Our book today is Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal The Hound of the Baskervilles,which brought back, in 1901, the beloved character of Sherlock Holmes who’d been killed off nearly a decade earlier by an author who was both bored by his formulaic stories and jealous of his international fame. The events of The Hound of the Baskervilles take place well before Holmes’s seeming demise in “The Final Problem,” but to long-deprived fans of the Holmes & Watson stories, it hardly mattered: their team was back in action.

I’ve loved the book for a long, long time (paradoxically, as a long succession of friends have pointed out, since one of the key gimmicks of the whole story hinges on the torture and death of a dog), and it’s been a haven to me on many occasions when the real world just got too tawdry or trying. It was both tawdry and trying in massive amounts the other night during the second Republic Party candidate group commercial, when one candidate after another tried to exceed all the others in narrow-minded xenophobic pettiness. I watched the thing as long as I could, then I watched it just a little longer, and then I retreated to The Hound and never looked back.

It’s the now-famous story of the cursed Baskerville family of Baskerville Hall in Devon, on the verge of the great Grimpen Mire. The head of that family, Sir Charles Baskerville, is found dead out on the grounds of his property, face-down in the dirt, the victim of a heart attack brought on by his headlong flight from …something, something that scared him so much he tossed aside all caution about his weak heart and ran for his life. And near his body could be seen the footprints of an enormous hound – leading quite a few of the superstitious Dartmoor folk to suspect the work of the legendary Hound of the Baskervilles, a creature that’s haunted the men of the family for centuries.

The death of Sir Charles makes his nephew Henry Baskerville, a farmer in Canada who’s spent a good deal of time in America as well, heir to the Baskerville estate – and heir to a staggering amount of money. Word is sent to young Henry to come to England, and Holmes asks the faithful Watson to accompany the new lord of Baskerville Hall to windy, rainy Devon, to safeguard him from harm while Holmes remains in London to carry on his own investigation of both the death of Sir Charles and the identity of the person who sent Henry Baskerville an anonymous note warning him to not live at the Hall. And since the book is really on one level simply the story of the repatriation of a wayward colonial, Doyle has Watson lay on the ancestral-magic business with gusto:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim, and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his eyes fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where men of his blood had held sway for so long and left their mark so deep. There he sat, with his tweed suit and his American accent, in the corner of a prosaic railway-carriage, and yet as I looked at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men. There was pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes. If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it.

This is the story in which Holmes famously says to Watson: “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it” – but every time I read the book, I’m struck afresh at how much better Watson comes off than Holmes throughout the length of it. There’s virtually none of the great detective’s signature near-miraculous powers of deduction, and even when he stumbles upon an important clue as to who might be behind the re-appearance of the Hound on the moor – it happens when he chances to look up at one of the many family portraits hanging on the walls of Baskerville Hall, where he’s rejoined Watson, and even though Doyle gives the thrill of the moment to Holmes, he’s not particularly interested in making Holmes seem attractive in his moment of insight:

“This chance of the picture has supplied us with one of our more obvious missing links. We have him, Watson, we have him, and I dare swear that before tomorrow night he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies. A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!” He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.

I loved reading it again, even though I can practically recite it verbatim by now. I savored the atmosphere of it, the deceptive straightforwardness of its narrative, and of course I loved the Sidney Paget illustrations liberally scattered throughout my edition. At one point early in the story, while Holmes is still in Baker Street, he tells Watson that by studying maps of Devon he feels he’s spent the day there in spirit, and I was relieved to find that the novel, too, can effect this transportation. The other night, I may have needed the relief of it nearly as much a Holmes on a boring afternoon.