Book #1: The Hound of the Baskervilles

Book #1: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

September 8, 2012

Sherlock Holmes is certainly the most famous detective in Western culture, and The Hound… is definitely his best-known story. I figured that this was as good a place as any to start my 1000 book challenge, especially since I already had an unread copy on my personal shelf. As I read the relatively short book (not even 170 pages), I found myself making comparisons between Holmes and my favorite contemporary fictional detective, Shawn Spencer from the TV show Psych.

Like Holmes, Shawn notices things that other people miss. He uses his powers of observation to pass as a psychic detective, a ruse that he has successfully kept from the detectives and police of Santa Barbara (including his girlfriend Juliet) for 6 hilarious seasons. Also like Holmes, Shawn has a bit of an off-beat sense of humor. In the narrative, Watson (as first-person narrator) observes that whenever Holmes has a good laugh (which is rare), it’s usually at someone else’s expense. Shawn laughs much more often, but he and Holmes are alike in that their priorities are not often understood by others. They have different ways of thinking; some people see it others are eccentric, and others see it as genius.

Watson, Holmes’s faithful sidekick, may be compared with Shawn’s best friend Burton “Gus” Guster. Like Gus, Watson works on the case as much as Holmes himself does. But unlike Watson, Gus does not have a glowing admiration for his partner. If anything, Gus is often disgusted with some of Shawn’s “immature” antics, though he participates in a many himself. Watson regards his friend Holmes as a genius, and he never wants to disappoint him.

Another comparison that I’ll make between Psych and Holmes’s adventure is that on the show, the characters are sometimes encountered with seemingly supernatural occurrences. But by the end of the episode, Shawn has figured out the logical, Earth-bound reason for the strange crime. The title character of the novel, the Hound itself, is believed to be a devilish apparition sent to haunt the descendants of the evil Hugo Baskerville. Without giving too much away, Holmes finds that a ghostly monster is not the cause of the deaths around Baskerville Hall, and he brings to light the true villains that have been hiding behind a superstition.

The relationship between Holmes and Watson is in itself interesting, but I wouldn’t go so far as to make (clichéd) claims that Holmes and Watson have a homosexual relationship. It is a “bromance,” nothing more and nothing less. I actually “awwwwed” out loud when I read that Holmes was worried about sending Watson off to the dangerous Baskerville Hall, and would be glad when his friend was home safe. As annoyed as Gus sometimes gets with Shawn, they have a “bromance” themselves, and like Holmes and Watson, have been friends for many years and know each other very well.

My write-up of this book as turned out to be more about a TV show than the story itself, but there’s a point to that. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes have directly influenced every piece of crime fiction (I am including film and television under that blanket term) that has come after them. I have a great many mysteries on my tentative (and very, very incomplete) to-read list, so I am glad for that reason that I started with this one, one of the most influential pieces of classic mystery literature ever written. And I’ll end on this note: even though the “formula” for the story was much more familiar to me than it would have been to readers in Sir Arthur’s time, I was still surprised by many of the twists and turns of the story. A classic read.

Above: James Roday and Dulé Hill as Shawn and Gus (respectively) from USA's Psych. Season 7 premieres in the fall, so if you're not familiar with the show, get to it! Very funny stuff.

On the right: Jude Law and the delicious Robert Downey Jr. as Watson and Holmes (respectively) from the Sherlock Holmes films. I have never seen these myself, though my ex housemate liked the first. I may have to see one of them now...