The Hound of the Baskervilles

⚖The case for it

Doyle opens with a family curse read aloud from an old manuscript and then spends the book refusing to say whether it matters, which readers describe as genuine uncertainty about which way the thing will break. Dartmoor is the achievement, “treating the moor like a living thing,” fog and bog and a landscape that lets “the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul.” Watson carries the middle in letters and diary entries sent back from the Hall, and readers say his competence here is “so much better than the baffled portrayal of him done for TV.” Short enough to finish twice, and reread every October.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Holmes vanishes for most of the middle, which readers experience as a detective novel losing its detective rather than as a structural choice. In the London chapters he “comes across in the beginning as an arrogant know-it-all,” doing deductions as a parlour turn. Watson wants his approval badly enough that one reader tells him to “man up a bit and stop trying to make Sherlock like him.” Harsher readers call the middle padded, a run of false leads that never tie back cleanly, and rate Doyle below Christie at misdirection. After all that build, there is “no real Aha! moment when the culprit was uncovered.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings