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?