11. The Hound of the Baskervilles: Mystery, Folklore, and Sherlock Holmes

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Mystery, Folklore, and Sherlock HolmesWhat is the true story that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's best-seller? Why have there been so many portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson in media beyond the novels? Is this the greatest Sherlock story ever told? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Adam Thornton Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  "Cried Holmes, and I heard the sharp click of a cocking pistol."

• 1:45Speaker 04

  "Look out, it's coming!"

• 1:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was at Holmes's elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly, they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant, Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downwards upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare,

• 2:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  its muzzle and hackles and duellap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog. So hello everybody, what a tremendous reading and done I have to say under great pressure as a savage face was staring at me from my screen.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  The savage face of Sherlock Holmes.

• 3:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, of Sherlock Holmes, yeah. So that was The Hound of the Baskervilles. It's one of the most celebrated scenes in all popular literature at the moment that Holmes and Watson confront the eponymous Hound of the Baskervilles. Written of course by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was first serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1901 and 1902 and then was published as a novel. And Tabby, it's by far the best known Sherlock Holmes story, isn't it? Arguably the most famous of all detective stories.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I'd definitely say so. Le Monde ranked it as the 44th best book of the century.

• 3:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  And that's two places ahead of Great Gatsby, The Great Gatsby, and 14 ahead of The Lord of the Rings. Shocking, tragic.

• 3:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think we both like The Hound of the Baskervilles, but we like The Lord of the Rings more, don't we?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a win-win really in my book.

• 3:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  So I first read it when I was about nine and I remember it very well because it was on a family holiday. And I remember being totally enthralled by it, but also very, genuinely very frightened by it. I remember I had to have a nightlight on because I was really spooked out at night.

• 4:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh no.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  I know, but and then this time, God, I found it such a joy to reread. I would hope that my tube would carry on so that I didn't have to stop and get off and stop reading. It's such a page turner.

• 4:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, no, it's a great book. I think it's a wonderful book. I don't think anyone Listened to this will be surprised by us saying this because it's a book that people feel very fondly about.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's the the combination. I know you. I know we've talked about this, the combination of the coziness of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the familiarity of the formula, the fact that we're in safe hands with them, but also, as you say, the supernatural sort of horrific mystery.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of the Hound on the Moors. I mean, that's something that really sticks in your mind.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  There's more more action in this than actually Wuthering Heights.

• 4:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  There is.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, much, much more.

• 5:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So for people who haven't read The Hound of the Baskervilles and are sort of puzzled why we're so enthusiastic about it, we'll give a bit of the plot, won't we? But we won't give the end away. We are going to be incredibly disciplined in this podcast and not talk about the villain too much.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  We will not be revealing the identity of the murderer.

• 5:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  So no spoilers for those who will be reading it in the future. So we open far from these kind of creepy moors. We open in a reassuringly familiar scene, and that is two, two, one B Baker Street, of course, as always, where the great Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes is in conversation with his loyal friend, flatmate, chronicler, helpmate, Dr. Watson.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  And so, I mean, everyone has heard of Sherlock Holmes, everyone knows about Sherlock Holmes, but he is the most brilliant detective of his age. He's a genius, he's eccentric, and he has a kind of endearingly selective knowledge. So he knows everything about the different types of tobacco ash, but he doesn't know, didn't know, for instance, that planets revolve around the sun, stuff like that, which I think so, such a clever little detail.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  And then Dr. Watson is the guy who narrates the story. And Dr. Watson was a former British Army surgeon injured during the Afghan wars who goes to live with Sherlock Holmes at two, two, one B Baker Street. And the two friends are in conversation at breakfast. Holmes is putting Watson through this kind of slightly patronizing test to see if he's kind of assimilated what Holmes calls his methods. And Watson is trying to analyze the character of a mysterious doctor who's called earlier that day purely by studying. His walking stick and he does this pretty well.

• 6:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  You know, not even nearly well enough to to please Holmes, who who then kind of blows him out the water with his own takes or conclusions.

• 6:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holmes is unbelievably condescending, isn't he?

• 6:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Watson is a bit embarrassed, isn't he? Because Holmes has made a fool of him. But that's basically set the tone perfectly. It's reminded us of the the dynamic between them. Because as we shall discuss, there has been a bit of a hiatus in the Sherlock Holmes canon. So this is the return of Sherlock Holmes after a long absence.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  And it is just classic Sherlock Holmes. Like, it's everything you expect, like the condescension, the way that Sherlock Holmes like picks extraordinary details out that no one else humanly would be able to. There's even a violin. It's just fantastic.

• 7:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that has set the scene very nicely for the arrival of the of this guy. This anxious visitor who has come to consult the one man in London, the the top consulting detective, not just in Britain, but in the world, who can solve this most serious and extraordinary problem. And this is, he turns out to be a doctor and he's from Dartmoor and he is Dr Mortimer. And Dr Mortimer has come to see Holmes because his friend, Sir Charles Baskerville, has been found dead on the grounds of his estate, Baskerville Hall, on the sort of Fogreed Moors of Devon. And Dr Mortimer says, you know, in the newspapers, it was reported as just he died of natural causes.

• 8:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  But something, I think something weird has been going on. My friend was running away from his house towards the moors, which seems weird. And on his face was an expression of perfect fear. And around him, there were these footprints. And this is one of the most famous passages in the book. Tabby, since you're the great dramatic performer, would you like to read this excellent passage?

• 8:38Speaker 04

  So it's this. It's so good. It's so good. And just literal chills. Footprints, footprints, a man or a woman's? Dr Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered. Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.

• 8:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  A gigantic hound. Wow. So the, the guy who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Foles, great novelist, he said that the title of the next chapter, which is The Problem, must be the least read chapter title in all literature. Because basically, people are so desperate to skip on to find out what happens next, they ignore the heading at the top and they move straight on to the text. And you are, I mean, when you see that, the footprints of a gigantic hound, you are hooked. Because it's the perfect, it's one of the things about the Sherlock Holmes stories, there's always this element of the weird and the kind of a possibility of the supernatural or something utterly inexplicable. That's the hook that draws you in. Even at this moment, you know, the cogs are turning in Holmes's mind and he's probably figured it all out. But of course, we haven't.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  So then, after this, Mortimer gives him this manuscript and we learn about the curse of the Baskervilles. And this is the legend surrounding the family in question of Sir Charles Baskerville, in which an ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, was murdered by a gigantic hellhound who kind of came for him after Sir Hugo himself committed kind of a terrible crime against a young maiden. And the curse is said to have dogged the

• 10:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dogs.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you notice that?

• 10:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's it.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm here for a reason. Said to have haunted every Baskerville ever since, with several members of the family dying under strange circumstances. And Sir Charles lived in fear of this. He was terrified of the moors. And then we are introduced to his nephew and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, who in a very, very classic Sherlock Holmes way, has travelled from America to take up his fortune and his estate. And he's, I find him quite an amusing character. He's a sturdy man with a pugnacious face, but alert, brave and practical. And there's this really funny moment when he and Watson have to rush out to confront a terrifying murderer living wild on the moors. And he's armed with nothing more than a riding crop.

• 10:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's because he's a, he's a hardy sort of stalwart soul who's been in North America, hasn't he? He's been in the US and in Canada.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 11:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so he's another, as you said, he's a very familiar figure in the sort of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle world. Of the sort of the guy who's gone out to the British Empire or to, you know, similar parts and has been outdoors, he's got a ruddy face, he's a kind of man's man. He's, he's, he's young and he's vigorous and all of this kind of thing.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. But because of this, because he's young and vigorous, he is determined to live in the hall, despite the warnings, despite the curse, despite the fact that Holmes himself fears for his safety. But then, while still in London, mysterious things start happening. He sent this warning with words cut out from yesterday's Times with only the word 'more' written in ink. And it's, "As you value your life or your reason, keep away from the moor." And then his boot mysteriously disappears from his hotel. And you love this detail, don't you? This is the best part for you.

