The Hound of the Baskervilles Reading Order

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-02) by Arthur Conan Doyle is the most celebrated Sherlock Holmes novel and the one that most successfully combines the Gothic atmosphere of the Dartmoor setting with Holmes's rationalist detection — a story in which the Baskerville family curse (a spectral hound that pursues the heirs to death on the moor) proves to have a rational explanation involving phosphorescent paint, but whose evocation of the moor itself gives the novel a genuine atmosphere of threat that the short stories rarely achieve. Watson's more sustained narrative role (Holmes is absent for much of the novel) gives the story a different texture from the short-story formula, and Stapleton is one of the more genuinely chilling Holmes villains. The novel is the best entry point for readers encountering Doyle's detective for the first time and the most widely read of the full-length Holmes narratives.