The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. (Published in the years of 1901 and 1902 in Strand Magazine.  The Edition: I forgot to get it before I returned it to the library... I was trying to get ahead for school, but then ended up dropping the class)  Whenever I read anything about Sherlock Holmes I have the strange urge to dress as a detective and start solving mysteries.  Maybe that is the large appeal to the readers at the time, for it did become very popular.  However, it was Doyle himself who did not love the character Holmes as much as his readers, and had wrote that Holmes died only to find his readers petrified.  He then began the stories again saying that it was a false death.  At least that is what I have heard.  If it is wrong, please correct me.  For now, I will state that I will not give away the ending in this story, just because I enjoy mystery novels for the thrill of trying to solve it before the detective does and I have a feeling that many others do as well.  But still...**SPOILERS AHEAD**

Sherlock Holmes to me is not my favorite character of the stories.  And he is not always the most appealing.  The first story that I read of Sherlock Holmes was The Man With The Twisted Lip and when we first meet Holmes he is in disguise and doing opium.  There was something that Holmes told Watson that I took to heart and it is "My eyes have been trained to examine faces and not their trimmings".  People have got so attached to accessories that if something were to look exactly the same could you tell the difference? Holmes is one who also uses a large majority of disguises in order to solve many of his mysteries, however, in this story Holmes apparently takes a step back from this case and stays back in London for another.  Or so we believe.  Instantly, I knew that he would be using a disguise to see the case from another angle, and when Watson sees the man on the cliff, I imagined through the description of the way he was standing that it was indeed Holmes himself.  And my observations were correct.  The last chapter of this story, or any Sherlock Holmes mysteries, always seem to shed some light on the way that Holmes mind actually works and that is when he is describing how he solved the crime.
Watson, is definitely my favorite, most relate-able person and that may just be because he is the one who is narrating this mystery. (He does narrate almost all of the Holmes mysteries except for three)  I was rooting for him, as he was searching through the mess of information that seemed to follow him as soon as he got there, to solve the crime himself.  But, of course this isn't a novel about Watson, but Holmes.  The one thing I did not like about the narration was the lack of information given about the solving of the crime, but looking back I realize that Watson wasn't the one with information and he too did not like that.

At the beginning of the novel, I did not think anything of the boot being stolen, only because I did not think that it would be a real hound.  Maybe that is because I grew up with Scooby Doo and thought that it would some how be a contraption that would break down or something after/during the chase of Sir Henry.  I really have no idea why I would think that, since this was published when the three wheeled car was still a popular motor-vehicle.  However, after Holmes re-entered the story, it soon became apparent to me that yes there was a hound on the lose.  I do though regret not looking at the title with more interest, just because Sherlock Holmes titles always seem to have a real meaning that you should be on the look out for.  Once again in The Man With The Twisted Lip I never took another thought after reading about the man with a twisted lip, until hearing Holmes show the truth behind the disguise.  Therefore, the next time that I read a Sherlock Holmes story, I will pay more attention to what the title is itself.

Otherwise, the story itself I quite enjoyed.  I did read it within a day, and I even took a break to watch a couple hours of Supernatural to feel the thrill of a more modern Sherlock Holmes/horror mish-mash.  I would say that most Holmes stories (short stories) are quite an easy read, and would encourage many to read them.  They are, though, a little bit more harder to solve before the end then say a Scooby Doo episode or one of those Clue books.  Now that I think about it, I enjoyed trying to solve those Clue books even though I was terrible at it.  So maybe you will have better luck at solving the crime before I did, but then again not many people do.  (By the way, sorry for continuously using TMWTTL but I felt the need too.  Maybe one of these days I will do a review on that short story.)

Happy Reading!