The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Well, it wasn’t near as bad as I had remembered from High School. In fact, it was just fine. My only complaint is that there was too little Sherlock Holmes in it.

The narrative problem, I’m assuming, with having Holmes in the entirety of a full-length novel, is that he’s simply going to solve the mystery too fast. If you want to stretch the story into a full length book, you really have to have Watson on his own semi-bumbling through the mystery as in this novel, or you have to insert a big stretch of backstory (as in A Study in Scarlet).

Otherwise, you’ve got to make the mystery really complicated, with many layers of the onion. But that requires blowing a lot of ideas on one story. Best to stretch it out over several books, I imagine, and pad, pad, pad.

So, if a second reading through the prism of my 38 year old eyes redeemed The Hound of the Baskervilles, does this mean I need to revisit Great Expectations?

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is the first Sherlock Holmes mystery, written purportedly while Conan Doyle was not-busy being an unsuccessful doctor.

It gives us the origins of how Holmes and Watson met (entirely invalidating the Young Sherlock Holmes movie from the 80’s). It is odd in that Holmes is entirely absent from the middle section of the book. This section is a somewhat abrupt jump back in time to give some background story on the mystery in question.

The middle section is also quite an unflattering portrayal of Brigham Young, and the Latter-day Saints colony in Utah of the time. I can’t imagine the Mormons were (or are) big fans of Conan Doyle.