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Did you know that in The Hound of the Baskervilles, world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes is a zombie? It's true. In a manner of speaking. As we mention in our "In a Nutshell" section for The Return of Sherlock Holmes, writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (spoiler alert!) Kills off his famous detective in the conclusion of the short story "The Final Problem," published in 1894.

We may all love Sherlock Holmes, the classic Victorian gentleman detective who uses his colorful observations to reason his way to the solutions of 19th-century London's most bizarre crimes. However, Conan Doyle resented the fact that demands for his Holmes stories were overwhelming all of his other, more acute, writing jobs. So Conan Doyle killed off Holmes by hurling his personality into a waterfall with his archenemy Doctor Moriarty. (Haven't heard of these? Neither had we.)

Still, while Conan Doyle might have regarded the Holmes stories as trashy fiction, he had to admit that they paid well. Everybody wanted to read about Sherlock Holmes. So in 1901, Conan Doyle slit off his detective's old pipe and magnifying glass and produced another Holmes story: the novel-length The Hound of the Baskervilles. He printed it first in chapters to the Strand Magazine and then as a book in 1902 (source).

The reason we say that Holmes is a zombie in this novel is not because he has an uncontrollable appetite for intelligence. However, The Hound of the Baskervilles came out seven years after Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, allegedly for good. And additionally, it came out four decades before Conan Doyle formally brought Holmes back to life, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). Therefore, like every good stunt, the Holmes in Hound is both alive and dead: alive because the novel is placed before his official "departure" in 1894, and dead because the book came out before Conan Doyle really dedicated to bringing Holmes back indefinitely.

Conan Doyle first got the idea for a story about a ghost dog in a golf game with an aspiring young journalist and author named Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who originally came from Devon (the part of southwestern England where The Hound of the Baskervilles is set) (origin).

Once Conan Doyle chose to add his old buddy Sherlock Holmes to the plot, he had a winner on his hands. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most enduringly popular of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with over two dozen movie and TV adaptations--such as one with a robot Doctor Watson, in Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century. What's more, the financial success of The Hound of the Baskervilles in both the U.K. and the U.S. encouraged Conan Doyle to come back to writing Holmes stories (origin).

The creepy atmosphere and suspenseful plot twists have definitely made Hound one of the favorites of the Sherlock Holmes canon.

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