the haunted house. It completely is. I mean, even

when they go inside the dining room, a place of shadow and gloom, there's a

sense the whole place is deserted, that it's haunted.

It feels also like something from an M.R. James ghost story or something.

This sort of sepulchral atmosphere.

And so you've got the house and then you've got the moor.

And actually, as you said, we did Wuthering Heights at the very beginning

of this series. And the Wuthering Heights, the moor is...

oddly absent for most of the book whereas in this book if you like moors

this is the book for you because there's a lot of time spent on the moor there's

some lovely writing about the moor sort of nature writing and the moor the point

about the moor is i mean you really are going back in time your car your your

your your modern technology avails you nothing um it is a sort of prehistoric

location they're actually these prehistoric dwellings that they talk

about all the time. Exactly. And whenever they go out there, there are

moments like this. A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor.

There's a huge, mottled expanse of green splotched bog which stretched away until

it merged into the russet slopes of the moor. There's all this sort of stuff.

This sort of melancholy, this sense that there's, you know, you're taking your

life in your hands when you venture out there because who knows what, there's

ghosts, there's creatures, There's weird dogs. There's all sorts.

They're constantly warned. Like the letter right from the start when we're

in London saying, you know, if you value your life, stay away from the moor. We

know it's a dark, dangerous place. But the irony at the heart of all this is

that Holmes doesn't believe in the supernatural.

He's kind of the opposite of the supernatural.

And I think this is something else that separates it from the classic Sherlock

Holmes formula.

Because Holmes never...

believes in supernatural explanation.

He says at one point, when Watson asks if it might be something beyond the ken

of man, he says, the devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not. But

this is earlier on in the novel. This is before he's actually been on the moor

and heard the hound and encountered it. You get the sense as it goes on.

Yeah, no, you're dead right. I think the beauty of it is that Holmes is the

incarnation of science and rationalism. I mean, when Watson first met him in

their very first meeting, when they decided to get a flat together, you

know, they met in a laboratory.

And Holmes...

He's always fiddling around with his chemistry sets and whatnot. And he is

never taken in by things. He's not gullible.

He's icy cold in his logic and whatnot.

And the beauty of it is he's now confronted with something that is, as

you said, beyond the ken of man. It is kind of wreathed in mystery and all of

this.

When he goes out there, he doubts himself.

He totally does.

I mean, deep down, in part of his mind, he knows who the killer is and he knows

what the plan is. But there's a bit of him that is scared nevertheless.

And I love that. He experiences fear, I think, in one of the few times that you

see Sherlock Holmes rattled. Yes, yes, exactly. He is rattled completely.

And I think... This contrast between the two things, the ancient evil on the one

hand. So you mentioned Ruth Rendell, a brilliant detective writer in her own

right. P.D. James, another one, writing at the same time, sort of 1980s. She

said... that she thought The Hand of the Baskervilles, what made, what elevated

it above other detective stories is that it pits on the one hand the ancient evil

of the Moor against Holmes, his sort of modernity and his individualism. And

that, I think, gives it so much power because it's not just a sort of

formulaic whodunit. No, but also that's why the introduction of this convict,

this murderer living on the Moors is so ingenious because...

That would normally be in like traditional detective fiction. He would

be the bad guy. He'd be the guy that we're trying to hunt down.

But the flesh and blood of him, even though he's a terrifying murderer and

he's feral living on the moors, is nothing set against the darkness of the

moors and the howl of the hound. And, you know, he seems so puny and feeble in

his comparison versus like the might of this supernatural entity.

Yeah. I mean, Holmes, in all detective novels, I think the detective represents

a kind of security and stability.

And so many detective novels, particularly this period, there's a

single kind of masterful figure who is restoring order to a world that's been

put into disorder.

So he's beating off the kind of forces of evil that are threatening civilized,

conservative, kind of modern England. That's what Sherlock Holmes does. It's

what Hercule Poirot does later on with Agatha Christie or whatever.

But the interesting thing about this, I think, is that The sort of paradox of it

is that actually the one person who really does believe in the supernatural

is Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah. So Sherlock Holmes is saying, well, deep down,

Watson, we know there's no such things as kind of diabolical dogs.

But the one man in England who really does believe in diabolical dogs.

