The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles is set in the late nineteenth century. The story takes place partly in London but, for the most part, in and around Baskerville Hall, an ancient house on Dartmoor. The...

Chapter 5 of this novel is titled "Three Broken Threads". The threads in this case refer to to threads of the case - three different possible leads that could further the investigation....

Stapleton required a belonging of Henry's in order to train the hound to attack and kill him. Stapleton was a distant relative, a Baskerville with his eye on Henry's property. He had similarly...

The moor surrounding Baskerville Hall is an appropriate setting for the strange goings-on in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The dark, vast expanses of moorland lend themselves easily to murder,...

Holmes vs. Stapleton: The main conflict is that Mr. Stapleton is killing heirs to the Baskerville fortune. The main conflict in the story is Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack Stapleton. We do not know that...

The curse of the Baskervilles is that the hound of the moor hunts down the members of the Baskerville family one by one. When the current resident of the Baskerville home is found dead, a young...

The fog on the moors plays a significant role in the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Let's do a survey of the language Arthur Conan Doyle uses to describe this fog. In chapter 14, we read...

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, as in most detective mystery genre works, the brilliant detective must sift through many clues, some of which are red herrings, to solve the mystery. The Hound of...

Holmes uses his usual analytical and empirical methods to solve the crime. He dismisses from the start any superstitious notion of a legend of a mysterious demonic hound and applies logic to his...

This section of The Hound of the Baskervilles contains several metaphors—some mundane and conversational, as when Watson accuses Holmes of having "eyes in the back of your head," meaning that he is...

In chapter 1, Sherlock Holmes meets Dr. Mortimer, who has come to get his assistance with a problem. Holmes shows off his skills in deduction to Watson. In chapter 2, Dr. Mortimer shares the...

Selden is the “Notting Hill Murderer,” an escaped convict and Mrs. Barrymore’s brother. Watson learns that there is a killer on the loose on the Moor. Mortimer and Henry Baskerville discuss the...

Like any good Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles is riddled with clues. Being one of Doyle's longer novels, he was able to incorporate a wealth of clues both directly tied to the...

A great many of the Sherlock Holmes stories turn out to be about money, even though the mercenary motif is not visible at the beginning. Some examples are "The Speckled Band," "The Solitary...

Holmes uses many kinds of evidence to solve the crime in The Hound of the Baskervilles. 1. Dr. Mortimer's testimony: Dr. Mortimer tells Holmes about the tale of the hound and that Sir Charles’s...

A character sketch is a complete description of a person. It usually does include both physical and personality traits. James Watson is a doctor, and he is highly observant and curious....

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Mortimer recounts the tale of a curse upon his family name. He has a letter dated from 1782 that describes the presence of a "hound of...

Watson sees Barrymore at a window with a candle in the middle of the night. Henry Baskerville comes to Sherlock Holmes when Charles Baskerville is murdered. Henry might be next. Holmes pursues...

Barrymore says his wife did not cry, but Watson can see her eyes. In his first case without Sherlock Holmes, Watson is in over his head a bit. His task is to look for clues and report back. He...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle offers a few red herrings to obscure the identity of the murderer of Charles Baskerville and build the novel's suspense. A man named Selden, a murderer who has escaped from...

One of the novel's themes is the vast difference in mindset and sensibility between town and country dwellers. In his natural urban environment, Sherlock Holmes is able to draw upon his remarkable...

The novel includes all three types of conflict— human versus nature, human versus human, and human versus themself. At first it seems that human versus nature is more important, as the Baskervilles...

Dr Mortimer says this as Sir Charles apparently foresaw the manner of his death by means of a supposedly spectral hound. The means of his death appears therefore to have been highly unusual, but...

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories, several characters believe the myth that is perpetuated about the hound, and others are not convinced. Initially,...

In the novel 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' by English author Arthur Conan Doyle, the walking stick is an important prop. It is able to 'tell' the detective quite a lot about its owner. It first...

Sherlock Holmes initially began to suspect that Stapleton was behind the criminal dealings concerning the Baskerville estate when he closely examined the cryptic warning note received by Sir Henry....

Sir Henry refuses to be scared away from his new home. Sir Henry is the last descendant of Baskerville Hall (supposedly). He inherits the estate when his uncle Sir Charles dies of very mysterious...

This is one of those questions that requires you to read beyond the immediate material. The short answer is that Holmes becomes interested because Dr. Mortimer reads about details of the case that...

Arthur Conan Doyle provides the reader with many rich descriptions of Baskerville Hall. In Chapter Six, readers get their first look at the exterior of the residence, and it's a bleak one. After...

The old legend of Sir Hugo Baskerville is narrated to Holmes and Watson by Dr Mortimer. Apparently Sir Hugo was a wild and fearsome man who took a fancy to a young woman living near his estate and...

At first, Holmes is surprised that Dr. Mortimer-- a "man of science--" has suggested that a supernatural being is the killer of the late Sir Charles Baskerville. He even asks Dr. Mortimer whether...

Sir Charles Baskerville was murdered by Stapleton, because Stapleton set the dog on him and purposefully made it as frightening as possible. In order to murder someone you don’t have to shoot them...

There are actually two criminals in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of Baskervilles. The first one to be captured is Seldon, or Notting Hill Murderer. He turns out to be the brother of Mrs....

In any mystery, it is important to get to know the suspects. In this case, the neighbors! The moor is very sparsely inhabited, and those who live near each other are thrown very much together....

In chapter two of The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Mortimer presents a news article for Mr. Holmes to read. The article is from the Devon County Chronicle, and Mortimer...

Like many good English murder mysteries, The Hound of the Baskervilles occurs in a relatively closed setting, namely the country around Baskerville Hall. Although the story begins in London, by...

Holmes deduces that the person who wrote the note did not want his or her handwriting to be recognized, and was in a hurry. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a mysterious spectral dog has been...

As with many mystery or suspense novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle portrays a conflict between good and evil, with the morally good characters trying either to avenge...

In many of his Sherlock Holmes stories it was the practice of the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to illustrate his hero's powers of deduction early on, and then to illustrate them again at the...

As with all detective stories, the main external conflict in The Hound of the Baskervilles is between the detective and the killer: Sherlock Holmes and Jack Stapleton. It's Stapleton who has been...

In "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Henry Baskervilles who was the heir to the property of the Baskervilles family after the death of Sir Charles Baskerville received a...

Sherlock Holmes is above all observant. In the opening scene, he sees Watson examining Dr. Mortimer's walking stick by noting his movements in the reflection of his silver coffee pot. It is fair to...

The hound's jaws were coated with phosphorus to make it look ghostly, demonic, and supernatural. As Watson describes it, it is: not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its...

If we are referring to the suspects in Sir Charles Baskerville's murder, there is also another suspect: Laura Lyons. In the story, Laura is estranged from her husband. For his part, Jack Stapleton...

Deductions are more Holmes's thing really, so when Watson tries his hand at the art of deduction, it's not surprising that he often gets the wrong end of the stick. (No pun intended.) However, one...

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson work to solve the mystery surrounding the death of a man called Sir Charles Baskerville, and save his...