★★★☆☆ The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle
My introduction to Sherlock Holmes
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
My introduction to Sherlock Holmes
I can be fairly precise about the year in which I first read The Hound of the Baskervilles because I remember the book itself. When I was in grade school (3rd - 6th grades, 1963-66), there was a program at our school that allowed us to buy cheap paperback printings of classic novels for 25 cents or 35 cents (for the longer ones). We would get a catalog every month. We were allowed to order up to three a month, which, of course, I did every month.
This is one reason why I am not a member of the "I love the smell and feel of a real paper book" brigade. These were the most badly produced books I have ever seen in my life. The paper turned brown within minutes, it seemed, and within a year the glue had decomposed, so that you really had only a sheaf of brittle crackly loose pages in a sort of small folder with a picture on it. Still readable, as long as you didn't drop it and get the pages out of order. OK -- a book is a book, and I loved them. But they would have been improved by being on an eReader.
So, HotB was one of these. When I ordered it I had no idea what it was about, except that I knew that it was a classic book, and was warned that it might be scary ("for a kid my age" was the implicit subtext, which I read loud and clear -- you can imagine how effectively that deterred me). It was thus that I became aware of the classic books behind the inescapable Sherlock Holmes images and jokes and movies.
I was not an instant convert. HotB is not that great a novel, not that great a mystery, and not that great a Sherlock Holmes novel. Arthur Conan Doyle's weaknesses as a thinker were becoming more obvious by the time he wrote HotB. Also, he was already tired of his character Holmes, whom he had tried unsuccessfully to kill off, and it was fairly evident even to ten-year-old me that his actual goal in HotB was to shoehorn a gothic horror plot he found more congenial into a Sherlock Holmes novel.
I did eventually learn to love the Holmes canon, but that came many years later when my Aunt Althea in New York City, who always knew about the latest books, gave me a newly published complete collection of Sherlock Holmes books. (I'm not linking to it here, because Goodreads lists hundreds of books with that title, and I don't recognize the familiar cover of the one I owned among them.) It is only when I read the entire oeuvre that I recognized what a great body of work it was, even with all its many flaws