The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a detective novel by the Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle, serialized in 1901 to 1902 and featuring his detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson investigating the death of Sir Charles Baskerville on the Devon moors, apparently linked to a centuries-old family legend of a spectral, murderous hound that has haunted the Baskerville line since the seventeenth century. Holmes sends Watson ahead to Baskerville Hall to protect the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, while conducting his own hidden investigation from a hut on the moor, uncovering a scheme by a disguised relative to murder the family's heirs and inherit the estate using a real, deliberately terrifying dog rather than any supernatural creature. Doyle wrote the novel as a return to Holmes after having killed the detective off in an earlier story, and its atmospheric moorland setting, sustained menace and slow-building supernatural suggestion, ultimately resolved through rational deduction, distinguish it within the Holmes canon. Widely regarded as the finest of the four Holmes novels and among the most famous detective stories ever written, The Hound of the Baskervilles is frequently cited as the work most responsible for cementing Holmes's enduring popular status.