A Glowing Dog, a Cursed Moor, and Watson Left Holding It

A Dead Baronet, a Family Curse, and a Footprint That Shouldn’t Exist

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Sir Charles Baskerville turns up dead on the grounds of his ancestral home, face frozen in what the coroner delicately calls an expression of horror, and next to the body: footprints of an enormous hound. Cue the legend, dutifully recited early on, of a Baskerville ancestor named Hugo who did something unspeakable to a local girl a couple centuries back and got torn apart by a phantom dog for his trouble ever since, apparently, misfortune and hairy black dogs have been shadowing the Baskerville line.

Enter Sir Henry, the new heir, fresh off the boat from Canada and blissfully unaware that he’s inherited a curse along with the estate. Holmes and Watson get pulled in, and then Conan Doyle does the thing that either makes this book brilliant or infuriating depending who you ask: he ships Watson off to Baskerville Hall alone, tells the reader Holmes is stuck in London on other business, and leaves his most famous detective almost entirely offstage for a third of the novel.

I know some people find that a bait and switch. I think it’s the smartest structural choice in the whole Holmes canon, and I’ll get into why.

Why the Fog Actually Works (and Where the Book Creaks)

Look, the reason this book has outlasted almost everything else Conan Doyle wrote isn’t the plot mechanics, which, once you see the trick, are honestly a little thin. It’s the mood. Dartmoor in this book is basically a character: the fog rolling in over Grimpen Mire, the convict loose on the moor, the distant howl that may or may not be a dog, may or may not be the wind. There’s a scene where Watson is alone at night and sees a figure silhouetted against the moon on a tor, just standing there, watching the house, and it’s genuinely one of the best “oh no” moments in any book from this era. I read that chapter on a train at night with the window black and my own reflection staring back at me, and I had to put the book down for a second. That’s not nothing.

And here’s the thing about sidelining Holmes: it makes Watson matter. In most of the stories Watson is a likable idiot whose main job is to be impressed. Here he’s the actual protagonist for long stretches, gathering clues, getting spooked, making his own (often wrong) deductions, and it humanizes the whole enterprise in a way the short stories rarely bother to. When Holmes finally reveals he’s been on the moor the whole time, secretly running his own investigation while Watson thought he was alone, I remember feeling almost betrayed on Watson’s behalf, which is a wild thing for a book to make you feel about its own hero.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I’d actually give one. The ending is a letdown. Once the “supernatural” hound gets explained (and I won’t spoil the specific mechanism), the villain’s motive and method collapse into fairly standard Victorian melodrama: inheritance schemes, a hidden identity, a woman used as a pawn in someone else’s plan. Conan Doyle builds an atmosphere so thick you can taste it and then resolves it with the detective equivalent of a shrug and a lecture. Beryl Stapleton, the most interesting female character in the book, gets reduced to a plot device rescued in the final act rather than a person with her own arc. And the pacing in the middle section drags. There’s a stretch of Watson’s diary entries and letters back to Holmes that exists mostly to pad out serialization length, and I’ll admit I skimmed a page or two on my second read, which felt like a small betrayal of a book I otherwise love.

I keep going back and forth on whether the slow middle is a flaw or just how Gothic fiction breathes. Maybe I’m grading a 1901 serialized magazine novel by modern thriller pacing standards and that’s unfair. But I’d rather tell you the truth about the reading experience than pretend every chapter grips equally, because it doesn’t.

The best mysteries aren’t the ones with the cleverest killer, they’re the ones that convince you, even for a chapter, that the world might actually have monsters in it.

About Arthur Conan Doyle

Conan Doyle was a trained physician who apparently found medicine less interesting than making up a detective smarter than everyone he’d ever met, which, fair. He famously got so sick of Holmes that he killed him off at Reichenbach Falls, only to bring him back years later because the public (and, let’s be honest, the paycheck) wouldn’t let him go. The Hound of the Baskervilles is actually set before that death in the timeline, a bit of narrative sleight of hand Conan Doyle used to satisfy demand without technically resurrecting anyone yet. He also believed fervently in spiritualism and fairies later in life, which is a strange footnote for a man who built his legacy on cold, rational deduction, and honestly makes him a more interesting person than his own detective.

If the Fog Got Into Your Bones, Read These Next

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, for the same slow-building Gothic dread, done at novel length instead of squeezed into serial chapters.

The Moonstone, also Wilkie Collins, often called the first real detective novel in English, and it plays fair with clues in a way that rewards close readers.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, if it’s the haunted-estate atmosphere you’re chasing more than the mystery mechanics.

The Sign of Four, another Holmes novel, if you want more of that same partnership without committing to a full re-read of the canon.

You can find most editions of the original, along with annotated versions if you want the footnotes on Victorian slang and geography, here on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Does sidelining Holmes for a third of the book strengthen the story or just feel like a structural gimmick to you?
2. Beryl Stapleton is arguably the most compelling character in the book but gets the least agency. Does that undercut the story, or is it just of its era?
3. How much of the fear in this book comes from the supernatural premise versus just isolation, fog, and not knowing who to trust?
4. Does the rational, explainable ending satisfy you, or did you want the legend to actually be true?
5. Why do you think this particular Holmes story has outlasted so many of the short stories in the wider cultural imagination?