The only man in England to believe in fairies. Yeah, because he does believe

in fairies. I read that from him. Ruth Rendell was so interesting about this.

She said.

It's as though Conan Doyle, and I quote, was so deeply subsumed into the

character of his most famous creation that when writing of him, of Sherlock

Holmes, he was unable to do otherwise than believe in what Holmes believed.

So even though Arthur Conan Doyle deep down would love to have a supernatural

explanation, Holmes would judge him for it. Holmes would think badly of his

creator for kind of getting into all of this kind of stuff.

Absolutely. And I mean, we said earlier that obviously he was...

infatuated with this idea of this mythical hound this brings us to the

moment we've all been waiting for the entire episode which is the hound itself

so if you remember in our opening reading we gave you a very vivid and

very well read Dominic description of the hound you know when when Holmes and

Watson finally encounter it in the flesh because our knowledge of it for much of

the book is just kind of this eerie howling that grows closer and closer and

closer to Holmes and Watson so we learn that it has fire burning out of its

mouth. Its eyes glow with a smouldering glare.

Its muzzles and hackles and dewlap are outlined in flickering flame. It's

massive. It's very dark. It has a savage face.

So it's absolutely terrifying.

Yes. But, Dominic, reveal for us, once and for all, is this a supernatural

beast, you know, that has rushed straight out of the flames of hell?

Or is it just a very big dog?

Well, if you haven't read the book, I think you kind of can guess what's

coming. So I don't know how much of a spoiler this is. Yeah, come on. This is

a Sherlock Holmes novel after all. It's a Sherlock Holmes story. Exactly.

It's just a very big dog.

It's a very big dog that's been covered in phosphorus that makes it kind of glow

in the dark. So it appears terrifying and otherworldly. What we won't reveal

is who has done this.

because that would spoil it for you. Yeah, so we will be keeping the

delicious secret of the true murderer a secret for any of you that want to go on

and read the book. The story behind the hound is really interesting because

obviously it is the hound that sticks in people's minds.

So I think there's something about this sort of gigantic, feral, diabolical dog

that lodges in your imagination when you first read the story, particularly if

you read it when you're younger. So what did you say, you were nine or so when

you read it?

Couldn't sleep.

So my son read it when he was, he read a sort of very, very, very abridged kind

of version for six-year-olds or something. And he loved it. I mean, he

loved the idea of this kind of demonic dog on the moors and Holmes and Watson,

these great pals kind of running away from it and terror and all this. And

critics have really got stuck into what the hound means.

So in the 1930s.

People thought, is the hound the proletariat? Is it the working classes

of Britain that are sort of rising up against Sir Charles and Sir Henry

Baskerville and their sort of feudal seat and whatnot?

Later on, people said, is it the id? You know, there's a lot going on in Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle's personal life. Does the hound represent his kind of base

primal sexual urges or something?

But what the hound obviously is, is a...

Whether you believe all the other explanations or not, the hound is the

latest iteration of a long-running theme, a long-running feature in English

folklore, isn't it? Which is this idea of the black dog or the terrifying

ghostly dog that haunts people for generations.

And now, Tabby, I'm queuing you up because you love a feral dog and you

love folklore.

I love a feral dog and I love folklore. So this is just... This is the best

thing that's ever happened to me in the book club. It's Tabby Syrett bingo.

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, I've loved folklore all my life. And as you say, there is this long

tradition of black dogs in English and Welsh folklore. That's kind of a

technical term. These are dogs which haunt landscapes and they warn of

impending disaster, often connected with landowners' families.

And remember here that Arthur Conan Doyle loved Tales of the Supernatural,

as we've said. And so...

These stories of supernatural black dogs and these spectral hounds, they crop up

in the folklore of all different parts of the United Kingdom.

So, for instance, in Yorkshire, you have the Barghest. Then in the Isle of Man,

you have the Modidu.

The Modidu.

The Modidu, which is... You don't know this?

I don't know this.

This is Black Dog in Manx. Okay. How's your Manx? Good? Strong. It's strong.

Yeah. I'll save it for a future episode.

But the best known of all these kind of mythical black dogs is Black Shuck or

Old Shuck of Norfolk. And he's terrifying. I remember being fascinated

by him as a child. And then also I think when I read The Prisoner of Azkaban, the

Harry Potter book, the grim in that is like a foretelling of death. Oh, yeah.

