The Hound of the Baskervilles

'Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!' The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Dartmoor in the most famous of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's books. Is Sir Charles the latest victim of the ancestral Curse of the Baskervilles, which summons a demonic hound to stalk the moor and exact vengeance for a past misdeed, or is there a more modern, more prosaic explanation for the sudden death? In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the modern, rational world, and the ancient, supernatural world collide in the novel which brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead. This new edition of Conan Doyle's classic mystery is part of a series of new editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories published in Oxford World's Classics. Darryl Jones's Introduction explores the competing worlds of the supernatural and the scientific in the novel and in Arthur Conan Doyle's life, the novel's colonial background and origins, and the role of landscape, folklore, and folk horror in the novel.

Darryl Jones is Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including the Oxford World's Classics editions of M. R. James's Collected Ghost Stories (2013) and Arthur Conan Doyle's Gothic Tales (2018). His most recent book is Horror: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2021). He is currently working on M. R. James, on Arthur Conan Doyle, and on the Anglo-Irish time traveller, J. W. Dunne.