• 11:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  But again, that's the kind of really weird, bizarre detail that sticks in your mind. So when you first read this as a child, so I read this when I was, I don't know, ten or eleven or something. And it's sort of, a sort of abridged kid's version. And it really stuck in my mind that his boot had been stolen. You know, who would steal one boot? Now, we find out the reason later on. Of course, this is the kind of detail that Sherlock Holmes loves.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because he's able to now, you know, create the, the sort of, put the puzzle together with the missing boot and the words cut out of the Times and the mysterious hellhound and the curse and all of this kind of thing. But interestingly, at this point, Watson says, well, I'm going to go off to Dartmoor with Sir Henry to find out what's going on. But Sherlock Holmes doesn't go because there's a big blackmail case in London and he has to stay behind and, and deal with that. So Holmes, our hero, is taken out of the narrative, isn't he?

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's left to Watson to help Sir Henry and kind of solve the case and report back to Holmes everything that he witnesses. But they arrive now at the moor and the house. And this is really when we get into this kind of Gothic creepy supernatural part of the book. Because it's a really gloomy, desolate place. Anyway, while there, they encounter a cast of characters who all kind of turn out to be suspects to some degree or another. So there's the hall servants, the Barrymoors. It turns out that Mrs. Barrymore's brother is this terrifying convict that's been on the loose and, and he's hiding on the moor.

• 13:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  And there, the Barrymoors are kind of, you know, protecting him.

• 13:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what you're not mentioning about the Barrymoors?

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Uh, wait, let me guess.

• 13:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know you know, and you're not saying it just to be difficult. I've played Frank Barrymore in our sister podcast Sherlock and Co. Yeah, it was a great performance. I'm the under keeper.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  I was so hoping this wouldn't come up.

• 13:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, it has.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, so that's the least interesting thing about the Barrymore's. Thank you, Dominic. But it's really interesting because this murderer being on the loose is kind of a red herring. Because we're kind of, at some point or another, kind of encouraged to think of him as maybe a suspect, as maybe like a force of danger, but actually not so. Or perhaps so. Anyway, then there's this naturalist, Jack Stapleton. And his appearance is oddly familiar, but he has, and he's obsessed with catching butterflies in the net. And he has a beautiful sister, Beryl, with whom Sir Henry quickly becomes infatuated. And Stapleton, her brother, is furious about this disproportionately, really. And Watson kind of dislikes him from the first, and there's a lot of stuff about people's features in this.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  The way your face looks, the way your skull is shaped, whatever, kind of says a lot about who you are. And then Stapleton's sister, the one that Sir Henry's kind of infatuated with, is secretly warning Sir Henry and Watson to get back to the safety of London. You know, there's danger here. And then there's another character, Mrs. Laura Lyons. She's a woman abandoned by her husband, but she's also entangled in some way with the dead Sir Charles. And this Stapleton, we don't know why.

• 15:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they're there with this strange sort of cast of characters. There's all kinds of strange howling on the moors, eerie kind of nighttime howls.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  It's genuinely creepy, the howling, I think.

• 15:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is creepy, completely. Watson is reporting back all the time his clues to Holmes in London. And then they find there's another man, there's a strange man on the moors. And they spot him, don't they? Or there's reports of him in the distance.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  In the moonlight, his silhouette.

• 15:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  This sort of long, lean figure. Amazingly, Tabby, this turns out to be, now I bet you didn't guess this when you first read it. It's Sherlock Holmes.

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of all people.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Extraordinary. So he's been here all along, solving the case under our very noses. And Paul Watson, who's been kind of writing, and you know, large portions of the book are Watson's kind of journal, and Watson, who's been sending him these long painstaking letters with every detail of the case, turns out like, never even needed them. Holmes had it in hand all along. Paul Watson.

• 16:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is like me doing my own notes for these episodes. And then it turns out you've actually been doing them all along.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  I know, I know. It's always so sad.

• 16:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, uh, Holmes says to Watson, you know, I know what's going on here. It's murder, Watson. Refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder. And then, um, they hear the hound one night. They hear the terrifying howl. They hear a man screaming. Even Holmes, the great man of iron, you know, with his kind of iron will.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  And rational mind.

• 16:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's shaken to his very soul. And they then stumble across the body of the latest victim. Well, if you want to find out who the victim is, um, the truth behind the hound, all of this kind of thing, we will come to this, won't we? We'll be exploring the story behind the Hound of the Baskervilles.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  We will.

• 16:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that, and particularly, there's going to be a lot of stuff, and we're not the, we're the book club, not the kennel club, but there's a lot of stuff about dogs. You've done a lot of dog-based canine research, Tavi.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. We're hoping to get sponsorship from Kraft at some point.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  No dead dogs. Actually, no, actually, there are dead dogs in this. I take that back in time. It wouldn't be the, the book club without dead dogs.

• 17:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Without dead dogs, exactly. So let's talk a little bit about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So put this into some context, because obviously it's a product of the late Victorian Edwardian, um, period. It's, it's a wonderful kind of period piece and a great window into the anxieties of the age and whatnot. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, one of the great celebrities of the day, he is a tremendous, tremendous character, isn't he?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  He absolutely is. He's got a very striking face. He looks just as you would hope the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes would look. But he was born in Edinburgh in 1859 to an Irish Catholic background. Um, his father is a civil servant turned artist, suffered from alcoholism and mental illness. And they live in some pretty grim tenement flats. But then the young Arthur's uncle sends him to a Jesuit prep school and then on to Stonyhurst in Lancashire. And he finds school very austere and harsh.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Very like Emily Bronte complains that the curriculum is kind of pre-modern. It's all kind of rhetoric, the classics, geometry, all of that.

• 18:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  And then as I'm born in his teens, he goes and spends a year in Austria to perfect his German. And then from eighteen seventy six to eighteen eighty one, he studies medicine at Edinburgh. But he also, this is when he also starts writing his short stories and tellingly, his first, which is published in eighteen seventy nine, is The Mystery of Sasasa Valley. And this is, so this is very kind of foreshadowing what will later come. It's an adventure story about a diamond hunt in South Africa. And the valley is haunted by this frightful fiend. And people who see its glowing eyes are blighted by the malignant power of this creature, which obviously anticipates the hellish hound of the Baskervilles. And he, then after this, Arthur Conan Doyle, he has a very adventurous life.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  He becomes a doctor on a Greenland whaler, which is a fascinating detail, I think. Then a ship surgeon on a voyage to West Africa. So very master and commander. He graduates as advanced doctor of medicine in eighteen eighty five with a dissertation on neurosyphilis.

• 19:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, neurosyphilis, interesting.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Valuable information, that. And then he sets up a practice in Plymouth and then Portsmouth, but is neither very successful. He spends a lot of his time writing fiction, goes to Vienna for a bit to study, you know, eyes. I don't know how to say the word, but he's an eye surgeon.

• 19:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ophthalmology, yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, again, not very successful. And, you know, charmingly spends most of his time ice skating with his wife, Louisa. So I approve of that. Anyway, then back to London, tries to set up a practice again, total failure, no patients. And I know, Dominic, that you're a very big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, and I can see why.

• 19:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  So just give us a portrait of the man, the character, a bit more.

• 19:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, I mean, he's not a terribly successful surgeon, is absolutely true. But he's a really, really endearing character, I think, Arthur Conan Doyle. He's a man of great enthusiasms. He's irrepressible. He's got a real zest for life. So, among other things, he was a goalkeeper, he played cricket.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  He's a goalsman.

• 20:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a goalsman, as you would call it, yeah, like Albert Camus. It's great to have the Goldsman back on the show.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Great to have Goldsman back on the show, yeah.

• 20:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Goldsmans.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Goldsmans.

• 20:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Surely Goldsman. Anyway, we're getting, yeah, this is.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  We're lost.