That's right. Yeah.

He's reputed to be the size of a calf and was easily recognisable by his

saucer-sized eyes, weeping green or red fire.

And this is Black Shark.

This is Black Shark, exactly.

The editor of The Strand magazine suggested that it derived from the

phantom boar hound of Hurghast Ridge on the Welsh borders. This is the hound of

the Baskervilles? This is the hound of the Baskervilles, yeah, which supposedly

appeared with clanking chains whenever there was a death in the local

Baskerville Vaughan family.

Wow, they were called the Baskervilles?

The Baskerville Vaughans, yeah.

Okay. And there's even this story about how this husband kept the story from his

wife for fear that she wouldn't marry him if she knew that their family was

haunted by this terrifying hound.

of their children falls ill from smallpox and the wife goes upstairs to

check on the invalid and only to run down again moments later to say that

there's this large black dog lying on her son's bed anyway the husband rushes

up to only to discover that the child is dead and then this this was a warning

all along whoa there's another legend uh and this is of squire richard cable of

buckfastly dot more So Dartmoor again.

And who's a supposedly incredibly evil man who murders his wife and sells his

soul to the devil. So this is just like the original Hugo Baskerville. And this

is from a guide to Devon published in 1907.

He died in 1677. He was the last male of his race and died with such an evil

reputation that he was placed under a heavy stone and a sort of penthouse was

built over that with iron gratings to prevent...

his coming up and haunting the neighborhood.

When he died, the story goes that fiends and black dogs breathing fire raced over

Dartmoor howling. And then further black still, you have a black dog that appears

as a harbinger of Simon of Athens' death.

And then obviously you have like Churchill's black dog. It was a way that

he... like spoke about depression and Samuel Johnson as well. So it's a very

well-known trope in England and English folklore.

But dogs also feature prominently in Sherlock Holmes stories more generally.

This isn't the only one.

So both Holmes and Watson are likened to dogs, aren't they? So, I mean, Watson is

always very dog-like.

He's like Holmes' kind of loyal dog.

In A Study in Scarlet, Watson likens Holmes to a pure-blooded, well-trained

foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in

its eagerness until it comes across the lost scent.

And there's also, I mean, very famously in The Sign of the Four, there's a dog

called Toby. And Toby is a sort of, he's a cross. I can't remember what he is.

He's a cross between two dogs and he has a brilliant nose.

Holmes says to Watson, I would rather have Toby's help than that of the whole

detective force of London.

And so they go all this great chase across London led by Toby.

Then very famously, there's the dog that doesn't bark in the nighttime in Silver

Blaze.

Holmes says famously, the great mystery is that why the dog didn't bark. And

that is the key to the whole mystery.

But it is the hound that stands out. It must be the most famous dog in popular

literature. Do you think? Yeah, I mean, I'd definitely say it must be. I can't

think of another contender, really.

But then there's another interesting detail of The Hound of the Baskervilles

that, you know, we've spoken about how it has much more supernatural, much more

gothic element than most of the other books. But also Arthur Conan Doyle's

treatment of women in the book, I think, is worth discussing because in this book

in particular.

There's an extraordinary degree of brutality towards the female characters

of the book. And it's kind of interesting because Sherlock Holmes, men

tend to be bigger fans of the books than women, I think, on the whole. And yet

women are much bigger consumers of true crime, you know, in podcasts, movies.

Agatha Christie or all these writers we've been talking about, P.D. James or

whatever, they tend to be bought by women.

And this highlights how Sherlock Holmes is slightly different from the rest of

the genre.

It has a much bigger, almost like a Baroque scale to it. And it's less

believable. It's less conceivable. Whereas, say, Agatha Christie, her...

Plots, they have a smaller scale. They're closer knit.

And that makes them much darker because the villains at the heart of the story,

the devils, they're the devils that you know.

You know, it's those that live with you. It's those that sleep beside you. And

there's something so sinister about that. Whereas in Sherlock Holmes,

they're often gloriously kind of inconceivable.

Yeah, I agree completely. On the women point, I think it's absolutely true

because there's the various characters that we mentioned.

