ISBN The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Introduction by Laurie R. King
 
The most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles features the phantom dog of Dartmoor, which, according to an ancient legend, has haunted the Baskervilles for generations. When Sir Charles Baskerville dies suddenly of a heart attack on the grounds of the family’s estate, the locals are convinced that the spectral hound is responsible, and Holmes is called in. “Conan Doyle triumphed and triumphed deservedly,” G. K. Chesterton wrote, “because he took his art seriously, because he lavished a hundred little touches of real knowledge and genuine picturesqueness on the police novelette.”


About author(s)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and began to write stories while he was a student. Over his life he produced more than 30 books, 150 short stories, poems, plays, and essays across a wide range of genres. His most famous creation is the detective Sherlock Holmes, who he introduced in his first novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). This was followed in 1889 by an historical novel, Micah Clarke. In 1893 Conan Doyle published The Final Problem in which he killed off his famous detective so that he could turn his attention more toward historical fiction. However, Holmes was so popular that Conan Doyle eventually relented and published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. The events of the The Hound of the Baskervilles are set before those of The Final Problem, but in 1903 new Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear that revealed that the detective had not died after all. He was finally retired in 1927. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1930.