• 20:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're lost. He's a Goldsman. He's a cricketer for the MCC. He founded his own rifle club. He was a keen amateur boxer. He loved playing golf. He was a judge, I discovered from doing some important research in the Bodleian Library. He was a judge at the world's first bodybuilding competition. So he's all in for, he'll do anything, basically. He's always available.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  He literally is a jack of all trades, master of none.

• 20:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is. So you mentioned him going ice skating with Louisa, his wife. So she was called Tooie, was her nickname. She, they had two children. She got TB. And by the time he writes The Hand of the Baskervilles, I think she's already quite seriously ill. And he has become infatuated with a younger woman called Jean Leckie. It's not clear whether they had an affair or whether he just completely and utterly fell in love with this Jean Leckie. But he's basically in this love triangle, possibly a kind of platonic love triangle, but he's in it nonetheless. He's also very interested in his politics. So he stood twice in Parliament as a Liberal Unionist.

• 21:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So these were Liberals who were keener on the Empire, more kind of hardline on foreign policy issues than mainstream Liberals. And they ended up in coalition with the Conservatives. He lost both times. But he's very into his kind of social activism. So one example of this is he lends his voice to the campaign against the atrocities in the Belgian Congo.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Very admirable. Good man.

• 21:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Another one, actually. So people always laugh at Conan Doyle because part of being such a massive enthusiast, he's an enthusiast for spiritualism, for séances, he believes in fairies.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 22:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, there's all this stuff, we'll come on to this, his interest in the supernatural because it's a really important part of The Hand of the Baskervilles. But he's also really passionately devoted to the underdog and to justice. So there's a brilliant book by Julian Barnes called Arthur and George. It's such a good novel. And it's the story of how Arthur. Conan Doyle crossed paths with this guy who was a lawyer called George Adelgy, just outside Wolverhampton, actually. He was framed for all these attacks on horses, I think it was, called the Wylie outrages. Basically ended up in prison and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lent his voice to try to free him. And it's a really, really moving story and it's a good example of the sort of humanity and decency that I think is part of the Arthur Conan Doyle story.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 22:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And everybody laughs at him about the fairies, which we'll come to, I think they're being a bit harsh. Anyway. We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves because obviously all of his fame is based on one character above all, and that is Sherlock Holmes. And he started writing Sherlock Holmes in eighteen eighty six. He sent a story to this company called Wardlock and Co, who did a Christmas annual every year. And the story was called A Study in Scarlet.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Of course, so famous.

• 23:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is Watson, he's come home to London. He's been wounded in the Second Afghan War, he's somewhere to live and a friend says, there's a bloke in twenty two one B Baker Street. Who's looking for a flatmate, this enthusiast in some branches of science. And Watson goes to meet him and this bloke is very tall, he's very lean. He's got a sort of hawk-like nose, he's got sharp piercing eyes. He's got a general air of kind of alertness and decision. And this is Sherlock Holmes, who it turns out is actually modeled on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former tutors.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  I love this guy. This is so funny. So he's, yeah, he's inspired by Conan Doyle's former tutor at Edinburgh and this guy called Joseph Bell. Who is a pioneer of forensic science and Arthur Conan Doyle said of Bell. He would sit in his receiving room and diagnose people as they came in before they even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms and even give them details of their past life and hardly ever would he make a mistake. I mean. If someone's going to tell you details about your past life, it's not like you can be like, actually, that's wrong. I was the Duchess of York, whatever. But still, I mean, that is very, very Sherlock Holmes, isn't it?

• 24:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's, well, a doctor does that. I mean, that's part of, I guess, the doctors. You know, how many GPs would say they can actually read things about people when they're describing their symptoms or whatever?

• 24:37Speaker 04

  They definitely don't go into past lives, though, GPs, in my experience. But anyway, he, and then Arthur Conan Doyle actually said to Bell in a letter, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I've heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man."

• 24:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, lovely, really good. But then there's also, you know, the other main character of the great Sherlock Holmes duo, and that's Dr. Watson. He's another great creation. He's curious. I mean, there's something of Arthur Conan Doyle in him, I think, maybe. He's curious, he's honest, he's warm-hearted, he's very brave. And I was very struck by his humanity because Sherlock Holmes isn't always very human, I think. You know, he's sort of too genius.

• 25:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Except perhaps in his kind of fondness for Watson. And through Watson, you know, we have a more human reaction. He reacts to scary or dangerous scenarios in the way that a normal person would, you know, rather than Sherlock Holmes himself.

• 25:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he speaks for the audience, doesn't he, I guess?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  He speaks for the audience, except in this story when Sherlock Holmes is genuinely rattled. And so through him, we experience the mystery as a normal person would. And his loyalty to Holmes is so touching and so unwavering, no matter how many times he's told, kind of, you've got it wrong, or you haven't put the, the, the method to, to proper use. And he admits time and time again that he's no match for Holmes's intellect. But nevertheless, he's brave and capable under pressure. And the thing is that Sherlock Holmes himself is very, very fond of Watson. You know, that is just one of the great literary friendships. And there's this lovely moment when Watson is almost killed by a bullet, and Holmes is very relieved. This is Watson. "It was worth a wound. It was worth many wounds to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain." All my years of humble but single minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

• 26:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tabby, if someone shot you, that's how I'd react.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  What? No, I'm Holmes in this scenario.

• 26:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah, of course, I've mistaken myself. Yeah, I forgot that I'm actually the junior partner.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Get back in your box.

• 26:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, okay.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Yes, it is as emotive as, you know, the firmest and most loving goal hanger presenter dynamics.

• 26:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  So you can see why this, you know, this friendship is kind of the beating heart of the book and I think a massive attraction for a lot of readers. Anyway, so turns out that Sherlock Holmes is a massive hit, huge success. So Wardlock asked for much more and then The Sign of the Four is published in February eighteen ninety, that's another hit. And it's so, it seems that Arthur Conan Doyle has kind of perfected his famous formula for these books.

• 27:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  He absolutely has because he then goes to the Strand magazine and he does, he takes Holmes with him. And he publishes, I think, twenty three more Sherlock Holmes stories. And you mentioned a formula. I mean, there is a formula. They open at twenty two one B Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes is usually, you know, he's injecting himself with cocaine or playing the violin or behaving madly because he's a bit bored. A visitor arrives, Holmes does all his rigmarole with the kind of bizarre details. There is a weird story and the weirdness is often the point of the story. It's not just a sort of generic whodunit story. There's some mad thing like with orange pips or a blue carbuncle, a missing goose or any of these kinds of weird things. And there's often, it turns out, a connection to the British Empire, to set the things that have gone on abroad.

• 28:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  You have that in The Sign of the Four, you have that in The Hand of the Baskervilles with the idea of the guy returning from North America to claim his inheritance. Holmes will think for a while, he'll play the violin, stare out the window. Then he and Watson will rush off somewhere by cab or by train. Holmes will often arrange some deranged trap or put on a kind of incredibly Baroque disguise. You know, disguise himself as a washerwoman or something. And then the villain is revealed and Holmes explains all to a bewildered Watson. And everybody loves it and everybody goes home happy, except. For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Because he writes these stories, they're very successful and he gets quite bored of it.

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he actually says of Holmes, I must save my mind for better things, even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him. In other words, I'm being very well paid, but actually I'd much rather write the sort of stuff that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wants to write, which are basically historical novels about the Napoleonic wars and stuff. So in December 1893, he publishes the final short story, The Final Problem. And this is this, you know, absolutely Titanic confrontation with Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, at the Reichenback Falls in Switzerland. And it ends with Watson looking down into the waters. Holmes has disappeared in this cauldron of swirling water and seething foam.

• 29:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there, says Watson, will lie for all time, the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation. A man whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Oh, you're crying.

• 29:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's so sad, Tappy.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  Watson is sobbing into his microphone.

• 29:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, because Holmes is dead, or is he?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Or is he?

