What Happens in The Hound of the Baskervilles? Plot, Killer and the Real Legend

A new heir arrives

The heir to the estate is Sir Henry Baskerville, Sir Charles's nephew, who has been living in Canada. Holmes calls the legend a fairy tale, but strange things begin to happen as soon as Sir Henry reaches London. One of his boots is stolen, he receives an anonymous letter warning him to keep away from the moor, and a bearded man follows him in a cab. Because a huge fortune is at stake, Holmes sends Watson to Dartmoor as Sir Henry's bodyguard, saying he must stay in London for another case.

Watson on the moor

Much of the middle of the novel is told through Watson's letters and diary. On Dartmoor he learns that a convicted murderer, Selden, has escaped from Princetown Prison and is hiding on the moor. At the Hall there are the butler Barrymore and his wife, who seem to be hiding something. Nearby live the naturalist Jack Stapleton, who is a little too friendly and warns Watson about the deadly Grimpen Mire, and his beautiful sister Beryl, who keeps secretly urging Sir Henry to go back to London. Sir Henry falls in love with Beryl, though her brother strongly objects.

The mysteries pile up. Barrymore signals with a candle to someone on the moor at night; it turns out that Selden is Mrs Barrymore's younger brother and that the couple have been leaving him food. Watson also sees a strange man standing on a rocky hill. When he tracks the man to a stone hut and waits with his revolver, the stranger turns out to be Holmes himself, who has been on the moor all along, investigating in secret. It is one of the most satisfying surprises in the series, because the reader, like Watson, believed Holmes was in London.

Spoiler: who is the killer?

Stop here if you want to read the novel first. The murderer is Jack Stapleton, and Beryl is not his sister but his wife, whom he has forced to play that role. One night Holmes and Watson hear a man fall to his death while a hound bays; they find a body in Sir Henry's clothes, but it is Selden, who had been given Sir Henry's old clothes by Barrymore. The hound, set on the scent of Sir Henry's stolen boot, had followed the wrong man. Back at the Hall, Holmes notices that the portrait of wicked Sir Hugo looks remarkably like Stapleton.

To catch him, Holmes uses Sir Henry as bait. He tells him to dine with Stapleton and walk home across the moor alone, while Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade hide nearby. In thick fog Stapleton releases the hound; the detectives shoot it as it attacks Sir Henry. In Stapleton's house they find Beryl tied up, and Stapleton himself has fled into the Grimpen Mire, where he is presumed to have drowned.

Holmes then explains the plot. Stapleton was really a Baskerville, the secret son of Sir Charles's youngest brother, and a throwback to Sir Hugo. He had bought a fierce black dog and painted it with phosphorus so that it would seem to glow like a demon, hoping to remove every heir between himself and the fortune. Beryl had sent the warning letter to save Sir Henry. Holmes ranks Stapleton among his most cunning enemies.

Where did the idea come from?

Doyle wrote the novel soon after returning from South Africa, where he had volunteered as a doctor during the Second Boer War. He had not written about Holmes for eight years. The journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson helped him with the legend and local colour, and the two explored Dartmoor together in June 1901.

The main inspiration was a real Devon legend about Squire Richard Cabell of Buckfastleigh, a hunter said to have been a "monstrously evil man" who sold his soul to the Devil. According to the story, on the night he was buried in 1677 a phantom pack of hounds came across the moor to howl at his tomb. Devon folklore also has a ghostly black dog called the Yeth hound, and some say Norfolk's legendary Black Shuck played a part too.

Interestingly, Doyle later wrote that he first imagined the book as a pure "Victorian creeper", a spooky tale in the style of Sheridan Le Fanu, and only afterwards decided to bring in Holmes. You can still feel that: the moor, the fog and the howling are as important as the clues.

Is Holmes back from the dead in this book?

Not quite. Doyle had killed Holmes in "The Final Problem" in 1893, and this novel is set before those events, so readers got a new adventure without a resurrection. Two years later Doyle brought Holmes back for good in "The Adventure of the Empty House", explaining that he had faked his death. The novel's huge success helped make that comeback happen.

Why is it so famous?

The book has everything: a curse, a lonely house, a dangerous swamp, an escaped convict and a detective who disappears for half the story. Its chapters end on cliffhangers, which suited magazine readers. In 1999 a poll of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts ranked it the best of the four Holmes novels, and in 2003 it appeared at number 128 in the BBC's Big Read poll of Britain's best-loved novels. There have been more than 20 film and television versions.

Learn with The Hound of the Baskervilles: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
a red herring	a clue that leads you the wrong way	The escaped convict was a red herring.
to lie low	to hide and stay quiet	Holmes was lying low on the moor.
to use someone as bait	to put someone where the enemy will attack	Holmes used Sir Henry as bait.
on the trail of	following and looking for	The hound was on the trail of the wrong man.
a cliffhanger	an ending that leaves you in suspense	Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.

Try this: Write a short mystery in three sentences using "a red herring" and "on the trail of".