The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of the four crime novels by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle featuring the detective Sherlock Holmes. Originally serialized in The Strand magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England’s West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound of supernatural origin. Holmes and Watson investigate the case.
This was the first appearance of Holmes since his apparent death in The Final Problem, and the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles led to the character’s eventual revival. Not only was it the first Sherlock Holmes story to be released in the twentieth century, it was the first story that seemingly endeavored into the world of the supernatural which would challenge Holmes’s idea of rational existence.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a writer and physician most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Before becoming a writer, he attended the University of Edinburgh to train as a physician, and it was from his teacher, Joseph Bell, that he learned much of what would inspire Holmes’s skills of deduction. He also wrote science fiction stories, historical novels, plays, romances, poetry, and nonfiction. After his son Kingsley died in the first World War, he became a convert to spiritualism and a social reformer who used his investigative skills to prove the innocence of individuals.View all by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