• 29:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the twist.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Whether he's dead or not, there certainly is a long hiatus from the Sherlock Holmes novels. As Arthur Conan Doyle throws himself into writing what he calls his real books. And these are, so this is actually very like A. M. L, the guy that became very famous for Winnie the Pooh, but always considered it kind of beneath him and his real talent in his other works. But, so the real books, you know, that Arthur Conan Doyle believes are kind of his Magnus Opuses. These are historical novels set in the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, et cetera. I think they sound excellent. Have you read any?

• 30:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Uh, I've read some of them. I think they're all right, but they're not as good as Sherlock Holmes. I mean, this is the reality. There were some people listening to this to say, oh, what about the White Company? Isn't that wonderful? Or whatever. They're nice period pieces, but the Holmes formula is what you come back for.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you know, for that very reason, the public is constantly pestering him to bring Holmes back. And at first he says no, he said, I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. That's how I feel about kettle crisps, actually.

• 30:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 30:55Speaker 04

  I mean, you would, you would, you would get this about foie gras or something like that, or like.

• 30:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, Pringles, the green Pringles.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you always eat those on planes, actually, don't you?

• 31:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  But then, um, two years later, he allows there to be an American stage adaptation, but says, as long as there's no love business. So, you know, strictly kind of English values.

• 31:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that'll be a big contrast to the book we're doing next week, Tabby.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, that's a far cry from Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses. Or is it? Um, and then in December 1900, he does an interview with Titbits and says, "He has never regretted the course I took in killing Sherlock. That does not say, however, that because he is dead, I should not write about him again if I wanted to. For there is no limit to the number of papers he left behind."

• 31:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  And then this sets the stage for The Hound of the Baskervilles.

• 31:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So we can date precisely when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles. He is in North Norfolk. It's great to have North Norfolk back on the show, Alan Partridge's hunting ground. So he's gone to North Norfolk with his mate Bertie Fletcher Robinson, who's a young journalist, and they've gone golfing in Cromer. And he's feeling very low, Conan Doyle, he can't sleep. He's, he went to the Burr War as a kind of war correspondent, and he got a fever. He then lost his campaign to become a Liberal Unionist MP in Edinburgh. He was blown away in the sort of khaki election, as it was called during the Burr War. And then he took part in Queen Victoria's funeral procession.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  God, it's also Victorian, isn't it?

• 32:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it is. He's been, but it's a sign of his celebrity that he's doing all these things.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he was in Queen Victoria's funeral procession. He started having these very melancholy reflections about the state of the nation and all this kind of thing. Also, his soul is, and I quote, "wrenched in two" because he's torn between Tui, his wife, who's bedridden with TB, and this woman, Jean Leckie, that he's fallen in love with.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 32:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's all going on for him, um, mentally. And on Sunday, the 28th of April, they can't play golf, him and this bloke Fletcher Robinson, because it's so windy. And so they sit around at the hotel, kind of having tea and whatnot. And Fletcher Robinson tells him a story of a black dog that haunts the countryside. And we shall come, because I know you've done an absurd amount of research into folkloric dogs.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't get enough of folklore.

• 33:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Conan Doyle loves this story about the dog haunting the countryside. He actually writes to his mother a few days later and says, you know, I've had, I've actually had a brilliant time. I've slept soundly at last. All goes well in every way. Fletcher Robinson and I are going to do a small book together, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Real Creeper. And then he writes to the editor of the Strand magazine as well. He uses the same expression, I've had the idea of a real creeper for the Strand. He says, it'll be at least 40,000 words. You'd love it. It'll really suit you. It's going to be called The Hound of the Baskervilles. And he says, I'll co-write it with Fletcher Robinson. I'll do all the, the writing and it'll be kind of in my style. But Fletcher Robinson will provide the ideas and the colour.

• 34:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the, the point about the ideas and the colour takes us to, well, what's at the heart of this story? Which is this idea of the supernatural and of the kind of the dog from the realms of folklore. So you love all this, don't you, Tabby? Because you love, bizarrely, I would never have had you down as a folklore enthusiast, but here we are.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  I absolutely love it. Yeah, I can't get enough. My, my, um, my flat is littered with kind of books of mythical beasts and stuff like that. But we'll, we'll properly get into this in the second half, but it's kind of, it's rooted in this long tradition of English folklore, these kind of hellhounds that kind of roam the countryside. And, and, and there's this idea that it may have derived in kind of a real story, featuring an ancient English family, but that itself is kind of a mythology. But Conan Doyle loves this whole idea because he's, as we've said, he's a huge enthusiast for the supernatural. He loves stories of curses, spells, ghosts, haunted houses, et cetera. That's also very Victorian, you know, this period of, you know, fairies and seances. And they kind of tap into that in one of the, I think, Robert Downey Jr.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Sherlock Holmes is. It's all to do with like, you know, wizards and not wizards, like magicians, mystical practices, that kind of thing. And Conan Doyle himself, he's a founding member of various kind of psychical research groups. And then later in life, he's the best known champion of spiritualism, séances, as we've said, mind readings, et cetera. And then in 1922, he kind of famously endorses this whole hoax around the existence of fairies.

• 35:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the Cottingley Fairies.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  So yeah, I think there's a film about it, a charming film, actually.

• 35:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So there's these girls who basically sent him photos that they've mocked up of fairies in the garden and everybody laughs at this and says, well, obviously these are completely fake. But poor Conan Doyle, he wants to believe it. He loves all this. And he gives, he basically lends his name to these, these hoaxed photographs. And everybody laughs at him again, because of course by this point he's getting on a bit. And so he's kind of a bit of a sort of old warhorse and people like poking fun at him. But it's a sign of this sort of longing within him, that he really wants to believe in the power of the supernatural and stuff.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 36:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So this is why he loves the story. And he, at first he's not thinking of it as a Sherlock Holmes story. But then he, he starts to sort of ponder it and he says, well, if I'm going to have this, this hound on the moors, I need a really, really good central character. I need a hero. And he basically says to the editor of the Strand, look, I can do you two options. Option one is it'll just be the Hound of the Baskervilles, a kind of ghost story. And I'll charge you £50 for every thousand words. Or I can put Sherlock Holmes in it and I'll charge you £100 for every thousand words. Which would you prefer? And then he adds, Holmes is at a premium in America right now. And the directors of the Strand magazine immediately come back and they say, we'll pay you the £100 per thousand words.

• 36:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  And so Sherlock Holmes is back.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And on that extremely exciting note, Dominic, I think we should take a break. And when we come back, we will be explaining how Sherlock Holmes is resurrected. We'll be discussing the book itself in much more detail. And most excitingly of all, we will be definitively solving the dark mystery of the hellish hound of the Baskervilles itself.

• 37:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, exciting.

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• 39:02Speaker 04

  Welcome back to the book club. Now, Dominic, before the break, you taunted us with the prospect of Sherlock Holmes's resurrection in The Hound of the Baskervilles. So, how is it that he's written back into existence?

• 39:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, he's got the idea when he's been on the golfing trip with this guy, what's his name? Fletcher Robinson in North Norfolk. And he has come back and he is absolutely enthused because, as we said, Conan Doyle is a man with this tremendous zest for life. And his future wife, Jean Leckie, said he could write a Sherlock Holmes story in a room full of people talking. He could write it in a train. He would just, once he got stuck in, you know, you couldn't stop him. He's a machine. And so, he had that idea in late April 1901.

• 39:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  And a month later, he and this guy Fletcher Robinson go on a sort of walking tour of Dartmoor to get, you know, local colour and stuff. And by that point, he's already written half of the book.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  God, he's faster than you.

• 40:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's as fast. He's turned it around really quickly. They stay near Dartmoor Prison, which gives him the idea for that part of the book, because Dartmoor Prison features in the book. And Conan Doyle, we know, he's writing to his mother. And he says, you know, I'm exploring the moor over our Sherlock Holmes book. It's a great place, very sad and wild, dotted with dwellings, a prehistoric man, strange monoliths and huts and graves. They go to the bog, they go to some abandoned stone forts, and they read books about local folklore, which is where they get the idea of resemblances being passed down through the generations. So kind of your, so your face, the face recurs in the portraits of the Baskerville family.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's this scene where they walked down this gallery and it's, it's almost like, I mean, it's almost like comic column. Then it's like these faces repeated down the generations. Very Victorian theme that.