Mrs Barrymore is exploited by her brother, who's a murderer. Is that

right? Yes.

The relationship between Stapleton and his sister is at the core of the book,

isn't it? And she ends up with kind of, I mean, she basically suffers domestic

abuse. Yeah. She's treated appallingly. She's tied up for a whole night. She has

bruises.

She has a terrible time, actually.

And some of Arthur Conan Doyle's biographers have suggested that, I mean,

I don't know whether this is a bit fanciful.

You know, he is in this love triangle. He is being torn between these two

women. I think it's actually probably, there's no psychological explanation for

it. It's just, you know, his Nedwardian man writing for men. And he

just sees the women characters as dispensable, I would say, rather than it

being sort of the expression of some darkness in his soul.

And this is also, I mean, we said that he was almost writing quite a retro book

and that a lot of it is very Gothic.

It's a very common theme in Gothic literature that these kind of women are

treated abominably and kind of abused by their male counterparts in some way or

another. So I think it's more that than anything.

I think you're dead right, though, that men tend to like Sherlock Holmes,

historically have liked Sherlock Holmes probably more than women do. I think

that might have changed now with things like Sherlock and Co or the Benedict

Cumberbatch or whatever, the TV version.

Yeah, I think you might be right, actually.

But I do think, I mean, part of that is to do with male friendship, I think. But

also the difference between Sherlock Holmes and some of those other writers

we've talked about is the whodunit element in Sherlock Holmes is never as

pronounced as it is in the others.

No, it's much more obvious.

Puzzling out how they did it is fun, but you always really know who the killer

was, I think, in Sherlock Holmes.

I think Sherlock Holmes feels to me more of an adventure story.

Yeah, it's the journey, not the...

The big reveal.

Yeah, exactly. It's the characters. I think that's what keeps people coming

back. It's the characters and the atmosphere.

It is the Watson-Holmes dynamic.

It is a portrait of male friendship, rather like in Master and Commander or

something. Quite rare, I would say, in popular literature to have two male

characters who are, in a very uncomplicated way, just great friends.

And that's what the books capture.

I think you're right. I think that's a massive...

part of its enduring appeal because I mean it's still I mean it's so famous

even today I mean Sherlock Holmes's figure must be one of the most iconic

characters in all of

And then I think it's also the fact that it's, as we said, you know, this kind of

cozy world, but also how neatly the cases are unraveled. You know, the

irresistible satisfaction of an almost infallible hero who always cracks the

case and the kind of secret satisfaction of thinking, oh, well, we got there

before Watson. We got there at the same time as Holmes because it's so obvious

right from the start.

And I think with The Hound of the Baskervilles in particular, it's, you

know.

popularity and its fame. I think a huge part of that is kind of the gloomy

atmosphere of the Moors and sort of the prospect of hellfire and supernatural...

devils wound up into woven with this kind of safe, homely, familiar Victorian

world. It's the contrast of those two things.

It is. It's the modernity on the one hand of Victorian Britain with these two

friends who in their different ways represent Britain's kind of self-image.

So you've got the eccentric individual, the brilliant genius on the one hand,

and then you've got the Afghan war veteran, solid, dependable, decent on

the other. So they're both kind of middle class archetypes, I suppose.

So you've got them on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have this kind of

brooding,

evil and it's satisfying for us to have that explained and tamed and kind of

domesticated and then they can go home and Sherlock Holmes can smoke his pipe

and they can he can play his violin very badly and Watson will write it all up

and they'll you know their friendship will endure and take sheds loads of

homely cocaine exactly yes exactly right so let's get to our on that on that note

let's get to our final uh takes so we're going to mark it in what tabby I'm going

to say fiendish hellhounds out of 10. It's a bit more predictable this week,

but got to be done.

Yeah, we had dead dogs out of 10 in Wuthering Heights. Now we're back on the

dogs. I know, but at least in these ones, the hellhounds are kind of

triumphant. They're not being beaten to a pulp by the Bronte sisters.

OK, so Fiendish Shellhounds out of 10. Go for it. You can go first. OK, I'll go

first. You know what? I'm going very, very high this week. I'm going to give

it a nine.

So I just thought it was just so enjoyable. It's just such a good read. I

long to sit down and read it.

