Abstract
It was one of those rare moments of affirmation. The instant I read Michael Dirda’s description of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) as ‘the first “grown-up” book I ever read — and it changed my life’, it reawakened distant memories of my own.2 This remarkable story bade me enter a world of adventure beyond even my own childish fantasies, the world of the detective which, despite the many directions that books have taken me since, I have never entirely abandoned. For someone growing up in a working-class town in the post-war decades, this Dartmoor seemed a far-off magical land full of mystery, terror and intrigue, entirely alien to the greyness of urban life. Here was a place, a primeval landscape, inhabited by spectral hounds, desperate convicts, ancient legends, cunning murderers, and Corinthian heroes taken straight from the Gothic canon — a kind of reincarnated Wuthering Heights. No amount of subsequent scholarly know-how can ever make up for the thrill of that first reading, which will stay with me always.
The ghost is very anxious to assert its former rights. (Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–924), A Book of Dartmoor)1
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Notes
Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of Dartmoor (London: Methuen & Co., 1900), p. 88.
Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2.
This article is reprinted in: Brian W. Pugh and Paul R. Spiring, Bertram Fletcher Robinson: A Footnote to the Hound of the Baskervilles (London: MX Publishing, 2008), pp. 108–15.
Amyas Northcote, ‘The Downs’ in In Ghostly Company (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2010), p. 89.
Pierre Bayard, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 7.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 226–7.
Henry James, ‘Owen Wingrave’ in The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories, ed. by T J. Lustig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 61.
The Hound of the Baskervilles, largely because of its qualities as something of an outlier in the Holmes’ series, has always attracted attention from other writers. Laurie King’s novel The Moor is particularly noteworthy as it reflects upon both the art of detection and the supernatural subjects which are pre-eminent in the original narrative. The Moor is her fourth novel featuring the now married Holmes and his wife Mary Russell. The latter is engaged in research studies at Oxford while Holmes continues his detective practice, and occasionally their paths coincide in order to work on a case. Holmes, who has to go abroad, sends Russell to Devon in response to a request from his old friend, Baring-Gould, who is concerned about an unexplained death and the appearance of a phantom coach accompanied by spectral hounds. What follows is a tale steeped in the supernatural, which revives the ghosts of the Baskerville case some thirty years earlier. But most significant is King’s reaction to the portrait scene at Baskerville Hall between Holmes and Watson, because, yet again, it is the device on which whole story turns. In The Moor, the Hall has been acquired by a dubious businessman called Ketteridge, who lives there with his somewhat sinister secretary, Scheiman. The plot also involves the secrets surrounding the testing of a tank on the moor, but interestingly it is the resurrection of the whole idea of a Stapleton as a reincarnated Hugo and that portrait which prove decisive in unmasking the criminal. The full reference for this book is: Laurie King, The Moor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
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© 2014 Michael Cook
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Cook, M. (2014). ‘That Forbidding Moor’: The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Ghost Story?. In: Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294890_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294890_5
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