• 40:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, with different wigs. And it is a very Victorian theme. I agree with you. Because a lot of writers in this period, so 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, they are fascinated by ideas of heredity, which is of course what gives rise to eugenics later on. So if you look at novelists of this period, 1890s, 1900s, like Emile Zola in France, or Thomas Hardy, the idea that traits are passed down through the generations, particularly criminal traits, or violence, or drunkenness, or whatever, that they are inherited.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  These ideas play a big part in the kind of novels, the realist novels of the late 19th and early 20th century. And that's, you can see that admittedly in this very cosy, kind of benign way, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And then there's one last element, which of course is the title. A few days after they finish this trip, they go to Fletcher Robinson's family seat, which is also in Devon. And the coachman to the Fletcher Robinson family is called Harry Baskerville.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Dun, dun, dun.

• 41:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  And later on, Fletcher Robinson gave a copy of the book to his coachman, to Harry Baskerville, with apologies for using the name. Read the dedication. So that's nice.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also the first release carries this footnote acknowledging Arthur Conan Doyle's debt to Fletcher Robinson, and then he later expands this in the novel's dedication, which is reprinted in all editions today. So to the publication, so the first nine installments come out in Strand magazine again in August nineteen oh one and runs alongside, interestingly, the first part of H.G. Wells's The First Man in the Moon. So obviously, you know, the fantastical is kind of very in vogue right now among Victorian audiences.

• 42:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I love that, the fact, I mean, the fact that you could imagine buying that magazine, you can read the first installment of The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells and the first installment of The Hand of the Baskervilles. It gives you a sense of how rich literary culture is at this point. And also, and these are people who are commanding enormous sums of money by today's standards for their serialisations and short stories and things. It's a literary culture that dwarfs anything that we have today, I think.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there'd be the same kind of enthusiasm for the release of those two stories as there would be now for the new big blockbuster.

• 43:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  That's what it was. Yeah, and then, and it's obviously a massive hit. There are queues outside the Strand magazine's offices and at bookstores. For the first time in its history, the magazine goes into seven prints and circulation rises to about three hundred thousand from an average of a hundred and eighty thousand. So that's massive. And it's such a huge hit that Holmes's full-time return obviously just becomes inevitable. You know, the US publisher Colliers offers Arthur Conan Doyle a staggering sum of thirty thousand dollars for eight new stories. And in income terms, that's more than seven million dollars today. I mean.

• 43:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, colossal amount of money. That's what queues up.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  The adventure of the empty house, which is the next short story, which is when it turns out that he didn't die at the Reichenback Falls.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  He was alive all along.

• 44:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  He was alive all along, exactly. But the fact that he's returned is down to this one book, The Hand of the Baskervilles, which becomes. By far the most celebrated Sherlock Holmes story. In fact, I would say that if you asked a hundred people in the street, can you name one Sherlock Holmes story? I'm guessing 90% of them would say The Hound of the Baskervilles and very few would be able to name many more, I think. This is by far the most best known, even though in some ways it is not typical, not least because the supernatural element, for example, is much more pronounced in this than any other.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Much more Gothic.

• 44:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Much more Gothic, but I suppose there are some ways, aren't there? I mean, it starts with the formula. It starts with them in 221B.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  I mean, it's undeniably a very Sherlock Holmes story. There's a lot in it of the traditional fat formula. So, you know, Ruth Rendell says, Conan Doyle often featured in his fiction, a protagonist who returned to his homeland after half a lifetime in foreign parts. The exotic country would most usually be America, India, Australia or South Africa, giving him the opportunity to make his main character a perspective of gold or adventure in some local war. So there we have Sir Henry Baskerville.

• 45:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Some protagonists return to exact revenge on the man or woman who all those years before was instrumental in sending them away. A few as blackmailers, others because they have inherited a fortune or a property in England. This is all very Hound of the Baskervilles. It's the classic Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 45:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, we were talking beforehand. So our executive producer, Tony Pasta, was saying, The Hound of the Baskerville, who's a massive Sherlock Holmes fan, was saying to us.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And actually, I'd really recommend the Sherlock and Co rendition of this. It's brilliant.

• 45:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, which Goalhanger does, exactly. So Tony was saying to us, oh, The Hound of the Baskervilles is unusual because Sherlock Holmes is absent for so much of the story, which is, I mean, it's true, he is absent, but he's often absent for bits of the short stories as well. So bits where Watson will go off on his own and then Holmes pops up later on in disguise, as he does in this. But I mean, Holmes, Holmes is always in, basically, whenever you meet a homeless person, somebody, an old crone on the streets or something.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know that three pages later, they will cast aside the hat and it will actually be.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  What ho, Watson?

• 46:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. The great detective.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  But then this absence then opens the door for Watson, who actually, rather than Holmes and his presence, it's actually Watson and his kind of very sharp observations and his reports. Back and forth, two Holmes that propel the narrative of Sherlock Holmes. And as, you know, Christopher Frayling says, Watson is a long way away from the buffoon figure of Hollywood films in this novel, and I totally agree.

• 46:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think that's one thing that a lot of the versions of Holmes get wrong.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a comical foil, almost.

• 46:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  The genius of Holmes.

• 46:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I don't think he is, he's certainly not comical in this book at all.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  No, I think you're brilliant.

• 46:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't think you're a buffoon at all.

• 47:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think you should clip, they should clip that bit and they should just use that, just you saying, I think you're brilliant, I don't think you're a buffoon at all. It's what I've waited all my life to hear, to be honest. So Watson is, I mean, I'm not talking about myself here, by the way, I'm talking about Dr. Watson. He's brave, he's very manly, he's.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  He has a poncho for cashmere sweaters.

• 47:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's happy, I'm unbelievable. I couldn't believe that you laughed so scornfully when I said that. That's shocking. But actually, Sherlock Holmes, so Watson in this book comes out rather well. Holmes makes some demented mistakes because he keeps risking the life of his clients as a sort of trap to lure the hound out, doesn't he?

• 47:43Speaker 04

  He does, he absolutely does. And then he says at one point, because basically they, they think this Sir Henry is kind of done for, he's, he's dead. And he says, I'm more to blame than you, Watson. In order to have my case well-rounded and complete, I've thrown away the life of my client. It is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career. But how could I know? How could I know that he would risk his life alone upon the moor in the face of all my warnings? And he doesn't actually catch the villain unusually. The villain escapes arrest and is, is maybe survives.

• 48:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we actually never see, I was saying, I think about that. We, we think that the villain has been killed by the bog.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  But the villain's body is never found. And Sherlock Holmes's body was never found at the Reichenback Falls and he came back from the dead.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, exactly. Someone's going to resurrect the villain. And the other thing is in this, which is very unusual for Sherlock Holmes novels, is Holmes himself is genuinely kind of frightened. Like, there's this bit in the book where he says, you know, it's like, he's, they hear this howling on the moor and he's genuinely unnerved by it. And he says, come on now, Watson, didn't you think yourself that it was the cry of a hound? I'm not a child. You need not fear to speak the truth. You know, he's seeking out reassurance from his sidekick.

• 48:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Nevertheless, he confesses at the end of the story that he's mismanaged the case, he's made mistakes, he's put his client in danger. But he also makes excuses. He blames it on the fog and

• 49:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the hound.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  terrifying hound.

• 49:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but the hound was part of the business from the beginning.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holmes at the end says, well, I could never anticipate that terrifying hound. But hold on.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  That's like blaming a murder on the murderer.

• 49:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Precisely. The book's got the hand of the basketballs, mate. I mean, did you not notice?

