Arthur Conan Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901-02, reviving Sherlock Holmes seven years after killing him at Reichenbach Falls. Sir Charles Baskerville has died of apparent heart failure on the moors near his ancestral home in Devonshire, in circumstances that suggest the family legend of a spectral hound is more than legend. Sir Henry Baskerville arrives from Canada to inherit the estate, and Watson accompanies him to Devonshire while Holmes, apparently detained in London, makes his own independent investigation. The novel's central device is Watson's incomplete knowledge, he is present, competent, and entirely unable to see the solution that Holmes has assembled from a distance.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is structured as a Gothic novel, ancient curse, wild moorland, decaying manor, ancestral guilt, whose supernatural apparatus is ultimately reduced to a rational explanation. The luminous hound is a large dog painted with phosphorus, deployed by a man who has traced his inheritance claims back to an illegitimate Baskerville line. Doyle manages the Gothic atmosphere skillfully enough that the rational explanation, when it arrives, diminishes the menace rather than simply dispelling it. Stapleton's plan required an enormous amount of research and patience, and his willingness to use an innocent relative as bait gives the criminal operation a coldness that is worse than supernatural malice.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most formally complete of the Conan Doyle Holmes novels, the only full-length work where the Gothic and detective frameworks are balanced rather than one overwhelming the other. Holmes's method is demonstrated economically: the famous reading of Sir Henry's boot is complete in a paragraph, and the identification of Stapleton through the portrait of Hugo Baskerville is a satisfying application of the premise that the detective's knowledge is always in advance of Watson's. The solution to the supernatural premise is exactly as reductive as the Holmes method requires, and the novel is honest about the fact that it leaves the moorland atmosphere unresolved.
The word 'detective' only entered English in 1843, the same year Poe published the first modern detective story.
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