It was a massive page turner. It also has some cases really excellent.

writing you know the the moors and the swamps the very good marriage of what is

genuinely frightening and primal with this always psych comedic injection of

sherlock holmes's quirkiness and eccentricity it's it's genuinely

chilling any book and that's so that brings to life the victorian world so

powerfully i'm always pretty sold on so yeah big fan what about you

I'm going to give it eight.

Wow, I'm higher than you. I didn't expect that, I have to say. I'm not

taking marks off for any particular reason.

I think it's George Orwell who had this idea about there being good, bad books.

So in other words, a book that maybe is not great literature, but it's just

brilliant. Yeah. And I think The Hounds of the Baskervilles fits that, ticks

that box perfectly.

It's not, you know, it's not Jane Austen. It's not Vladimir Nabokov. It's

not Proust or something.

It's not pretending to be.

It's not going to change your life.

No, it's not a book that you nominate as a book that's shaped the way you think

or anything like that. It is just tremendous, tremendous entertainment.

So actually the eight, the eight is harsh. I'm giving it eight as this kind

of literary production, but as entertainment, it is undoubtedly a 10

because. Holmes and Watson are not one of, you know, they're one of the great

double acts in all literature for a reason. They're beautifully observed.

The writing is excellent.

I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle definitely can write. There's no question about

that. It's easy to laugh at him because of the fairies and because he thought

that his greatest creations were these slightly dated kind of hundred years war

epics or whatever that no one reads anymore.

But this is, I mean, if you could write something as good as The Hand of the

Baskervilles, you're laughing. It's really, really good.

Oh, you'd be chuffed.

And I think, you know, that's a good point, the good, bad books. And this is

most definitely not a snobby podcast.

Like, I think books that are just a really brilliant read, even if they're

not kind of literary masterpieces, I think they should have their day in the

sun. And that brings us neatly on to next week's book, which, you know,

arguably, is it a...

A good, bad book. Or a bad, bad book.

Or a good, good book. Exactly. Is it a literary masterpiece? And that is, at

long last, the book everyone's been waiting for, Sarah J. Maas's A Court of

Thorns and Roses. The book that taught Dominic Sandbrook how to love.

Oh, my God, Sammy. I can't believe you got that.

Yeah. So this is our first venture.

Possibly last.

Let's hope last. Into the world of Romantasy, which we'll be doing next

week. And then after that, we'll be back. Well, we'll be doing something

very How Did the Baskervilles Like? We'll be doing Wilkie Collins' The Woman

in White. So Victorian sensation fiction.

Another ghost story.

By Toni Morrison.

After that, one of my very favourite people, Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway

from the 1920s. Then The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Code of the Worcesters by

P.G.

Woodhouse. So lots to look forward to. And Tabby, you never asked me who my

favourite screen Sherlock Holmes was.

Oh, Dominic, I'm so sorry.

Well, OK, well, this is actually an interesting detail. You know that

according to the Guinness World Book of Records, Sherlock Holmes holds the

record for the most adaptations in film and TV.

Yeah. above any other literary figure with over 250 appearances. So in light

of that, who is your favourite on-screen Sherlock Holmes?

I think there's two that stand out for me. One is Jeremy Brett, who did the

Granada versions in the 1980s and 1990s. Yeah, that was before my time. They are

definitive, Tabby. I can't believe you haven't seen them. It's shocking.

The other one, of course, is Will Ferrell. So Will Ferrell did John C.

Reilly. And it just makes me... I know it got...

nought zero stars all the newspapers but just to see it kind of makes me smirk

and I know it will annoy Holmesians or people who really love Sherlock Holmes

so I thought I'd throw in that detail who's your favourite obviously it's

going to be somebody terrible Tabby I know I actually I can already anticipate

a Just a barrage of... Backlash.

I'm going to have to say Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock.

Oh, dude, you've absolutely... I thought he captured the eccentricity, the

genius. That's terrible from you. Because the best version, just to

reiterate,

the best modern version of Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock & Co, the Goalhanger

podcast, is it not? Yes, agreed, agreed.

And not least because you will see other Goalhanger presenters pop up in it. All

right, quit.

Cut and we're done.

Okay. Bye, everybody.

Bye-bye.