• 49:29Speaker 04

  But I think this, this weakness in Holmes's otherwise kind of granite, you know, deduction and his, you know, cold rational mind. I think it's rather endearing. I think it's a strength of the book. And it also shows you just how terrifying these supernatural forces that they are working against are, or are they supernatural?

• 49:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, this absolutely brings us perfectly to the dimension of the book that I think explains why uniquely among Sherlock Holmes stories, it has made such an imprint in the popular imagination. And this is the fact that it is not just a detective story. It's a brilliant Gothic story, a supernatural story. The late Victorians, Edwardians loved stories of kind of horror and sensation.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, think of Dracula, which we, which we did in our mini-series back in September.

• 50:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So we're only a few years after the publication of Dracula. We're only a few years after the publication of things like King Solomon's Mines, or She, the kind of H. Rider Haggard stories of the supernatural in Africa. The Victorians love all this kind of thing. And actually, that gives it a much darker tinge, I think, than almost all the Sherlock Holmes stories that are set in London. Because this feels Feels like Holmes and Watson are going out to confront something much more primal and ancient. I suppose they're going back in time, not just in to confront a beast from folklore, but also in a literary sense, because this they're going back to an older literary form, the kind of Gothic novel of the 18th century or something, the haunted house or the sensation novels of the mid Victorian period, the kind of Wilkie Collinses and things.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, definitely, because just think of the curse, you know, that's said to haunt the Baskerville family. That's classic kind of late Victorian horror novel. And, you know, this thing of the wild, profane and godless to Hugo Baskerville, set upon by this hound and having his throat ripped out and being slaughtered. And then, you know, those who saw it wanted to said die that very night of what he had seen. And the other twain were but broken men for the rest of their days. Even the writing there, it's harkening back to an older time, an older form. And then there's Baskerville Hall itself, which is straight out of Victorian sensation fiction. It actually reminded me so strongly of the Gothic house of horror in Guillermo del Toro's movie, Crimson Peak, which is set in Victorian England.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  And then also, to some extent, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre.

• 51:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  It's so, it's just the typical Gothic mansion that kind of features in, you know, games or cartoons, whatever it may be.

• 51:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  The haunt classic haunted house, that's exactly what it is.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  Exactly. And it's so there's this passage, "In the fading light, I could see that the centre was a heavy block of a building, from which a porch projected. The whole front was draped in ivy with a patch clipped here and there where a window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenellated and pierced with many loopholes. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows and from the high chimneys which rose from the steep, high angled roof, there sprang a single black column of smoke." I mean, it's like. It's like the archetype of the haunted house.

• 52:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  It completely is. I mean, even when they go inside the dining room, a place of shadow and gloom. There's a sense the whole place is deserted, that it's haunted. It feels also like something from an M R James ghost story or something, this sort of sepulchral atmosphere. And that, so you've got the house and then you've got the moor. And actually, as you said, we did Wuthering Heights at the very beginning of this series. And the Wuthering Heights, the moor is oddly absent for most of the book. Whereas in this book, if you like moors, this is the book for you. Because there's a lot of time spent on the moor. There's some lovely writing about the moor, sort of nature writing. And the more, the point about the moor is, I mean, you really are going back in time. Your car, your, your, your, your modern technology avails you nothing.

• 53:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is a sort of prehistoric location.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  There are actually these prehistoric dwellings that they talk about all the time.

• 53:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And whenever they go out there, there are, there are moments like this. A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. There's a huge mottled expanse of green splotched bog which stretched away until it merged into the russet slopes of the moor. There's all this sort of stuff, this sort of melancholy, the, this sense that there's. You know, you're taking your life in your hands when you venture out there because the, who knows what? There's, there's ghosts, there's creatures, there's weird dogs, there's all sorts.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  They're constantly warned, like the letter right from the start when we're in London saying, you know, if you value your life, stay away from the moor. We know it's a dark, dangerous place. But the irony at the heart of all this is that Holmes doesn't believe in the supernatural. He's kind of the opposite of the supernatural. And I think this is something else that separates it from the classic Sherlock Holmes formula. Because Holmes never believes in supernatural explanation. You know, he says at one point, when Watson asks if, if it might be something, you know, beyond the ken of man. He says, the devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not? But this is earlier on in the novel, this is before he's actually been on the moor and heard the hound and encountered it.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  You get the sense as it goes on that he begins to doubt, you know, that passage that I read. When he says to Watson, if that is like, that is the, that is the howl of a hound, like tell me, tell me that I'm wrong.

• 54:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, no, you're dead right. I think the beauty of it is that Holmes is the incarnation of science and rationalism. I mean, that when Watson first met him in their very first meeting, when they decided to get a flat together. You know, they met in a laboratory and

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holmes is always fiddling around with his chemistry sets and whatnot and he, you know, is never taken in by things. He's not gullible, he's icy cold in his logic and whatnot. And the beauty of it is, he's now confronted with something that is, as you said, beyond the ken of man. Kind of, it is, it is kind of wreathed in mystery and all of this. And when he goes out there, he doubts himself.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  He totally does.

• 55:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, he, deep down, in part of his mind, he knows who the killer is and he knows what the plan is. But there's a bit of him that is scared nevertheless, and I love that.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  He experiences fear, I think, in one of the few times that you see Sherlock Holmes rattled.

• 55:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, yes, exactly. He is rattled completely. And I think this contrast between the two things, the ancient evil on the one hand. So you mentioned Ruth Rendell, a brilliant detective writer in her own right. P D James, another one, writing at the same time, sort of nineteen eighties. She said that she thought The Hound of the Baskervilles, what made, what elevated it above other detective stories is that it pits on the one hand, the ancient evil of the moor against Holmes, his sort of modernity and his individualism. And that, I think, gives it so much power because it's, it's not just a sort of formulaic whodunit.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  No, but also it's, that's why the, the introduction of this convict, this murderer living on the moors is so ingenious. Because that would normally be in like traditional detective fiction, he would be the bad guy. He'd be the guy that we're trying to hunt down. But the flesh and blood of him, even though he's a terrifying murderer and he's feral, living on the moors, is nothing set against the darkness of the moors and the howl of the hound. And, you know, he seems so puny and feeble in his comparison versus like the might of this supernatural entity.

• 56:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I mean, Holmes, in all detective novels, I think the detective represents a kind of security and stability. And, and so many detective novels, particularly this period, there's a single kind of masterful figure who is restoring order to a world that's been put into disorder. So he's beating off the kind of forces of evil that are threatening civilisation. Conservative kind of modern England. That's what Sherlock Holmes does, is what Hercule Poirot does later on with Agatha Christie, whatever. But the interesting thing about this, I think, is that the sort of paradox of it is that actually the one person who really does believe in the supernatural is Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Sherlock Holmes is saying, well, deep down, Watson, we know there's no such things as as kind of diabolical dogs. But the one man in England who really does believe in diabolical dogs.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  The only man in England to believe in fairies.

• 57:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because he does believe in fairies.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  I read that from him.

• 57:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ruth Rendell was so interesting about this. She said, it's as though Conan Doyle, and I quote, was so deeply subsumed into the character of his most famous creation that when writing of him, of Sherlock Holmes, he was unable to do otherwise than believe in what Holmes believed. So even though Arthur Conan Doyle, deep down, would love to have a supernatural explanation, Holmes would judge him for it. Holmes would think badly of his creator for kind of getting into all of this kind of stuff.

• 58:03Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, I mean, we said earlier that obviously he was infatuated with this idea of this mythical hound. This brings us to the moment we've all been waiting for the entire episode, which is the hound itself. So if you remember in our opening reading, we gave you a very vivid and very well read, Dominic, description of the hound. You know, when when Holmes and Watson finally encountered it in the flesh, because our knowledge of it for much of the book is just kind of this eerie howling that grows closer and closer and closer to Holmes and Watson. So we learn that it has fire burning out of its mouth, its eyes glow with a smoldering glare.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Its muzzles and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. It's massive. It's very dark. It has a savage face. So it's absolutely terrifying.

• 58:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  But Dominic, reveal for us once and for all, is this a supernatural beast, you know, that has rushed straight out of the flames of hell, or is it just a very big dog?

• 59:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, if you haven't read the book, I think you kind of can guess what's coming. So I don't know how much of a spoiler this is.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, come on. This is a Sherlock Holmes novel after all.

• 59:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a Sherlock Holmes story, exactly. It's just a very big dog. It's a very big dog that's been covered in phosphorus that makes it kind of glow in the dark. So it appears terrifying and otherworldly. What we won't reveal is who has done this, because that would spoil it for you.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we will be keeping the delicious secret of the true murderer a secret for any of you that want to go on and read the book.

• 59:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  The story behind The Hound is really interesting because obviously it is the Hound that sticks in people's minds. So I think there's something about this sort of gigantic, feral, diabolical dog that lodges in your imagination when you first read the story, particularly if you read it when you were younger. So what did you say you were nine or so when you read it?

• 59:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, couldn't sleep.

• 59:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  So my son read it when he was, he read a sort of very, very, very abridged kind of version for six year olds or something. And he loved it. I mean, he loved the idea of this kind of demonic dog on the moors and Holmes and Watson, these great pals kind of running away from it in terror and all this. And critics have really got stuck into what The Hound means. So in the 1930s, people thought, is The Hound the proletariat? Is it the working classes of Britain that are sort of rising up against Sir Charles and Sir Henry Baskerville? And their sort of feudal seat and whatnot. Later on, people said, is it the id? You know, there's a lot going on in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's personal life. Does The Hound represent his kind of base, primal sexual urges or something?

• 1:00:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  But what The Hound obviously is, is a, you know, whether you believe all the other explanations or not, The Hound is the latest iteration of a long running theme, a long running feature in kind of English folklore, isn't it? Which is this idea of the black dog or the sort of the terrifying, ghostly dog that haunts people for generations. And now, Tabby, I'm queuing you up because you love a feral, you love a feral dog and you love folklore.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  I love a feral dog and I love folklore. So this is just, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me in the book club.

• 1:01:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's Tabby Syre, bingo.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I've loved folklore all my life. And as you say, There is this long tradition of black dogs in English and Welsh folklore. That's kind of a technical term. These are dogs which haunt landscapes and they warn of impending disaster, often connected with landowners' families. And remember here that Arthur Conan Doyle loved tales of the supernatural, as we've said. And so these stories of supernatural black dogs and these spectral hounds, they crop up in all, like in the folklore of all different parts of the United Kingdom. So, for instance, in Yorkshire, you have the Barget. Then in the Isle of Man, you have the Mody Do.

• 1:02:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Mody Do.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  The Mody Do, which is, which is, this is, you don't know this?

• 1:02:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't know this.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  This is black dog in Manx.

• 1:02:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. How's your Manx? Good?

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  Strong. It's strong. Yeah. I'll save it for a future episode. But the best known of all these kind of mythical black dogs is Black Shuck or Old Shuck of Norfolk. And he's terrifying. I remember being fascinated by him as a child. And then also, I think, when I read The Prisoner of Azkaban, the Harry Potter book, the grim in that is like a foretelling of death.

• 1:02:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  He's reputed to be the size of a calf and was easily recognisable by his saucer-sized eyes, weeping green or red fire.

• 1:02:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is Black Shuck?

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  This is Black Shuck. Exactly. The editor of The Strand magazine suggested that it derived from the phantom boarhound of Hurgest Ridge on the Welsh Borders.

• 1:02:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the hound, the hound of the Baskervilles?

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  This is the hound of the Baskervilles, yeah, which supposedly appeared with clanking chains whenever there was a death in the local Baskerville Vaughan family.

• 1:03:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow. They were called the Baskervilles?

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  The Baskerville Vaughan's, yeah.

• 1:03:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  And there's even this story about how this husband kept the story from his wife for fear that she wouldn't marry him if she knew that their family was haunted by this terrifying hound. And then one of their children falls ill from smallpox and the wife goes upstairs to check on the invalid and only to run down again moments later to say that there's this large black dog lying on her son's bed. Anyway, the husband rushes up to only to discover that the child is dead and that this was a warning all along.

• 1:03:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Whoa.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  There's another legend, and this is of Squire Richard Cable of Buckfastly Dartmoor, so Dartmoor again, and who's a supposedly incredibly evil man who murders his wife and sells his soul to the devil. So this is just like the original Hugo Baskerville.

• 1:03:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  And this is from A Guide to Devon, published in 1907. He died in 1677. He was the last male of his race and died with such an evil reputation that he was placed under a heavy stone and a sort of penthouse was built over that with iron gratings to prevent his coming up and haunting the neighbourhood. When he died, the story goes that fiends and black dogs breathing fire raced over Dartmoor howling. And then further black still, you have a black dog that appears as a harbinger of Simon of Athens' death. And then obviously you have Churchill's black dog. It was a way that he spoke about depression and Samuel Johnson as well. So it's a very well-known trope in England and

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  English folklore. But dogs also feature prominently in Sherlock Holmes stories more generally. This isn't the only one.

• 1:04:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So both Holmes and Watson are likened to dogs, aren't they? So, I mean, Watson is always very dog-like. He's always, he's like Holmes' kind of loyal dog. In a study in Scarlet, Watson likens Holmes to a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness until it comes across the lost scent. And there's also, I mean, very famously, in The Sign of the Four, there's a dog called Toby. And Toby is a sort of, he's a cross, I can't remember what he is. He's a cross between two dogs and he has a brilliant nose. Holmes says to Watson, "I would rather have Toby's help than that of the whole detective force of London." And so they go all this great chase across London, led by Toby. Then, very famously,

• 1:05:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  there's the dog that doesn't bark in the night time in Silver Blaze. Holmes says famously, the great mystery is why the dog didn't bark, and that is the key to the whole mystery. But it is the hound that stands out. It must be the most famous dog in popular literature. Do you think?

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'd definitely say it must be. I can't think of another contender, really. But then there's another interesting detail of The Hound of the Baskervilles that, you know, we've spoken about how it has a much more supernatural, much more Gothic element than most of the other books. But also, Arthur Conan Doyle's treatment of women in the book, I think, is worth discussing because in this book in particular, there's an extraordinary degree of brutality towards the female characters of the book. And it's kind of interesting because Sherlock Holmes, men tend to be bigger fans of the books than women, I think, on the whole. And yet, women are much bigger consumers of true crime,

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  you know, in podcasts, movies, documentaries.

• 1:06:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Agatha Christie or

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:06:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  all these writers we've been talking about, P. D. James or whatever, they tend to be bought by women.

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  And this highlights how Sherlock Holmes is slightly different from the rest of the genre. It has a much bigger, almost like a Baroque scale to it. And it's less believable, it's less conceivable. Whereas, say, Agatha Christie, her plots, they have a smaller scale, they're closer knit. And that makes them much darker because the villains at the heart of the story, the devils, they're the devils that you know. You know, it's those that live with you, it's those that sleep beside you. And there's something so sinister about that. Whereas in Sherlock Holmes, they're often gloriously kind of inconceivable.

• 1:07:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I agree completely. On the women point.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it's absolutely true because there's the various characters that we've mentioned. Mrs. Barry Moore is exploited by her brother, who's a murderer. Is that right?

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:07:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  The relationship between Stapleton and his sister is at the core of the book, isn't it? And she ends up with kind of, I mean, she basically suffers domestic abuse.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's treated appallingly. She's tied up for a whole night. She has bruises. She has a terrible time, actually.

• 1:07:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  And some of Arthur Conan Doyle's biographers have suggested that, I mean, I don't know whether this is a bit fanciful, you know, he is in this love triangle, he is being torn between these two women. I think it's, it's actually probably, there's no psychological explanation for it. It's just. Um, you know, his, his Edwardian man writing for men and it doesn't, and he just sees the women characters as dispensable, I would say, rather than it being sort of the, the expression of some darkness in his soul.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  And this is also, I mean, you, we said that he was almost writing quite a retro book and that a lot of it is very Gothic.

• 1:08:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  It's a very common theme in Gothic literature that these kind of women are treated abominably and kind of abused by their male counterparts in some way or another. So I think it's more that than anything.

• 1:08:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think you're dead right, though, that men tend to like Sherlock Holmes, historically have liked Sherlock Holmes probably more than women do. I think that might have changed now with things like Sherlock, Sherlock and Co, or the Benedict Cumberbatch or whatever, their TV version.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you might be right, actually.

• 1:08:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I do think, I mean, part of that is to do with male friendship, I think. But also the difference between Sherlock Holmes and some of those other writers we've talked about is the whodunit element in Sherlock Holmes is never as pronounced as it is in the others.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  No, it's much more obvious.

• 1:08:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Puzzling out how they did it is fun, but you always really know who the killer was, I think, in Sherlock Holmes. I think it's, Sherlock Holmes feels to me more of an adventure story.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's the journey, not the, the big reveal.

• 1:09:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. It's the characters. I think that's what keep people coming back. It's the characters and the atmosphere. It is the Watson Holmes dynamic. It is a portrait of male friendship, rather like in Master and Commander or something. Quite rare, I would say, in popular literature to have two male characters who are in a very uncomplicated way, just great friends. And that's what the, the books capture.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  I think you're right. I think that's a massive part of its enduring appeal because I mean, it's still, I mean, it's so famous even today. I mean, Sherlock Holmes's figure must be one of the most iconic characters in all of literature. And then I think it's also the fact that it's, as we said, you know, this kind of cozy world, but also how neatly the cases are unraveled. You know, the irresistible satisfaction of an almost infallible hero who always cracks the case. And the kind of secret satisfaction of thinking, oh, well, we got there before Watson. We got there at the same time as Holmes because it's so obvious right from the start. And I think with the Hound of the Baskervilles in particular, it's, you know, popularity and its fame.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  I think a huge part of that is kind of the gloomy atmosphere of the Moors and sort of the prospect of hellfire and supernatural. Devils wound up interwoven with this kind of safe, homely, familiar Victorian world. It's the contrast of those two things.

• 1:10:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. It's the modernity on the one hand of Victorian Britain with these two friends who in their different ways represent Britain's kind of self-image. So you've got the eccentric individual, the brilliant genius on the one hand, and then you've got the Afghan war veteran, solid, dependable, decent on the other. So they're both kind of middle-class archetypes, I suppose. So you've got them on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have this kind of brooding evil. And it's satisfying for us to have that explained and tamed and kind of domesticated. And then they can go home, and Sherlock Holmes can smoke his pipe, and they can, he can play his violin very badly, and Watson will write it all up, and they'll, you know, their friendship will endure.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  Take sheds loads of homely cocaine.

• 1:11:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, yes, exactly. Right, so let's get to our, on that note, let's get to our final takes. So we're going to mark it in what, Tabby?

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  I'm going to say fiendish hellhounds out of 10. It's a bit more predictable this week, but got to be done.

• 1:11:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we had dead dogs out of 10 in Wuthering Heights, now we're back on the dogs.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  I know, but at least in these ones, the hellhounds are kind of triumphant, they're not being beaten to a pulp by the Bronte sisters.

• 1:11:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so fiendish hellhounds out of 10, go for it, you can go first.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Okay, I'll go first. You know what, I'm going very, very high this week. I'm going to give it a nine. So I just thought it was just so enjoyable. It's just such a good read. I long to sit down and read it. It was a massive page turner. It also has some cases of really excellent writing, you know, the moors and the swamps, the very good marriage of what is genuinely frightening and primal with this always psych comedic injection of Sherlock Holmes's quirkiness and eccentricity. It's genuinely chilling. Any book that brings to life the Victorian world so powerfully, I'm always pretty sold on. So yeah, big fan. What about you?

• 1:12:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm going to give it eight.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Wow, I'm higher than you. I didn't expect that, I have to say.

• 1:12:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm not taking marks off for any particular reason. I think it's George Orwell who had this idea about there being good, bad books. So in other words, a book that maybe is not great literature, but is just brilliant.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think The Hand of the Baskervilles fits that, ticks that box perfectly. It's not, you know, it's not Jane Austen, it's not Vladimir Nabokov, it's not Proust or something, it's not pretending to be.

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  It's not going to change your life.

• 1:12:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, it's not a book that you nominate as a book that's shaped the way you think or anything like that. It is just tremendous, tremendous entertainment. So actually, the eight, the eight is harsh. I'm giving it eight as this kind of literary production, but as entertainment, it is undoubtedly a 10. Because Holmes and Watson are not one of, you know, they're one of the great double acts in all literature for, for a reason, they're beautifully observed. The writing is excellent. I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle definitely can write, there's no question about that. It's easy to laugh at him because of the fairies, because he thought that his greatest creations were these slightly dated kind of Hundred Years' War epics or whatever that no one reads anymore. But this is, I mean, if you could write something as good as The Hand of the Baskervilles, you're laughing. It's, it's really, really good.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  Oh, you'd be chuffed. And I think, you know, that's a good point, the good, bad books. And this is most definitely not a snobby podcast. Like, I think books that are just a really brilliant read, even if they're not kind of literary masterpieces, I think they should, they should have their day in the sun. And that brings us neatly on to next week's book, which, you know, arguably, is it a good, bad book?

• 1:13:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or just, or a bad, bad book, or a good, good book.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  Exactly. Is it a literary masterpiece? And that is, at long last, the book everyone's been waiting for, Sarah Day Mas's A Court of Thorns and Roses, the book that taught Dominic Sandbrook how to love.

• 1:14:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my God, Tabby, I can't believe you've got that. Yeah. So this is our first venture, possibly last.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  Let's hope last.

• 1:14:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Into the world of romanticy, which we'll be doing next week. And then after that, we will be back, well, we'll be doing something very Hand of the Baskervilles-like. We'll be doing Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, so Victorian sensation fiction.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Another ghost story.

• 1:14:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  By Toni Morrison. After that, one of my very favourite people, Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway from the 1920s. Then The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and The Code of the Wusters by P G Wodehouse. So lots to look forward to. And Tabby, you never asked me who my favourite screen Sherlock Holmes was.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Oh, Dominic, I'm so sorry. Well, okay, well, this is actually an interesting detail. You know that according to the Guinness World Book of Records, Sherlock Holmes holds the record for the most adaptations in film and TV.

• 1:15:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 04

  Above any other literary figure with over 250 appearances. So in light of that.

• 1:15:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Who is your favourite on-screen Sherlock Holmes?

• 1:15:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think there's two that stand out for me. One is Jeremy Brett, who did the Granada versions in the 1980s and 1990s.

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was before my time.

• 1:15:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are definitive, Tabby. I can't believe you haven't seen them. It's shocking. The other one, of course, is Will Ferrell. So Will Ferrell did it.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 1:15:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  John C. Riley. And it just makes me, I know it got naught, zero stars in the newspapers, but just to see it kind of makes me smirk. And I know it will annoy Holmesians, or people who really love Sherlock Holmes. So I thought I'd throw in that detail. Who's your favourite? Obviously, it's going to be somebody terrible, Tabby.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  I know. I actually, I can already anticipate just a barrage of.

• 1:15:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Backlash.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  I'm going to have to say Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock.

• 1:15:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, dude, you've absolutely.

• 1:16:01Speaker 04

  I thought he captured the eccentricity, the genius.

• 1:16:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's terrible from you. Because the best version, just to re, just to, no, just to reiterate, the best modern version of Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock and Co, the Goalhanger Podcast, is it not?

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  Yes, agreed, agreed.

• 1:16:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  And not least because you will see people, other Goalhanger presenters pop up in it.

• 1:16:22Speaker 04

  All right, quit, cut, and we're done.

• 1:16:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:16:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bye-bye.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

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